Pentagon Clueless on Fort Hood Shootings

Townhall.com ^ | January 26, 2010 | Debra J. Saunders

[Kaslin]

Political correctness is alive in the Pentagon. Witness "Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood," a Department of Defense report released last week on the Nov. 5 shootings that left 13 people dead.

Granted, drafters of the report had to be careful not to say anything that would help the defense of accused shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who has pleaded not guilty. Even so, if the report's purpose was to craft lessons to prevent future attacks, how could they leave out radical Islam?

"Our concern is with actions and effects, not necessarily with motivations," former Army Secretary Togo West explained to Time magazine.

In that turn-a-blind-eye spirit, the report essentially whited out the many warning signs left by the Army psychiatrist. On the Internet, Hasan compared Islamist suicide bombers with an American soldier who threw himself on a grenade in Iraq to protect fellow troops. As reported in the Times of London, Hasan explained, "Scholars have paralleled this to suicide bombers whose intention, by sacrificing their lives, is to help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers. If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard, that would be considered a strategic victory." The Washington Post reported that Hasan gave public talks to his colleagues in which he equated the war on terror with a war on Islam.

M. Zuhdi Jasser, founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, which challenges radicalized Islam, also is an internist and former lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy. As one who went through the same system that trained Hasan, Jasser believes the biggest lesson from Fort Hood should be that a "culture of political correctness" kept concerned officers from reporting Hasan. Yet the report papers over the elephant in the room.

To Pentagon report writers, the shootings have an air of mystery. As in: "Detecting a trusted insider's intention to commit a violent act requires observation of behavioral cues/anomalies." It helps if you can believe that Hasan's cues were observable only to the trained eye.

Ignoring Hasan's pro-terrorist Web postings, the report instead focuses on workplace violence, programs to prevent workplace violence -- such as the Post Office's "Going Postal Program" -- and the stress imposed on military health care providers.

The report does refer to "radicalization," which is good. But it overuses the term "self-radicalization," despite Hasan' contact with Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki before the shootings. Said Jasser: "They are simply trying to exaggerate the fact that these are lone actors. I do not believe they are."

Jasser is especially offended at the notion that Hasan's actions were the fruit of psychological problems -- or, as per the report, "cumulative psychological effects of persistent conflict." (To me, the report read like the first draft of a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity plea.) To Jasser, the more obvious finding could be that the shooter, like Osama bin Laden, simply decided that the ends justify the means.

[donmeaker]

They guy was nuts. Islam had nothing to do with it. He used Islam as a justification, but who cares about the rants of the crazy? Crazy people gave Jesus as their motivation for lynching within living memory, and that doesn’t discredit Jesus. or does it?

[TChris]

"Our concern is with actions and effects, not necessarily with motivations," former Army Secretary Togo West explained to Time magazine.

Fool.

Motivations are precisely the information which will enable you to predict such "actions and effects" in the future. Otherwise, you'll only be surprised again and again.

When one of your people starts posting anti-American messages on the 'net and dressing in the manner of your enemy during a war, his motivations should cause you to GET A CLUE about what is coming!

[brushcop]

They are certainly not clueless, that’s what makes this even more insulting to us and reinforces why these people (meaning our own fifth columnists) should not be given any sort of pass for undermining our security. Remove those who we can and put pressure on those that are appointed.

Many know someone working within the “system”, whether friends or acquaintances that should hear our displeasure over this botched “investigation”.

[Blood of Tyrants]

Islam had nothing to do with it.

What the hell are you talking about? This guy was so in the tank for Islam that he actually went out and found imans who would bless his actions! Islam had EVERYTHING to do with it.

[Dilbert San Diego]

Yep, we have to be politically correct and ignore obvious issues.

And the underwear bomber guy was an isolated extremist. We have no clue what his motivation was. (sarcasm)

Political correctness may get us all killed.

So now it’s racist and/or bigoted to deal with or understand anyone’s motivations. All we can do is react after the fact. This is now an explicit policy?

Then, there’s no way to ever predict or investigate who might do things, because you have to wait for them to actually carry out a horrific act before you do anything.

[Jackson57]

Understanding motivation is what allows them to be proactive and PREVENT actions ... rather than constantly being REACTIVE and dealing effects after the fact. Sec. West really needs to find a new job if he’s too stupid to understand that concept.

[stephenjohnbanker]

“Islam had EVERYTHING to do with it. “

Exactly!

[Dick Bachert]

Political Correctness:

”A doctrine fostered by a delusional, illogical liberal minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.”

By spreading this definition around, perhaps we can employ one of the more effective methods of deflating and defeating the fools who practice and promote it: RIDICULE.

Unless stopped – and soon – PC will DESTROY Western Civilization -- if it hasn’t already.

PASS IT ON!!

THEN PASS THE KOOL AID!!

[Diogenesis]

In this state where the military cannot protect itself,
it can hardly protect the People, either.

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"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned repeat it."
George Santayana

[Capt. Tom]

They guy was nuts. Islam had nothing to do with it. He used Islam as a justification, but who cares about the rants of the crazy? Crazy people gave Jesus as their motivation for lynching within living memory, and that doesn’t discredit Jesus. or does it?

If you read the New Testament there is nothing in it that advises Christians to subjugate, or kill people who do not believe in the religion.
If you do that you are in violation of Christianity.

If you are a Muslim you can find in the Koran and Hadiths all kinds of justification for doing what Maj. Hassan did. - tom

[mbarker12474]

> ...nothing to do with Islam...

Listed below are the acts that had nothing to do with Islam during the month of February 1978, for example. For similar lists of acts that had nothing to do with Islam in, say, March 1978, or September 1983, or July 1997, or January 2002, see:

http://www.prophetofdoom.net/Islamic_Terrorism_Timeline_1978.Islam

http://www.prophetofdoom.net/Islamic_Terrorism_Timeline.Islam

Acts that had Nothing-To-Do-With-Islam in February 1978:

- February 1, 1978: The Palestinian Arab Revolutionary Army announced that they injected exported Israel oranges with mercury to sow panic and wreck Israel's economy. Five Dutch children fell ill, prompting European officials to check thousands of oranges. Over the next week, mercury-spiked oranges were found in Holland, West Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium. The Israeli citrus was spiked with mercury in Rotterdam where the oranges and lemons were repackaged for sale in European stores. When the Arab Revolutionary Army claimed responsibility, they said, "We do not intend to kill people in nations that import the oranges but to sabotage the Israel economy." Since they poisoned five children before they made their announcement, it was one of many lies. A London woman found an Israeli orange spiked with mercury in a bag of fruit she bought in a London store on February 7th, making England the fifth country where poisoned fruit was discovered.

- February 3, 1978: The National Liberation Front of Chad captured the country's main airport at Faya-Largeau. They killed 100 government troops and took Pierre-Andre Kummerling, a Swiss electrical engineer, and Christian Masse, a Frenchman, hostage. It was reported that the Marxist Muslim terrorists demanded a ransom of $2.5 million and the withdrawal of 300 French military advisers from Chad. The Libyan-backed, Sudan-trained, Chad National Liberation Front (FROLINAT, Front de Libération Nationale du Tchad) was the result of a merger between the Chadian National Union and General Union of the Children of Chad. These Marxist Muslim terrorist organizations were formed in the Sudan by Muslims who fled the anti-Islamic policies of Chadian President François Tombalbaye. FROLINAT was led by Ahmed Hassan Musa, an Islamist with close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Its parent, the Chadian National Union was led by Ibrahim Abatcha, a Muslim who trained with the North Korean military.

- February 3, 1978: A Pakistani Muslim armed with a grenade hijacked a 747 flight from Islamabad carrying 357 passengers. Fortunately for most of those aboard, the jihadist accidentally set off the grenade. While the Muslim was not killed in the blast, with his one weapon gone, he was subdued and the plane landed safely.

- February 5, 1978: The Mexican Consulate in New York City was bombed by a group claiming to be the Anti-Communist Latin American Army. A spokesman for the group demanded the freedom of the "Anti-Communist Cubans, Oreste Ruiz, Gaspar Jiminez, and Gustavo Castillo" who were arrested by Mexican authorities for their role in the attempted kidnap and murder of two Cuban officials in Merida, Mexico, in July 1976.

- February 7, 1978: In the Philippines, three Ananda Marga members stabbed an Indian embassy official. Although he was stabbed in the chest and throat he survived the attack. Five days later in Australia, the Ananda Marg Yoga Society bombed the Hilton hotel in Sydney where leaders from a dozen Asian and Pacific countries were holding a Commonwealth conference. Three people were killed and seven were injured. The Ananda Marga Yoga Society is a Hindu-based multicultural humanist religious movement founded in India in 1955 by Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar. They practice a contemporary form of Tantric Yoga and dedicate themselves to "self-realization and humanity." Their religion simply replaced God with man. The Ananda Marga follow Sarkar's doctrine of Progressive Utilization Theory which dealt with ending social and economic injustice through socialism and multiculturalism. This theory led the group to oppose, often violently, traditional schools of Indian thought and the Indian caste system. Ananda Marga was held responsible for a number of terrorist attacks in the 1970s. The vast majority of these were against Indian diplomatic and business targets abroad, most often in Australia, where the group had many followers. Ananda Marga also attacked Russian interests and its members were arrested with maps of the U.S. Embassy in Thailand. Although Ananda Marga has ceased to carry out terrorist attacks, it continues to flourish as a religious movement. As a testimony to people's inability to think, and to their self-serving natures, Ananda Marga has become one of the best-known New Age religious movements in the West. The religion has centers in over 160 countries.

- February 14, 1978: In El Salvador, leftist guerrillas belonging to the People's Liberation Army bombed and machine gunned the Nicaraguan Embassy in San Salvador. The Marxists called it a "symbolic" attack against Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza.

- February 14, 1978: Palestinian terrorists set off a bomb next to a bus in downtown Jerusalem. Two people were killed and 35 more were injured, many seriously.

- February 15, 1978: An incendiary device was thrown into the home of an Egyptian official associated with the World Bank. A group called the Jewish Committee for Concern claimed responsibility for the second such incident in a week. An anonymous caller said that the group had thrown the bomb to protest a proposed sale of U.S. fighter planes to Egypt, knowing that the aircraft would be financed by the World Bank and used to kill Jews. Convincing Egyptians to purchase American arms rather than Russian weapons had been the chief objective of Jimmy Carter's Camp David Accords.

- February 16, 1978: A bomb rocked the USIS building in Turkey.

- February 17, 1978: In one of many events that prompted Palestinian Muslims to replace electronic detonators with human ones on their explosive devices, the PLO put a time bomb in a trash can in the main square of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The bomb killed one Muslim from the West Bank and seriously wounded another. No Jewish students were injured.

- February 18, 1978: The IAS Bi-national Center in Tabriz, Iran was attacked by Islamic students.

- February 18, 1978: Yusuf el Sebai, former Egyptian Cultural (Islamic) Minister and editor of Egypt's Al Ahram newspaper, was assassinated by two Muslim terrorists at the Hilton Hotel in Nicosia, Cyprus. Sebai was a close friend of President Sadat and was Secretary General of the Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Organization which was meeting on the island. The Islamic jihadists pinned him down in the hotel lobby and proceeded to shoot him several times in the head. The terrorists said that they killed Sebai "because he published good things about Israel and because he had accompanied President Sadat on his November ‘77 trip to Israel.". The Muslims followed Muhammad example, assassinating someone whom their prophet would have labeled a "hypocrite." Knowing that Muhammad also kidnapped civilians and held them for ransom, the fundamentalist Muslim murderers in Cyprus took thirty hostages and threatened to kill them unless they were given a plane. Following negotiations, the Islamic terrorists were taken to a jet that flew them and their hostages out of Cyprus. They were denied landing in the Middle East and the so plane returned to Cyprus, where the terrorists were captured and the hostages rescued. The good Muslims, Zayet Hussein Al Ali of Kuwait and Samir Mohammed Khadar of Jordan, were sentenced to be hanged. However, in November l978, Cyprus President Spyros Kyprianou commuted the death sentences to life imprisonment "in the general interests of Cyprus which is waging a war for physical survival [against Islamic terrorists]." Whether one agrees with capital punishment or not, downgrading the sentence of these terrorists along with admitting that it was being done to avoid the wrath of Islam, was an astounding emboldening event for jihadists everywhere.

- February 19, 1978: In Columbia, terrorists invoking the name of the dead German PFLP terrorist, Andreas Baader, claimed responsibility for bombing the Bogota hotel office of Lufthansa. The Baader-Meinhof Group was a violent Marxist Muslim gang that emerged from West Germany in the late 1960s. On April 2, 1968, Andreas Baader, the group's founder, and his girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin, bombed a Frankfurt department store. A journalist named Ulrike Meinhof helped Baader escape prison in May 1970, giving rise to the name. Following the prison break, Meinhof and Baader enrolled in a terrorist training camp run by the Palestinian Front for Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Returning from the Middle East, Baader, Meinhof, and Ensslin engaged in a violent terrorist spree of bombings, abductions, and firearm attacks. Baader-Meinhof Group members were misled by a mix of Marxism and Islam. Baader, Meinhof, and Ensslin terrorized West Germany with PFLP support until their capture in 1972. On May 8, 1976, Ulrike Meinhof hung herself in prison. A year later, Baader and Ensslin also killed themselves in prison. The coordinated suicides brought an end to West Germany's Baader-Meinhof chapter. However, others would kill in their names.

- February 26, 1978: In the Philippines, Islamic terrorists from the Moro National Liberation Front kidnapped French Finance Ministry official Pierre Huguet. He was taking pictures with his tour group in Zamboanga when he was pushed off a bridge and plucked out of the water by jihadists lurking in a boat below. The terrorists released Mr. Huguet unharmed two weeks later when the Philippine authorities agreed to reimburse the Muslims for the expenses incurred during their crime. It's one thing to pay some arbitrary ransom, but to ask for and receive a terrorism expense check in some sort of cordial business agreement is a special kind of whacky. Reimbursing a criminal for their out of pocket costs makes terrorism seem like a legitimate enterprise. This is not a game. The stakes could not be higher. Following a failed 1977 accord between Moro National Liberation Front and the Philippine government, the MNLF's second-in-command broke away from the terrorist club and Hashim Salamat created the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. But other than a new name and a promotion, philosophical foundations of the splinter group were identical to its predecessor. The MILF is a fundamentalist/salafi Islamic organization attempting to follow Muhammad's terrorist example and Allah's orders to wage war until the world submits to Islam. The Moro Islamic Liberation Front demands a fully independent Islamic state in the southern Philippines. In advance of this goal, the MILF has used terrorist attacks and kidnapping throughout the 1980s and 1990s. However, deciding to use deception and strike on two fronts, by the late 1990s the Moro Islamic Liberation Front began negotiations for an autonomous Muslim region. This ass akin to Yasser Arafat's and Bill Clinton's Oslo Accords creating an autonomous region within Israel that would be controlled by the PLO and then using it to destroy what remained of the Jewish state. In June, 2001, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and Philippine president Gloria Arroyo signed a peace agreement. It would be among the dumbest things this woman would ever do. Not only were many horrendous terrorist attacks claimed under the name of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front after June 2001, an increasing number of attacks were perpetrated by the MILF's new affiliates: the Abu Sayyaf Group and Jemaah Islamiyah. It was as if the Philippine president didn't understand that the problem was Islam or that the MILF was just one of a thousand symptoms. This ignorance is what led President Gloria Arroyo, in December 2004, to announce that she had formed a joint organization to clear the southern Philippines of criminal elements and operatives by using the MILF terrorist organization. The Abu Sayyaf Group and Jemaah Islamiyah that she wanted removed were partners in crime and religion with the MILF so this was political pandering at its best. It was like America partnering with the PLO to rid the PA territories of HAMAS and Islamic Jihad, only worse since the Filipino organizations were intertwined and not rivals.

[RicocheT]

He was not nuts, nuts is an irrational compulsion you cannot control. This bad guy had a plan, did it step by step and could have stopped it and not killed.

This bad guy was strongly motivated to kill fellow soldiers just because they were Americans and not Muslims. He bought into the lie of Radical Islamism that only that sect should exist and control the world on behalf of Allah.

If the Army and other US organizations want to scout out danger within, it should focus on expressions of Radical Islam and an unwillingness to tolerate other ways of living one’s life.

[hosepipe]

Democrats in Americas military are ALL security risks..
Democrats should be excluded from being Officers.. AT LEAST..

[stig]

They guy was nuts. Islam had nothing to do with it. He used Islam as a justification, but who cares about the rants of the crazy? Crazy people gave Jesus as their motivation for lynching within living memory, and that doesn’t discredit Jesus. or does it?

Yes if a large enough segment of believers of Jesus were continually lynching people then yes it would discredit Jesus.

Thankfully their biblical justification for such crimes was extremely weak and we don't seem to have people acting out in that manner anymore.

I don't think you can make the same claim about radical Islam.

[donmeaker]

Kind of like the KKK?

[stig]

Kind of like the KKK?

gee the last time the KKK blew up a skyscrapper or had a suicide bomber was ... Oh yeah they never had that. The KKK doesn't even come close percentage wise to radical islam. The last time I looked every mainstream branch of Christianity will have nothing to do with their activities. They are looked down upon by our society as low life scum. Let's see oh yeah radical islam is celebrated as heroic in various countries around the world.

[donmeaker]

“When murder is done on a large scale, generals get medals, but when murder is done on a small scale, it is monstrous!”
Major Graf, in “Night of the Generals” by Hans Helmut Kirst.

[donmeaker]

To my mind, Islam seems like privateering or piracy. Their business model is that they are permitted to rob and kill, and we should pay them protection money not to.

We first met that with the Barbary Pirates around 1903, and not very much has changed.

[donmeaker]

Congrats. You just retroactively fired General of the Armies George C. Marshall.