Report: Hasan Promoted, Given Positive Evaluations, Even as His Superiors Voiced Concerns Over His Competence and Stability

...and dutifully ignored their own increasing worry.

Gee, I wonder why they did that?

A Defense Department review of the shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, has found the doctors overseeing Maj. Nidal Hasan's medical training repeatedly voiced concerns over his strident views on Islam and his inappropriate behavior, yet continued to give him positive performance evaluations that kept him moving through the ranks.

The picture emerging from the review ordered by Defense Secretary Robert Gates is one of supervisors who failed to heed their own warnings about an officer ill-suited to be an Army psychiatrist, according to information gathered during the internal Pentagon investigation and obtained by The Associated Press. The review has not been publicly released.

...

What remains unclear is why Hasan would be advanced in spite of all the worries over his competence....

Hasan showed no signs of being violent or a threat. But parallels have been drawn between the missed signals in his case and those preceding the thwarted Christmas attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound U.S. airliner....

The Defense Department review is not intended to delve into allegations Hasan corresponded by e-mail with Yemen-based radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki before the attack. Those issues are part of a separate criminal investigation by law enforcement officials.

So, note, this review doesn't even take into account those 20 emails to the terrorist murder-priest for purposes of "spiritual counsel" and/or "research." This is just based on what his superiors and fellow officers observed.

In telling episodes from the latter stages of Hasan's lengthy medical education in the Washington, D.C., area, he gave a class presentation questioning whether the U.S.-led war on terror was actually a war on Islam. And fellow students said he suggested that Shariah (shah-REE'-yuh), or Islamic law, trumped the Constitution and he attempted to justify suicide bombings.

Yet no one in Hasan's chain of command appears to have challenged his eligibility to hold a secret security clearance even though they could have because the statements raised doubt about his loyalty to the United States. Had they, Hasan's fitness to serve as an Army officer may have been called into question long before he reported to Fort Hood.

Instead, in July 2009, Hasan arrived in central Texas, his secret clearance intact, his reputation as a weak performer well known, and Army authorities believing that posting him at such a large facility would mask his shortcomings.

...

While in medical school at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences from 1997 to 2003, Hasan received a string of below average and failing grades, was put on academic probation and showed little motivation to learn.

He took six years to graduate from the university in Bethesda, Md., instead of the customary four, according to the school. The delays were due in part to the deaths of his father in 1998 and his mother in 2001. Yet the information about his academic probation and bad grades wasn't included in his military personnel file, leaving the impression he was ready for more intense instruction.

In June 2003, Hasan started a four-year psychiatry internship and residency at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and he was counseled frequently for deficiencies in his performance. Teachers and colleagues described him as a below average student.

...

Still, Hasan's officer evaluation reports were consistently more positive, usually describing his performance as satisfactory and at least twice as outstanding. Known as "OERs," the reports are used to determine promotions and assignments. The Army promoted Hasan to captain in 2003 and to major in 2009.

Read the whole thing; I've excerpted more than I really can. It's all good -- or, rather, all bad.

As is the case with the Panty-Bomber -- if even this guy's behavior isn't enough to get the attention of superiors, whose behavior would be?

No one's, obviously. And that is The System that did, in fact, work precisely as designed, just as Janet Napolitano said. The System exists not to detect and handle security threats; The System exists to studiously ignore such threats while providing a small amount of PR for public consumption, to reassure them The System is protecting them.

But it's not. It's expressly designed not to. If either of these men were planning a new 9/11, and had the capability to do so, we'd be mourning the loss of another 2000+ innocent American dead, because The System is designed to permit just that.

posted by Ace at 12:04 PM

| Access Comments