From Alexander Cockburn:

“This indulgent posture towards the omens offered by Hasan’s political and psychic profile stretched from the FBI – which saw no excessive cause for alarm in his emails to the radical Imam Anwar al Awlaki, now based in Yemen, and a vocal enthusiast for jihad in its most violent forms – to his medical colleagues who in early 2008 they discussed Hasan’s indifferent performance and, in the words of an AP report, “saw no signs of mental problems, no risk factors that would predict violent behavior.” They seized on “other factors” that suggested Hasan would continue to thrive in the military.”

“Don’t ask, don’t tell”, the famous summation of the Clinton-sponsored Army posture on gays seems to have become a more general  maxim , whether it concerned the phone intercepted emails  to the Imam, the praise for suicide bombers, the business card announcing him cryptically to be “a soldier of Allah”, or even the Arabic bumper sticker (“Allah is love”) which got his car scored with a key by a vet fresh back from the Crusades.

Talking of “Don’t ask”, it does seem reasonably clear that somewhat akin to some members of the Hamburg cell carrying out the 9/11 attack, if Hasan was hoping – a vulgar myth, to be sure –  for the reward of virgins in the aftermath of martyrdom, their sex might have been an issue. No girlfriend; local virgins not pious enough for marriage; fainted while watching childbirth during medical training; at Walter Reed would not allow his photo to be taken with female co-workers; killed a pregnant woman in his lethal rampage (her dead embryo may constitute the fourteenth charge of homicide in the string for which he faces the death penalty); mentored 18-year old Duane Reasoner, a convert to Islam he met at the local mosque and with whom he seems to have cemented ties of loyalty and affection. Reasoner, who was with Hasan at his apartment not long before the major’s lethal excursion, declines to condemn him, saying fiercely in his BBC interview that Hasan’s victims “were troops who were going to Afghanistan and Iraq to kill Muslims.”

It’s the rationale most respectful to Hasan. No kook he, but indeed a Soldier of Allah.  Of course, amid the thunderings of the Right about the army’s hospitality to a gay Palestinian terrorist  General Casey retreats into the well-mannered sanctuary of “diversity”, even if there are no doubt enlisted men in Afghanistan saying right now , “No Muslims in my foxhole.” In Fort Hood the war came home with a vengeance, as it has been doing there at regular intervals with the suicides and savage domestic violence of vets driven crazy by what they’ve done in the service of Empire.”

My Comment:

The psychological profile is again oddly similar to the profile of Virginia Tech shooter, Cho. But aside from that, why does the army invite this sort of thing? If you’re planning to launch a global war on Muslim majority countries, you’d think common sense would tell that it might not be best to hire Muslims to prosecute it.