I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT mean to make light of any of this. Just making an observation.

I was wondering if even one Republican would realize that this guy murdered a bunch of people DESPITE the fact that he knew they were or could have been heavily armed.

The Republican side harps that more guns is the answer to preventing things like Columbine or Va. Tech shoootings - certainly not in this case.

There will be an extensive investigation and we'll no doubt know more in the coming days and weeks.

Two strong possibilities: He flipped after years of Muslim-baiting, or he flipped after years of hearing horror stories from soldiers he counseled.

If either is true, on what planet will any investigation by the military allow either of these to emerge?

Steve: Thanks for the factual summation. This is a story that will unfold over time and has many complicated issues in it. In the days ahead we will need posts like this to keep us informed about what has actually occured, as opposed to hyperventilation from MSM about this guy's religion, ethnicity, motive, etc. Because of sites like yours, I no longer watch TV news.
I prefer to get the facts and digest them without a pundit filter, even if they don't fit into a 90-second sound bite. Keep up the good work.

Dianaw

The soldiers and civilians this ass murdered were unarmed. The military has very tight controls reguarding where arms and ammunition are stored and who has them where. The weapons that ass used were not G.I. issued.

I was wondering if even one Republican would realize that this guy murdered a bunch of people DESPITE the fact that he knew they were or could have been heavily armed.

According to the general and other commentary I've read, soldiers are not armed while on base. The anomaly was that Hasan was armed. Typically, only military police on base are armed.

People of all religions and persuasions whig out all the time ..quick what was the religion of the last mass murderer? I thought so . Those that harbor prejudice will play it for all they can

Of course, it might have been a roduct of the incredible strain the military as a whole has been under since Dick Cheney and George Bush decided to play toy soldier.

It will be interesting, from a Political Science POV, to see the spin put on this, left and right.

Taylor writes, above: "He flipped after years of Muslim-baiting, or he flipped after years of hearing horror stories from soldiers he counseled."

While either may be true, they have the feel of a Progressive POV, and I'm sure that the Other Side will see a Muslim hatred of America, Freedom, Our Way of Life as motivation.

Thankfully, the man is alive and will be able to give us answers. . .

Day, the real answers will come out in some book published in about 20 years. In the meantime we will be treated to bullshit of the kind spewed by all of the cable news all yesterday afternoon. Everybody will spin the story to fit their audience's vision of the world. That is what cable news pukes do. Hell, that is what all modern reporters do.

There are regulations as tight as those aboard ships regarding every aspect of an American soldier on any base . It is hardly unrelated to discover that where this incident occurred is not as vulnerable as a Columbine High School , or a restaurant . I appreciate the lockdown of equipment in any organization for the simplest of reasons , organization .
The howling of the deepest intellectual voices from the elite right wing banks of knowledge and collected fonts of wisdom for the obvious need to weaponize our civilian population after the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University massacre resonates comfortably , and repeatedly , only in the medicated halls of a Michelle Malkin institute of hypocrisy . The perimeter of other diseased mental defectives generally populating the words thoughts and deeds of our esteemed authoritarian torturing right wing political enthusiasts , will substitute in an error free echo should the iconic high stepping cheerleaders of free market fantasies be unavailable to proselytize their pure , purer , purest , forms of hate and hypocrisy .

One point (nit-picky): one cannot earn a "doctorate in psychiatry". "Doctorate" refers to the Ph.D. degree, whereas psychiatry is a discipline within medicine and as such denotes the MD degree.

Hasan was a psychiatrist; i.e., he held the MD degree and specialized in psychiatry.

Like any nut who goes off and shoots people randomly, this guy is crazy. In this case, he's a crazy Muslim. In the case at Virginia Tech it was a crazy guy of Korean descent. At Columbine it was a couple of crazy young white boys. At the church in Tennessee it was a crazy redneck.

Usually the conservative response to mass shootings like this is: those little bitches who got shot should have been carrying a fire arm so they could fire back. That won't happen in this case because the nut shooter is a Muslim and the victims are soldiers, tailor made for right-wing spasms.

This isn't even the first massacre in the area. There was a similar massacre at a Luby's restaurant in Waco, Texas a few years back. Mass shootings are as American as apple pie. Unfortunately. God bless the victims and their families.

soldiers are not armed while on base

But according to NBC reporting this morning, at least some of the casualties were victims of friendly fire - meaning not Hasan. Any way you look at it, I think it shows the dangers of guns in a crowd.

You know, 14 years ago Republicans like Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh called for revolution and taking back the government. There are eerie parallels to today -- Republicans were in the minority, President Clinton was pushing for health care reform. And in that volatile climate we had the Oklahoma City bombing.

Now, the very day of Michelle Bachman's "insurgency" and "takeover" of the Capitol we have the Fort Hood massacre.

When political leaders spout off incendiary, angry verbal assaults it creates a seemingly desperate political and social climate that facilitates violence. The results of our leaders' angry words are unpredictable and often tragic.

Elected leaders need to act like leaders, not like petulant kids.

soldiers are not armed while on base

Why was Hasan allowed to be yesterday? Serious question.

An example of the distortion possible was a quick mention in one report to the effect that something the psychiatrist wrote was "sympathetic to suicide bombers".

If you have had to answer the question "Why would anyone do this to me?" for 7-8 years from dozens, if not hundreds, of wounded soldiers, would you NOT try to write out clearly for yourself why a suicide bomber kills himself in an attempt to kill your patient?

Glen Beck and Lou Dobbs can scream "Because the bomber is a Mooosleem!!!!" as a explanation because they are ignorant and and don't have a real job, like healing the wounded minds of soldiers. A psychiatrist has to have an answer that will last their patient a lifetime, not the scapegoat of the moment.

A few thoughts that come to mind:

(1) Hasan was a devout Muslim.
(2) Near 100% of devout Muslims believe that the US has no business being in Iraq or Afghanistan.
(3) According to the FSO / former Marine Captain who quit the Afghan effort a few weeks back, there are over 180 small insurgent groups in Afghanistan, most of them simply loosely knot local tribesmen who are fighting locally to remove the US presence. i.e. the "Taliban" is now another word for local opposition.
(4) All these tribesmen are devout Muslims.

What's wrong with this picture? I have a Jordanian American friend (funny that) who told me that even if Muslim Jordanian troops were in Afghanistan "to help them" they would be viewed as invaders, so what to think of blond blue-eyed Texans in Kandahar? What are we really doing there?

Yes, we don't know whether this Hasan guy was actually a Al-Qaeda plant - or a soldier terribly conflicted between faith and task who popped, but I think the big picture is that our soldiers are simply going to snap under this pressure. As Colin Powell apparently said to Obama, "What is the mission?" Yes, WTF is it?

Good Ford, what a tragedy.

"Why was Hasan allowed to be yesterday? Serious question."

Reporting from General Cone last night was that the guns used were not Army-issue.

Reporting from General Cone last night was that the guns used were not Army-issue.

Right, but by "allowed," I meant how was he able to bring them on base? Do they not have checkpoints, etc.?

In the grand tradition of male hazing and "kidding", this guy was apparently routinely refered to as "camel jockey" and given other derogatory names. I wonder if the commanding officers ever consider that such names piss people off in a serious way. It's pretty much akin to calling black guys "nigger" or "night porter" or similar terms.

Anyone notice that NOBODY is talking about the TeaBaggers rally? This story has taken all the airtime on every channel since yesterday afternoon- precisely the time that the cable-news outlets would have devoted to the "superbowl of freedom". Even FNC!!!
Gee, when I saw Shep Smith on Fox in Beck's spot, I thought Beck had been bumped for the news coverage, which I found surprising considering Fox. Only when I watched Jon Stewart did I hear about Beck's appendicitis.

Yes, we don't know whether this Hasan guy was actually a Al-Qaeda plant ...

Given that the guy was born and raised in the United States and spent most of his adult life in the US Army, I think we can be pretty sure he was not an al-Qaeda plant, unless you think they have secret mind-control powers that can make people do things without ever meeting them.

This quote from James Fallows seems to capture my sadness:
"We know the emptiness of these events in retrospect, though we suppress that knowledge when the violence erupts as it is doing now. The cable-news platoons tonight are offering all their theories and thought-drops. They've got to fill time. I wish they could stop. As the Vietnam-era saying went, Don't mean nothing.

RIP"

I tilt to the right on this issue. He didn't want to be posted in a danger zone, so he killed innocent comrades. This came after his education was funded big time by the military. One, no matter how you spin it, the guy is a personal scumbag. Two, it is certainly fair to ask if he is the first example of a general threat, or he used his Allah as an awful excuse for his sordid ingratitude.

I tilt to the right on this issue. He didn't want to be posted in a danger zone, so he killed innocent comrades. This came after his education was funded big time by the military. One, no matter how you spin it, the guy is a personal scumbag. Two, it is certainly fair to ask if he is the first example of a general threat, or he used his Allah as an awful excuse for his sordid ingratitude.
Posted by: Bob M

No need to mention that you tilt right on this issue; your last sentence made it obvious ... racists seem unable to keep using code before they break out and say what they really, really want to say.

By early 2004 the Army started to give cultural sensitivity training to troops about to be deployed to Iraq. When interviewed, one such instructor on a Texas base said that the officers there were so hostile to all things Arab and/or Muslim that it was a waste of time to try train the soldiers to act more respectivefully.

When Stanley Kubrick was promoting Full Metal Jacket he was asked why the soldiers weren't shown as an disorderly mob of drug users, as was usual for Hollywood movies about Viet Nam. He replied that Tet took place in 1968, when the US forces were still quite displined. The major loss of morale didn't take place until after Nixon got elected. The Army started to fall apart when the draftees realized that Nixon's campaign promise of having a "secret plan to end the war" was just a lie. The Army is now an all volunteer force but Obama did promise to withdraw from Iraq and the longer his promises go unfulfilled, the more morale, and with it, discipiline will decline.

But according to NBC reporting this morning, at least some of the casualties were victims of friendly fire - meaning not Hasan.
Cops.

Two strong possibilities: He flipped after years of Muslim-baiting, or he flipped after years of hearing horror stories from soldiers he counseled.

Third possibility: He flipped out due to years of religious indoctrination. Fundamentalism of any stripe is a mind-twister.

Mental health professionals are always in danger of being emotionally affected by what they hear. Pile on top of that the fact that two countries that have people of your ethnicity and your faith are being militarily occupied by your country and civilian women and children are being injured or killed. And on top of that, you are going to have to go there and see the same kinds of horrors you're being told about. And perhaps you haven't been talking to anybody about all of this.
Sounds like a pretty deadly emotional cocktail to me. And who's to say that this wasn't also a case of "suicide by cop" except he didn't die?
He didn't have a wife and children that he would've left behind.
Not to say that this whole thing isn't truly tragic or that what he did wasn't horrible. Just saying there's a lot we don't know and may not ever know.
And it's just one more reason to get our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

He was a doctor, an officer--a captain and then a major. Who harasses doctors--patients? Nurses? Who harasses majors--colonels? Generals? That's a bunch of bull and a very sorry excuse.

And it's just one more reason to get our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

It took 30 comments, but finally someone nailed it.

This is what the Left should be focusing on -- getting Obama to effing end the wars. Remember, the wars? Those little things that had us all so pissed at GWB?

Btw, the day Obama announces his very own surge in Afganistan, national-wide protest at 5pm. In Chicago, the protest will take place at Federal Plaza.

"Right, but by "allowed," I meant how was he able to bring them on base? Do they not have checkpoints, etc.?"

Military bases like this (I've been there) have civilian contractor security guards at the gate checking passes (which he would have had) and occasionally pulling cars to the side for inspection. He was an officer in the U.S. Army.

He - was - trusted.

"This is what the Left should be focusing on -- getting Obama to effing end the wars."

All Obama can do is end our participation in those 'wars'. When we leave Afghanistan they will be right back in their civil war and when we leave Iraq there is a good chance they'll fall into a multi-ethnic/sectarian civil war.

I'm not saying we shouldn't leave. I'm just saying that leaving doesn't bring them peace, just a lower technology of death.

He - was - trusted.

Okay. But why should a military officer be any more trusted than, say, an attorney entering a courthouse, a teacher going into a school or a state legislator entering a capitol building?

It makes zero sense and may illustrate a certain arrogant naivete that there should have been no security measures to prevent the carrying of outside arms onto a military base.

"No need to mention that you tilt right on this issue; your last sentence made it obvious ... racists seem unable to keep using code before they break out and say what they really, really want to say.

Posted by: Gonads on November 6, 2009 at 12:10 PM "

I think you should learn to read better, gonads, before you start popping off. I referred to his twisting of Islam ("Allahu Akbar") to justify his actions. That is hardly racist, etc., and you really should not call others names without knowing them. I hope your brain doesn't match your gonads, or the ladies in your life are going to be sadly disappointed.

Please don't reply. You've embarrassed yourself enough.

I think you should learn to read better, gonads, before you start popping off. I referred to his twisting of Islam ("Allahu Akbar") to justify his actions. That is hardly racist, etc., and you really should not call others names without knowing them.
Posted by: Bob M

Where did you read that he said "allahuakbar"? ... or is that your projection of what you imagined he was saying?

incidentally, there's nothing twisted about saying "god is great," although presumably the more charitable and non-racist reading is that you meant he would be saying that mid-massacre.

this guy had plenty of reasons to flip and go crazy. your attachment to the crazy muslim theory clearly marks you of a certain type ... which ironically, has allowed me to make snap judgments about you without the benefit of knowing you!