I guess the New York Times thinks they can mitigate Nidal Hasan’s murder of 14 or 15 Americans at Fort Hood in the arena of public opinion by making him a more sympathetic figure in their pages. They discuss the emails he sent to superiors in the days preceding the bloody attack on unarmed soldiers;
In the e-mails, one sent 13 days before the attack and the second three days prior, Major Hasan asked his supervisors and Army legal advisers how to handle three cases that disturbed him. In one case, a soldier reported to him that American troops had poured 50 gallons of fuel into the Iraqi water supply as revenge; the second case involved another soldier who told him about a mercy killing of a severely injured insurgent by medics; and in the third, a soldier spoke of killing an Iraqi woman because he was following orders to shoot anything that approached a specific site.
The Army never fully investigated his concerns. On Nov. 5, 2009, Major Hasan walked into a medical deployment center to kill as many soldiers as he could as part of a jihad to protect Muslims and Taliban leaders from troops heading to Afghanistan, he has said.
Maybe they weren’t investigated because they sound so wildly out of the bounds of reality. No one in the military intentionally poisons a civilian water supply “as revenge”. Can you imagine your neighbor’s kid doing that? Medics don’t kill people for mercy or otherwise. My son who worked in the operating room at the hospital in Bagram said that they worked on more Taliban in their operating room than Americans because that’s who was getting shot up. They got the same level of care as anyone else who came through those doors.
Yes, Hasan should have been ferreted out before November 5, 2009 and it’s the PC Army’s (and the PC FBI’s) fault that he wasn’t, but the responsibility for the horror of that day rests solely on the shoulders of Hasan. It’s not the fault of the soldiers who went to Iraq to do their job, and it wasn’t the fault of the soldiers who were deploying to Afghanistan that day.
The first email was sent 13 days before the murders, does the Times and Hasan expect the whole world to stop while the Army investigates one report in fewer than 13 days?
Hasan tried to make the emails an issue during his trial and the judge, to her credit, didn’t allow that. So the New York Times has decided they’ll make an issue of the emails in the court of public opinion.
Thanks to Mr Wolf for the link.
