Signs Were Missed

It seems clear that federal authorities missed key signs that Fort Hood massacre suspect Nidal Malik Hasan was deeply troubled.

It is easy to second-guess these signs as clearly pointing to the deadly rampage last week. But a failure of prognostication is not the issue. It's likely that no one could have predicted what happened based on the clues Hasan was leaving.

Still, the Army clearly had a soldier/psychiatrist who was conflicted about the morality of his role in it and in his country's wars. More, it had someone who corresponded with another who advocated war on the Army and the country.

All of this should have triggered an early intervention — even an interview — but apparently, this did not happen. It should have, regardless of whether the soldier was Muslim, Christian or atheist.

From personal utterances to a PowerPoint presentation to that e-mail correspondence with an anti-American imam, there were signs aplenty of incompatibility between Hasan and military service and the current wars, one of which he was about to deploy to.

Political correctness is being flung about as the reason for authorities' seeming indifference to these signs.

As the theory goes, they didn't want to be viewed as anti-Muslim so, in the case of the correspondence with the imam, this was viewed as legitimate research for a paper Hasan was working on.

A more likely answer for official inaction is inertia, misjudgments and failure to connect dots that occur in any bureaucracy. Having contact with a radical imam should have been a cause for concern no matter Hasan's faith. How about we talk about that rather than whether soldiers who are Muslim should be automatically subject to more scrutiny?

Enemies being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan are Muslims. There are, sadly, Muslims who pervert their faith as a cause to kill. Hasan is Muslim, and perhaps he was an extremist.

But many more U.S. soldiers who are Muslim aren't extremists. Muslims have died in this country's service in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Alarms should have gone off. But not because Hasan is Muslim; they should have been sounding because of Hasan's questionable actions over a long period of months.

REPRINTED FROM THE MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL.

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