Fort Hood Shootings

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so, to summarize, diamond thinks that it was "PC-ness" that caused the shooting
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No, liberals contributed to this shooting by their ill informed policies of political correctness and no quick access to guns on military bases for innocent soilders to defend themselves, and I think an execution would be more fitting.

This is just yet another example of my Gay friend trying to blur logical lines of reasoning.


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diamond said:
No, liberals contributed to this shooting by their ill informed policies of political correctness and no quick access to guns on military bases
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What? :doh:

First of all the latest article we have in the other thread states there were FILED complaints about his lecture as far back as 07. So it wasn't PC bullshit, it was someone screwed up, plain and simple.

No quick access to guns on Military Base? Really? Explain this...
 
UberBeaver said:
Classmates who participated in a 2007-2008 master's program at a military college told The Associated Press that they complained to faculty during the program about what they considered to be Hasan's anti-American views, which included his giving a presentation that justified suicide bombing and telling classmates that Islamic law trumped the U.S. Constitution.

"If Hasan was showing signs, saying to people that he had become an Islamist extremist, the U.S. Army has to have zero tolerance," Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, said on "Fox News Sunday." "He should have been gone."

I'm not sure how the military works legally in terms of free speech, but if I'm in the army, and the dude next to me is justifying suicide bombings and saying the Koran is above the US Constitution, I'm getting suspicious and that dude is being watched.
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I agree. From what I have read so far, there were several warning signs that were ignored by the Army and by those who monitored his internet postings.
 
the iron horse said:
I'm glad she had a gun.
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We’re into growing up
Women of the future
Hold the big revelations



Munley.jpg


and larger pistolas
 
BVS said:
How did he get shot, and how many more of these would be occuring if they were allowed to freely carry?
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The point is he would not have walked in to a room full of armed soldiers and opened fire.

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diamond said:
The point is he would not have walked in to a room full of armed soldiers and opened fire.

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So you either believe the stories coming out or you don't, you can't have it both ways...

If he sympathized with suicide bombers then yes, he sure would have. I wish you would listen to yourself sometimes.
 
diamond said:
The point is he would not have walked in to a room full of armed soldiers and opened fire.

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well, the gun doesn't matter, does it? after all, it's just an inanimate object. he could have very easily killed 13 people with a baseball bat or an ice pick because the gun doesn't matter if the person wants to kill.

after all, just an inanimate object.
 
Irvine511 said:
why? it's just an inanimate object.

she could have used her ninja throwing stars.
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Now THAT would have been awesome!

It is a good idea to not have soldiers walking around with loaded weapons on base. Usually, only the gate guards and civilian cops carry weapons outside of training areas - and this is a good thing.

However, after this, I imagine we will probably end up with more temporary MP-type soldiers protecting larger auditoriums, processing centers, hospitals...etc.
 
AEON said:
It is a good idea to not have soldiers walking around with loaded weapons on base. Usually, only the gate guards and civilian cops carry weapons outside of training areas - and this is a good thing.
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I knew that if you posted enough we would someday agree, well it happened...:wink:
 
AEON said:
However, after this, I imagine we will probably end up with more temporary MP-type soldiers protecting larger auditoriums, processing centers, hospitals...etc.
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Probably, or they could just follow up better on extremist postings. I can dream.
 
cnn.com

Muslim soldiers facing backlash?
Posted: 06:47 AM ET
Carol Costello - Correspondent, CNN's American Morning
Filed under: Military


By Carol Costello and Ronni Berke

Although about 3,500 American servicemen and women are Muslim, the Army's Chief of Staff is worried about backlash after a Muslim-American was named a suspect in the killings at Fort Hood.

General George Casey says, "as great a tragedy as this was ... it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well."

It's something that deeply worries many Americans who are Muslim and have made the ultimate sacrifice. Like the family of Army Corporal Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq in 2007. His mother, Elsheba Khan, visits his grave at Arlington National Cemetery every Sunday.

“He represented the country, he represented Muslims all over the world,” she says. “I’m very proud of him."

Khan is concerned there will be a backlash against Muslim-American soldiers. She knows some are already reaching conclusions as to why Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan allegedly opened fire on his fellow soldiers.

On the right-wing Web site, Pajamas Media, Phyllis Chesler wrote: "...I knew in my bones that the shooter or shooters were Muslims ... we must connect the dots before its too late..."

That suspicion about Muslims, even those born in the United States, intensified after 9/11. Khan’s mother says it is the reason he joined the Army as soon as he turned 18, telling his parents: “I’m a citizen. I protect my country, whoever there is [in] the country, doesn’t matter race, whatever religion ... everybody included,” Elsheba Khan said.

Her son was awarded a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, and an honored place at Arlington. A picture of Khan's tombstone with symbols of his religion so touched General Colin Powell, that he used the image to open minds about Islam when he endorsed Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential run.

Powell's acknowledgment of her son's service profoundly touched Khan. “When he mentioned my son, and he mentioned his whole name and pronounced it correctly, I was like the proudest mom that day.”

President Obama also honored Kareem Khan. And Khan's fellow soldiers have written her glowing accounts of her son’s outstanding service to country. Of course, the public outpouring has quieted now. Still, Khan keeps her son's medals and pictures on display in her home and regularly visits his grave – now praying her fellow Americans will not pass judgment on all Muslims because of the actions of one man.
 
coolian2 said:
creepiest hero worship ever.
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Here's another hero of mine-another strong, clear headed thinking woman.:up:


NOVEMBER 10, 2009.Dr. Phil and the Fort Hood Killer

His terrorist motive is obvious to everyone but the press and the Army brass.

It can by now come as no surprise that the Fort Hood massacre yielded an instant flow of exculpatory media meditations on the stresses that must have weighed on the killer who mowed down 13 Americans and wounded 29 others. Still, the intense drive to wrap this clear case in a fog of mystery is eminently worthy of notice.

The tide of pronouncements and ruminations pointing to every cause for this event other than the one obvious to everyone in the rational world continues apace. Commentators, reporters, psychologists and, indeed, army spokesmen continue to warn portentously, "We don't yet know the motive for the shootings."

What a puzzle this piece of vacuity must be to audiences hearing it, some, no doubt, with outrage. To those not terrorized by fear of offending Muslim sensitivities, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's motive was instantly clear: It was an act of terrorism by a man with a record of expressing virulent, anti-American, pro-jihadist sentiments. All were conspicuous signs of danger his Army superiors chose to ignore.

What is hard to ignore, now, is the growing derangement on all matters involving terrorism and Muslim sensitivities. Its chief symptoms: a palpitating fear of discomfiting facts and a willingness to discard those facts and embrace the richest possible variety of ludicrous theories as to the motives behind an act of Islamic terrorism. All this we have seen before but never in such naked form. The days following the Fort Hood rampage have told us more than we want to know, perhaps, about the depth and reach of this epidemic.

One of the first outbreaks of these fevers, the night of the shootings, featured television's star psychologist, Dr. Phil, who was outraged when fellow panelist and former JAG officer Tom Kenniff observed that he had been listening to a lot of psychobabble and evasions about Maj. Hasan's motives.

A shocked Dr. Phil, appalled that the guest had publicly mentioned Maj. Hasan's Islamic identity, went on to present what was, in essence, the case for Maj. Hasan as victim. Victim of deployment, of the Army, of the stresses of a new kind of terrible war unlike any other we have known. Unlike, can he have meant, the kind endured by those lucky Americans who fought and died at Iwo Jima, say, or the Ardennes?


It was the same case to be presented, in varying forms, by guest psychologists, the media, and a representative or two from the military, for days on end.

The quality and thrust of this argument was best captured by the impassioned Dr. Phil, who asked us to consider, "how far out of touch with reality do you have to be to kill your fellow Americans . . . this is not a well act." And how far out of touch with reality is such a question, one asks in return—not only of Dr. Phil, but of the legions of commentators like him immersed in the labyrinths of motive hunting even as the details of Maj. Hasan's proclivities became ever clearer and more ominous.

To kill your fellow Americans—as many as possible, unarmed and in the most helpless of circumstances, while shouting "Allahu Akbar" (God is great), requires, of course, only murderous hatred—the sort of mindset that regularly eludes the Dr. Phils of our world as the motive for mass murder of this kind.

As the meditations on Maj. Hasan's motives rolled on, "fear of deployment" has served as a major theme—one announced as fact in the headline for the New York Times's front-page story: "Told of War Horror, Gunman Feared Deployment." The authority for this intelligence? The perpetrator's cousin. No story could have better suited that newspaper's ongoing preoccupation with the theme of madness in our fighting men, and the deadly horrors of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, than this story of a victim of war pressures gone berserk. The one fly in the ointment—Maj. Hasan had of course seen no war, and no combat.

Still, with a bit of stretching, adherents of Maj. Hasan-as-war-victim theme found a substitute of sorts—namely the fears allegedly provoked in him by his exposure, as an army psychiatrist, to the stories of men who had been deployed. The thesis then: Maj. Hasan's mental stress, provoked by the suffering of Americans who had been in combat, caused him to go out and butcher as many of these soldiers as he could. Let's try putting that one before a jury.

By Sunday morning, Gen. George Casey Jr., Army chief of staff, confronted questions put to him by ABC's George Stephanopolous—among them the matter of the complaints about Maj. Hasan's anti-American tirades that were made by fellow students in military classes, as well as other danger signs ignored by officials when they were reported, apparently for fear of offense to a Muslim member of the military.

These were speculations, Gen. Casey repeatedly cautioned. We need to be very careful, he explained, "We are a very diverse army." Mr. Stephanopolous then helpfully summarized matters: This case then was either a case of premeditated terror—or the man just snapped.

The general was not about to address such questions. He was there to recite the required pieties, and describe the military priorities . . . which are, it appears, a concern above all for the sensitivities of a diverse army, a concern so great as to render even the mention of salient facts out of order, as "speculation.'" "This terrible event," Gen. Casey noted, "would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty."

To hear this, and numerous other such pronouncements of recent days, was to be reminded of all those witnesses to the suspicious behavior of the 9/11 hijackers who held their tongues for fear of being charged with discrimination. It has taken Maj. Hasan, and the fantastic efforts to explain away his act of bloody hatred, to bring home how much less capable we are of recognizing the dangers confronting us than we were even before September 11.

Corrections & Amplifications: Maj. Hasan is a psychiatrist. An earlier version of the article stated he was a psychologist.

Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal's editorial board.
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ok, so in an effort to get back on track, here's a great thought post from Sullivan trying to make sense of Ft. Hood and connect it to the larger GWOT. it's the best thing i've read today:



Yglesias spins:

The terrorism fears around this subject should also remind us that the fear of a “save haven” in Afghanistan continues to be an underscrutinized concept. Suppose there had been a terrorist plot here? What role would a safe haven have played in it? The key assets Hasan had, from the point of view of committing acts of violence against Americans, were access to weapons and a physical location inside the United States of America.
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This is the reality that still haunts me with respect to 9/11. We assume that we have understood that event by now. And I once thought I did. It was a declaration of war and we had to fight back. We went to Afghanistan and removed the Taliban regime; we went to Iraq to prevent al Qaeda getting WMDs and to open up a democratic space where Islamism would falter. I supported both responses.

I worry now, as we peer through the wreckage, that we were simply trying to make our enemy a conventional one, so that we could defeat them by conventional means. Invade a country; change a regime; even use the military for endless attempts at nation-building to "drain the swamp" that brings terror to our cities. We'd beat them that way, wouldn't we? Our power was unrivaled, wasn't it?

So how are we where are we now? In Afghanistan, the Taliban has been empowered by the long occupation and the government is as corrupt as ever and fast losing its own people. Al Qaeda have simply moved to Pakistan where they remain safely as long as they duck drone attacks. In Iraq, we actually gave al Qaeda a new opening and had to spend billions and lose thousands of lives to push them back. Even now, we have no guarantee they will not re-emerge in a still deeply divided country when far fewer American troops will soon remain. And through all this, we threw away one core advantage: our moral high ground. Through torture and the mass killings of civilians, through allowing sectarian genocide in Iraq and giving the world Abu Ghraib and Gitmo as symbols of the new America, we even managed to blur the lines between civilization and barbarism. And in this struggle, our political leaders failed to keep the country united, or the alliance intact.

The awful truth is: what 9/11 revealed, and what it was designed to reveal, is that there is nothing we can really do definitively to stop another one. They had no weapons but our own technology. The training they had was not that sophisticated and the costs of the operation were relatively tiny. There were 19 of them. None of the key perpetrators has been brought to justice. Bin Laden remains at large. If you calculate the costs of that evil attack against the financial, moral and human costs of the fight back, 9/11 was a fantastic demonstration of the power of asymmetry to destroy the West.

Everything that has subsequently transpired has merely deepened that lesson. The US is now bankrupt, trapped in Iraq and Afghanistan for the rest of our lives, unable even to prevent the two most potentially dangerous Islamist states, Pakistan and Iran, from getting nukes, morally compromised and hanging on to global support only because of a new president who is even now being assaulted viciously at home for such grievous crimes as trying to get more people access to health insurance.

Yes, security is much better. Yes, it's amazing that more attacks have not taken place. Yes, Muslim-Americans have not joined Jihad the way many Europeans have. Yes, we have gained some small benefits from ousting the Taliban, and Saddam ... although at terrible costs. But we have done nothing to show that we can really win this war by the methods we have used so far. The biggest blow to al Qaeda as a global brand has not been what we have done to them, but what they have done to themselves, by their flagrant violence against fellow Muslims, their nihilism, and their barbaric brutality.

And now, in the wake of Fort Hood, we face the possibility of radicalizing Muslims in America and polarizing more Americans against them. This does not help. Sure, it is not easy - countering real Islamist danger without provoking more of it. And it is not fair that this monstrous religious terror should exist at all in a free society that did nothing to deserve its attack. But it is what it is. I worry when I read David Brooks this morning:

The conversation in the first few days after the massacre was well intentioned, but it suggested a willful flight from reality. It ignored the fact that the war narrative of the struggle against Islam is the central feature of American foreign policy. It ignored the fact that this narrative can be embraced by a self-radicalizing individual in the U.S. as much as by groups in Tehran, Gaza or Kandahar.
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Yes and no. Yes, this war is everywhere, because it really exists in the fundamentalist psyche. But we must resist - for those very reasons - the assumption that this is a "struggle against Islam", not Islamism. Maybe this was just a slip of the pen. But how easy it is even for decent smart folk like David to slide into the Manichean world of the fundamentalist, which itself subtly shifts the playing field to the fundamentalists' advantage.

As American politics itself curdles some more into the core divide between fundamentalism and liberalism, the impact of the post-9/11 century deepens. And the murderous marketers of divine certainty make progress - at home and abroad.
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