Free Republic

At the end of Sunday’s Face the Nation on CBS, host Bob Schieffer offered commentary on the cause of the mass shooting at Fort Hood: “That doctor [Major Nidal Hasan] should not have been at Fort Hood. I don’t care how hard-up the Army is for mental health professionals....sadly, this shows the Army still does not take protecting soldiers’ mental health as seriously as it does training them to shoot.” Schieffer went on to argue: “And then there is the other part that often happens in government. Don’t deal with the problem, shuffle it off to somewhere else. When he...

Fort Hood shootings: FBI given gunman's name six months ago The US Army major who killed 13 people in a shooting spree at America's biggest military base had come to the attention of the FBI six months earlier over possible links to extremist comments posted on the internet. By Gordon Rayner and Nick Allen in Fort Hood, Texas Published: 9:59PM GMT 06 Nov 2009 Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a devout Muslim who was trying to buy his way out of the Army, was suspected of being the author of postings which compared suicide bombers to heroic soldiers who throw themselves...

Thirteen dead and 31 wounded would be a bad day for the US military in Afghanistan, and a great victory for the Taliban. When it happens in Texas, in the heart of the biggest military base in the nation, at a processing center for soldiers either returning from or deploying to combat overseas, it is not merely a “tragedy” (as too many people called it) but a glimpse of a potentially fatal flaw at the heart of what we have called, since 9/11, the “war on terror”. Brave soldiers trained to hunt down and kill America’s enemy abroad were killed...

A 21-year-old pregnant soldier who was due to come home within weeks is the second Chicago-area victim from the shooting at Fort Hood. Francesca Velez had just returned from a tour of duty in Iraq and was due to be temporarily released from the military on maternity leave, according to her family and friends.