Thursday, February 3, 2011

This Just In--Jihad Kills

A congressional probe into the Fort Hood massacre, the results of which will be officially released today, has drawn some utterly predictable but crucial conclusions. (In a nutshell: if you ignore the sharia imperative and pretend Islam is all hearts and flowers, you will die, kafir). Here's the Politco write-up:
...In a report set for release Thursday by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the FBI is criticized for failing to notify the Army about alleged gunman Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s extremist views, while the Army lapsed in identifying and responding to his changing beliefs.

Commanders had the authority to discipline or discharge Hasan but, the examination found, the Defense Department did not teach them how to differentiate between soldiers practicing peaceful Islam and those who, like Hasan, had become radicalized.

The report, obtained by the AP in advance of a midday release by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), chair of the panel, and Susan Collins (R-Me.), the ranking member, comes to similar conclusions found by other probes into the Hasan case. The central missed warning sign was that a terrorism task force led by the FBI learned of Hasan’s repeated interactions with radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki but did not report its findings to the Army.

The Senate investigation also found that the Army has not done enough to improve how it identifies and handles soldiers who are believed to support radical Islam.
Also predictably, the Army is trying to cover its sorry arse:
An Army spokesman told the AP that it is continuing to work on bettering its monitoring of potential threats from within. “We will closely examine the report’s findings and recommendations,” said Col. Tom Collins. “The Army has already implemented numerous concrete actions that have made our soldiers, families and civilian employees safer. There is still more work to do, but the Army is committed to doing all we can to learn from this tragic event.”
The fact that he calls it a "tragic event" (making it sound like, say, a landslide and not an act of holy war) leads me to suspect that the Army, with its touchy-feely "diversity" bollocks, is still fairly clueless.

1 comment:

Carlos Perera said...

I must respectfully register a minor disagreement with Scaramouche: The Army is not clueless, it knows full well that men like Nidal Hasan are dangerous . . . but high-ranking military officers, the kind with offices in the Pentagon, eager to please their civilian masters, have made it quite clear, by means both subtle and not-so-subtle, that any officer or non-commissioned officer who runs afoul of prevailing notions of political correctness will have his/her career ruined in a heartbeat. A glaring Catch-22 is built into the system: Proactive action to cashier Major Hasan would have preempted the Fort Hood shootings, but, because no shootings would have taken place, his superiors would have been open to the charge of "Islamophobic" prejudice against the good doctor. Since an extreme act of violence like the Fort Hood murders is always unlikely, the safe thing to do, from a careerist perspective, is . . . nothing; ignore the problem and hope it will become somebody else's headache.