None Dare Call It Jihad: The Same Reason No One Can Call It Jihad After the Attack Is The Same Reason No One Called it Jihad Before the Attack

A read the whole thing deal.

Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood that claimed 13 lives and wounded more than 40. Three hours later, while the base was still in lockdown, an FBI spokesman dismissed suggestions that the attack was terrorism and said that a link between Hasan and terrorist organizations "is not being discussed."

Yet, a little more than a week after the shooting we know that Hasan justified suicide bombings in an Internet posting. He lectured colleagues using the rhetoric of jihad. He warned darkly about "adverse events" if Muslims were not allowed to leave military service. He repeatedly sought counsel from a radical imam with known ties to al Qaeda. He tried to convert some of his patients to Islam--many of them soldiers troubled by their near-fatal experiences with jihadists. He printed business cards that made no mention of his military service but instead identified him as an "SOA," a soldier of Allah.

And U.S. authorities knew about some of this well before the attack at Fort Hood. At Walter Reed--where Hasan spent the six years before his posting to Fort Hood in July--his superiors wondered whether he might be "psychotic" and worried that he consistently sided with jihadists over his fellow soldiers. The FBI had intercepted emails Hasan had sent to Anwar al Awlaki, an al Qaeda supporter with strong ties to three 9/11 hijackers.

But the FBI did not know all that the Army knew. And the Army did not know all that the FBI knew. The participants in an FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force discussed Hasan's case briefly and concluded that it did not warrant an investigation. If they had performed even a cursory, unobtrusive examination of this man, his contacts, and his radical views, they would have quickly turned up a great deal of troubling information.

Since the shooting there have been dozens of theories floated about Hasan's motivations. On the night after the attack, CNN's Larry King interviewed the ubiquitous "Dr. Phil" McGraw, who speculated that Hasan's counseling of traumatized soldiers might have in turn traumatized him and caused him to snap. In his November 10 remarks at Fort Hood, President Barack Obama suggested the cause of the shooting was--and may remain--a mystery. "It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy." The FBI agreed: "The investigation to date has not identified a motive, and a number of possibilities remain under consideration." One of them, according to an article in the Financial Times, was "anti-Muslim bias."

Here is another: Nidal Malik Hasan is a jihadist. That so many refuse to even consider this in the face of the overwhelming evidence might help explain why those whose job it was to keep us safe refused to see it back when it really mattered.

The passages on page two about the radical Al Qaeda preacher Hasan contacted are worth reading, but I can't copy the whole thing.

Anyone notice the media has lost all interest in this story already?

Thanks to EdwardR.

posted by Ace at 03:42 PM

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