I
had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no
glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if
nothing was done with the meat except to bury it... -
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell
To Arms
Killeen
– Old hands at the world's largest military installation are also
old hands at waging war in the world's largest theater of operations
– the Global War On Terrorism.
Most
of them say not much has changed at Ft. Hood since the day when an
Army psychiatrist the Jewish Defense Organization called “the
all-American Palestinian” gunned down and murdered 13 unarmed
people right outside his office door at the Soldier Readiness Center.
Located
in a sprawling complex once used as a sports complex, the center is
an assembly line operation that clears combatants for takeoff, making
sure their inoculations are up to date, their wills are up to date
and on file, their group life insurance beneficiary information forms
are accurate, and their pay records are in order.
Major
Abu Nidal Malik Hasan is also charged with the attempted murder of 32
other people as they worked or waited in line at the Soldier
Readiness Center to be deployed, or re-deployed, to the war in
Afghanistan – or Iraq.
One
thing to which everyone you talk to has long ago agreed is that it's
taking far too long for justice to reach out and touch Major Hasan.
Most cannot contain themselves; they blurt out murderous intentions
toward him as casually as they would express a fond desire for the
Rangers to make it all the way to the World Series this season.
It's
a given.
Tomorrow
morning, Tuesday, April 16, a new judge will rule on a battery of
defense pre-trial motions, including the hair on the shrink's chinny
chin chin, a personal grooming choice he says he adopted for
religious purposes – or preferences.
Whatever.
The
former judge said it is disruptive for a soldier to break Army
regulations by wearing a beard. He got overruled, finally, after many
months during which the case languished in the Army Court of Appeals,
and the new judge, Col. Tara Osborn, has decided it's not that big a
deal.
Colonel
Osborn turned down defense motions for special sentencing due to
Major Hasan's religious proclivities.
Murder
by religious fatwa is no affirmative defense in the American
military's law books.
She
will also hear arguments from defense counsel regarding suppression
of evidence after ruling that not only is the Army appeals court's
stricture against the forcible shaving of the beard a matter of
constitutional law, but the military law that allows either a death
sentence, or life imprisonment without possibility of parole is up to
constitutional scrutiny, as well.
She
has scheduled seating a jury in the General Court Martial by May 29,
and a beginning of testimony in the case in chief on July 1 as the
government examines some 300 witnesses, many of whom testified in
pretrial hearings that they locked eyes with the accused murderer as
he mowed people down with one of the world's most powerful
semiautomatic handguns.
So,
what's really on trial?
 |
| From a power point presentation Hasan made on Jihad |
America's
ability to defend herself against a gnawing, insidious onslaught of
terror.
This
is the war that not only saddled up and came riding roughshod into
your living room on a daily basis; it also invaded your kids'
consciousness in a myriad of video games designed to reduce the
novelty of anything rare or unique, startling, or in the slightest
way unusual about the kind of nerve-shattering, mind-blowing violence
with which the war of terror and counter terror is fought.
Operant
conditioning on the grand scale is an art and science aimed at
reducing the incidence of mind-numbing, reflex-destroying post
traumatic stress disorder that can render a battle-hardened trooper
useless after repeated deployments.
After
all, there are few among us who have not boarded a jetliner for a
jaunt or junket to home, school, grandma's house, or a stint at
fighting in some war or the other. Almost no one in our nation has
never boarded an express elevator for a quick trip to the lofty
perches that top our cities' skyscrapers.
After
you sat there on your couch and watched the twin towers topple and
the people leaping into space to escape the flames, there is nothing
all that surprising about what comes afterward.
There
you have it. Major Hasan's access to means and opportunity to commit
the crimes for which he is accused are foregone conclusions.
His
motives, on the other hand, are the stuff of Kipling's day, the one
in which east is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet
- minus the romance.
In
this story, no noble war lord of the Islamic jihad will come forward
to detail his son to fight alongside the noble young westerners bent
on revenge.
They
are diametrically opposed, no doubt. The Army is calling it violence in the work place.
Raised
in a Palestinian family from the West Bank town of Ramallah, Major
Hasan spent his entire adult life in the U.S. Army. He went to school
most of the time following his enlistment in 1988, when he served as
a Private First Class at The National Training Center at Ft. Irwin,
California, a desert outpost located in a Mojave hell hole between
Vegas and Barstow.
 |
| The National Training Center at Ft. Irwin |
He
studied science at an on-post community college while he served his
time there.
They
trained the Rangers who routed Saddam Hussein's Army at Baghdad in
mock-up cities complete with mosques and outdoor markets at Ft.
Irwin. Here they proved out unmanned aerial vehicle strike
capabilities in real time and under actual combat conditions.
When
he finished his hitch in California, he kept at his education at a
community college back in his home town, the District of Columbia and
its suburbs. Then he split for Roanoke and got a B.S. with honors in
biochemistry at Virginia Tech's College of Agriculture and Life
Sciences before getting a medical degree at the Uniformed Services
University of the Health Sciences at Silver Spring, Maryland. He did
a residency in psychiatry at Walter Reed.
During
that 10-year odyssey, he attended local mosques as a devout follower
of the Islamic faith. According to a fatwa issued by the Islamic
Graduate School of Social Sciences, “We abide by every law of this
country except those laws that are contradictory to Islamic law.”
During
the six months prior to his attack, Maj. Hasan posted numerous
articles on-line in which he constantly affirmed his jihadist belief
that a suicide bomber is like a soldier who throws himself on a
grenade to save his comrades' lives.
It's
a doctrine readily taught and absorbed by Al Qaeda's fighters.
Maj.
Hasan sent numerous e-mails to Anwar al-Awlaki, the former Imam of
the Dar al Hijal Mosque at Falls Church, Virginia, with whom he
studied in 2001, a time when al-Awlaki similarly preached to and
taught three of the Arabic suicide jockeys who piloted the jetliners
into the twin towers of New York and the Pentagon of D.C.
He
wrote an impassioned e-mail to al-Awlaki, saying that he could hardly
wait to join him in eternity. The gum shoes concluded it was code for
something much deeper, that perhaps he had already crossed some
dividing line in his mind.
It's
a valid point in the social psychology on the subject, in which most
researchers believe the primary Islamic resentment is directed
against puppet dictator governments enabled by American interests,
and that Muslims' rage is only secondarily aimed at Americans.
At
any rate, Maj. Hasan was conducting research into a Master's thesis
in public health on “Disaster and Preventive Psychiatry.”
The
Army, seeing no sinister plot, failed to investigate. In the
aftermath, nearly a dozen top officers faced disciplinary hearings
over the matter.
 |
| Command and Control Vehicle tested at Ft. Irwin |
Following
Maj. Hasan's attack, al-Awlaki wrote on his website, “Nidal
Hassan is a hero.... The U.S. is leading the war against terrorism,
which in reality is a war against Islam..... Nidal opened fire on
soldiers who were on their way to be deployed to Iraq and
Afghanistan. How can there be any dispute about the virtue of what he
has done? In fact the only way a Muslim could Islamically justify
serving as a soldier in the U.S. army is if his intention is to
follow the footsteps of men like Nidal.”
The
CIA targeted al-Awlaki, a native American citizen, in a drone attack
last September. They killed him with rockets as he rode in a convoy
of pickup trucks. Two weeks later, they got his 16-year-old son
Abdulrahman in a similar desert attack in their native Yemen.
Maj.
Hasan had a job to do at the Soldier Readiness Center. He certified
those who complained of PTSD from their combat experiences to be
ready to go back into battle, regardless of their complaints of shot
nerves and fits of rage, sleepless nights, chronic alcoholism and
drug abuse, and a growing dependence on serotonin reuptake
inhibitors, muscle relaxers, and other psychotropic cocktails he and
other Army doctors prescribe to keep the front line fit and fighting.
But
he was on his way to a deployment in Afghanistan, something against
which he protested – to no avail – when he drove to his office
and opened up with the pistol.
He
would have been one of 1.64 million deployed since 9/11 – a group
among whom those who enlisted prior to age 25 are seven times more
likely to develop PTSD and in whom 97% who suffered childhood trauma
and violence against civilians and prisoners are likely to succumb to
the lifelong affliction, according to studies by the Rand Corporation(click)
and psychological journals(click).
So
it goes.
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