Connecting the dots

Jonah Goldberg looks at which dots tend not to get connected in today's army.

...Flash forward to Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the man who last week shot over 40 people at Fort Hood, killing 13, while shouting "Allahu Akbar!"

 

"As a senior-year psychiatric resident at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Maj. Nidal M. Hasan was supposed to make a presentation on a medical topic of his choosing as a culminating exercise of the residency program," reports the Washington Post.

 

Hasan went a different way. He opted to give a bizarre PowerPoint presentation in which he defended suicide bombing, explaining that non-believers should be beheaded, be burned alive, and have boiling oil poured down their throats (presumably not in that order). He argued that all Muslims should be discharged from the military.

 

One slide concluded: "We love death more then [sic] you love life!"

 

According to the Post, the medical staff in attendance was deeply disturbed by the incident. But there's apparently no record of anyone's reporting it to authorities. That would be insensitive and discriminatory.

 

The following year, intelligence officials discovered that Hasan had been sending e-mails to Anwar al-Aulaqi, a prominent American-born radical cleric now based in Yemen with ties to al-Qaeda.

The FBI concluded it was no big deal and dropped the matter. "Investigators," reports the Post, "said Hasan's e-mails were consistent with the topic of his academic research and involved some social chatter and religious discourse."

 

Ah yes, his "academic research," which was laid out so rigorously in his PowerPoint presentation.

 

Hasan also reportedly expressed joy over the murder of an Army recruiter in Arkansas. His views were not a secret to his colleagues, nor apparently to his patients, whom he tried to proselytize.