Was Hasan a Terrorist? Time Magazine’s Nancy Gibbs talks about whether the Fort Hood massacre is a sign of more trouble to come.
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Interview with Fort Hood witnesses. TODAY’s Ann Curry talks with Sgt. Kimberly D. Munley and Sgt. Mark Todd about what happened that day.
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The Fort Hood Killer: Terrified ... or Terrorist?
What a surprise it must have been when Major Nidal Malik Hasan woke up from his coma to find himself not in paradise but in Brooke Army Medical Center, deep in the heart of Texas, under security so tight that there were armed guards patrolling both the intensive-care unit and checkpoints at the nearest freeway off-ramp. This was not the finalé he had scripted when he gave away all his earthly goods — his desk lamp and air mattress, his frozen broccoli and spinach, his copies of the Koran. He had told his imam he was planning to visit his parents before deploying to Afghanistan. He did not mention that his parents had been dead for nearly 10 years.
And who denied him his martyrdom?
That would be Kimberly Munley, the SWAT-team markswoman nicknamed Mighty Mouse, who with her partner ran toward the sound of gunshots at the Soldier Readiness Center, where men and women about to deploy gather for vaccinations and eye exams. It's practically been a motto stitched on their sleeves — "Better to fight the terrorists there than here" — except now they were at home, and there was one of their own, a U.S. officer, jumping up, shouting "God is great" in a language he could barely speak and then opening fire.
For eight years, Americans have waged a Global War on Terrorism even as they argued about what that meant. The massacre at Fort Hood was, depending on whom you believed, yet another horrific workplace shooting by a nutcase who suddenly snapped, or it was an intimate act of war, a plot that can't be foiled because it is hatched inside a fanatic's head and leaves no trail until it is left in blood. In their first response, officials betrayed an eagerness to assume it was the first; the more we learn, the more we have cause to fear it was the second, a new battlefield where our old weapons don't work very well and our values make us vulnerable: freedom, privacy, tolerance and the stubborn American certainty that people born and raised here will not reject the gifts we share.
Even as the President weighs how to fight the wars he inherited, he and the entire U.S. security apparatus will have to figure out how you fight a war against an enemy you can't recognize, much less understand. In that sense, the war on terrorism has left the battlefield and moved to the realm of the mind. The good news is that al-Qaeda's throw weight is much diminished; the bad news is that terrorism is now an entrepreneurial arena, with the Internet as its global recruiting station, attracting the lost, the loners, the guy with a coffee cart on Wall Street buying up hair dye and nail-polish remover to blend into bombs, or the polite army major in uniform who took his time, bought his gun and turned it on his comrades.
In his tribute to the fallen, President Barack Obama invoked a "world of threats that know no borders." Soldiers sacrifice to keep us safe; somehow we failed to keep them safe. It would be grim news for the intelligence community and the Army if they just missed all the warning signs. It would be worse news if they saw but chose to ignore them.
A Whole New War
No one thought the battle between the West and radical Islam was going to be fought like a traditional war, but to the extent that we could, we did. We tightened our borders, hardened the targets, took off our shoes and sent troops and tanks and drones to crush opponents in Afghanistan and take out top al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan. We adapted our laws and intelligence services to make it easier to infiltrate terrorist cells, sniffing their emails, phone calls and Web traffic. The campaign has shown such success in crippling al-Qaeda's ability to deliver a massive blow that the U.K. has just reduced its national threat level.
But the terrorist techniques of even a decade ago are already outmoded. "I used to argue it was only terrorism if it were part of some identifiable, organized conspiracy," says Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. But Hoffman has changed his definition, he says, because "this new strategy of al-Qaeda is to empower and motivate individuals to commit acts of violence completely outside any terrorist chain of command." Every month this year, he notes, there has been a terrorist event — either an act committed or one broken up before it could be carried out. "The nature of terrorism is changing, and Major Hasan may be an example of that," Hoffman argues. "Even if he turns out to have had no political motive, this is a sea change."
If "leaderless resistance" is the wave of the future, it may be less lethal but harder to fight; there are fewer clues to collect and less chatter to hear, even as information about means and methods is so much more widely dispersed. It is more like spontaneous combustion than someone from the outside lighting a match. Senator Joe Lieberman's Homeland Security Committee warned of this threat in a report last year. "The emergence of these self-generated violent Islamist extremists who are radicalized online presents a challenge," the report concluded, "because lone wolves are less likely to come to the attention of law enforcement." At least until they start shooting.
It might help if there were at least agreement on what constitutes terrorism; one government study found 109 different definitions. As far as the FBI is concerned, it counts as terrorism if you commit a crime that endangers another person or is violent with a broader intent to intimidate, influence or change policy or opinion. If Hasan shot people because of indigestion, worker conflict or plain insanity without a larger goal of intimidation or coercion, it was probably just a crime. If, on the other hand, his crime was motivated by more than madness — say, a desire to protest U.S. foreign policy — it was effectively terrorism.
So what are we to make of the free agents who might have never sworn allegiance to a band of jihadist brothers or plotted a conspiracy of violence, just watched some YouTube videos or downloaded some sermons and came away with visions of carnage dancing in their heads? "We have to be careful not to let our definition of terrorism become too broad," said former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff last year. "Particularly when we get to the individual lone wolf, then it really does become hard to distinguish between the person who killed the students at Virginia Tech and the person who might do the same thing simply because they read something on the Internet about bin Laden and that happened to appeal to their psychology." Once everything is terrorism, he warned, then nothing is. But while the motivations of the Virginia Tech gunman seemed perversely personal, Hasan had spent years telling anyone who would listen that the U.S. war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan was immoral.
The Making of a Radical
Hasan was a walking contradiction: the counselor who himself needed counseling; the proud soldier who did not want to fight, at least not against fellow Muslims; the man who could not find a sufficiently modest and pious wife through his mosque's matchmaking machinery but who frequented the local strip club. A man supposedly so afraid of deployment that he launched a war of his own from which he clearly did not expect to return alive. "Everyone is asking why this happened," said Hasan's family in a formal statement, "and the answer is that we simply do not know."
But if this is the new face of terrorism in America, we need better facial-recognition software. Hasan's motives were mixed enough that everyone with an agenda could find markers in the trail he left. For those inclined to see soldiers as victims, he was a symptom of an overstretched military, whose soldiers return from their third and fourth deployments pouring out such pain that it scars their therapists as well. "We've known for the last five years that [deployment to Afghanistan] was probably his worst nightmare," cousin Nader Hasan told Fox News. "He would tell us how he hears horrific things ... That was probably affecting him psychologically."
That diagnosis seemed like sentimental nonsense to people who noted how well Hasan matched the classic model of the lone, strange, crazy killer: the quiet and gentle man who formed few close human attachments but, reported the New York Times, used to chew up food and let his pet parakeet eat it from his mouth; when he rolled over during a nap and accidentally crushed it to death, he visited the bird's grave for months afterward.
But Hasan may be the new terrorist template that fuses psychological damage with jihadist ideology. The most obvious and ominous evidence points to a now familiar pattern: alienated individuals who don't have to graduate from al-Qaeda training camps to embrace their mission and means. When an Army officer is reported to proudly call himself a Muslim first, an American second; when he appears at a public-health seminar with the PowerPoint presentation "Why the War on Terror Is a War on Islam"; when he applauds the killing of a U.S. soldier by a Muslim convert at an Arkansas recruitment center; and when he is caught corresponding with a radical imam in Yemen who has called on all Muslims to kill American soldiers in Iraq, you wonder just how brightly the red lights had to flash before anyone was willing to stop and ask some questions.
Hasan's early life offers few clues to what came later. He was born in Virginia to Palestinian parents who had chased the American Dream from the West Bank to Roanoke. They opened a couple of restaurants and a convenience store and had great hopes for their three sons — which did not include their eldest joining the Army, even if just as a way to get a free education. Hasan graduated from Virginia Tech with honors in biochemistry, then went to medical school, where, an uncle told the Los Angeles Times, he decided to major in psychiatry after he fainted while watching a baby being born.
At that point, his fanaticism did not extend past cheering on his Washington Redskins. He did, however, regularly attend services at the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring, Md., helped at its homeless shelter and even applied to an annual matrimonial center that acts as a kind of matchmaking service. He described himself in his application as "quiet and reserved until more familiar with person. Funny, caring and personable."
"He wanted a woman who prayed five times a day and wears a hijab," the former imam Faizul Khan told the New York Times, "and maybe the women he met were not complying with those things." It was after his parents died that Hasan became more conspicuously devout. At Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he completed his psychiatric training, he was reportedly reprimanded for trying to convert patients to Islam, while castigating those with drug and alcohol issues for their "unholy" behavior. As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan unfolded, he asserted the right of Muslim Americans to conscientiously object to fighting; his relatives claimed he offered to repay the cost of his medical education in exchange for release from his obligations.
The first alarms began to sound while he was still in training. "He was very vocal about being a Muslim first and holding Shari'a law above the Constitution," says an officer who attended the Pentagon's medical school with Hasan but would speak only off the record because his commanders ordered him not to discuss the case. "When fellow students asked, 'How can you be an officer and not hold to the Constitution?,' he'd get visibly upset — sweaty and nervous — and had no good answers." This officer was so disturbed when Hasan gave a talk asserting that the U.S. was waging a "war on Islam" that he challenged the lieutenant colonel running the course. "I raised my hand and asked, 'Why are you letting this go on? This has nothing to do with environmental health,' " which was the actual focus of the course. " 'I'm just going to let him go,' " replied the lieutenant colonel, who had even approved the topic in advance.
"It was a systemic problem," the officer says. "The same thing was happening at Walter Reed."
The vital question for the military and our own security is whether political correctness — or the desire to protect diversity — prevented the Army from recognizing and dealing with a problem in its midst, a problem in plain sight. According to a co-worker, Hasan would not even allow his photo to be taken with female colleagues. "People are afraid to come forward and challenge somebody's ideology," explains Hasan's classmate, "because they're afraid of getting an equal-opportunity complaint that can end careers." NPR reported that top officials at Walter Reed held meetings in the spring of 2008 in which they debated whether Hasan was "psychotic." "Put it this way," an official told NPR. "Everybody felt that if you were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, you would not want Nidal Hasan in your foxhole."
Preacher and Provocateur
Hasan's path began to twist about the time he attended the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Va., one of the largest mosques on the East Coast and home to a charismatic Islamic cleric named Anwar al-Awlaki. Born in New Mexico in 1971 to Yemeni parents and educated at Colorado State University, al-Awlaki was often portrayed as a mainstream, moderate Muslim cleric who asserted that terrorists claiming to be good Muslims had "perverted their religion." But the perception of al-Awlaki shifted as intelligence officials began connecting the dots: they found that he had raised money for Hamas, had met with two of the 9/11 hijackers at his previous mosque in San Diego and had some association with other extremist groups. In April 2001, two 9/11 hijackers worshipped at al-Awlaki's Virginia mosque; the next month, Hasan held his mother's funeral there, though there is no evidence that the two men met.
In 2002, al-Awlaki left the U.S. and eventually returned to Yemen, where his humor, charisma and technological savvy helped him develop a global reputation as an intellectual blood bank for aspiring martyrs. The Fort Dix Six are said to have listened to his sermons, as are some of the Minneapolis youths who traveled to Somalia to join the al-Shabab terrorist group. And last December and January, surveillance of al-Awlaki revealed that he had received as many as 20 e-mails from Hasan.
The FBI-led Washington-area Joint Terrorism Task Force reviewed the transcripts along with the task force's representative at the Pentagon's Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS); they reviewed Hasan's personnel file and concluded there was no need to open an investigation. The exchange was just one of hundreds, maybe thousands, that al-Awlaki was having with people in the U.S. The contents of the e-mails seemed relatively innocuous, inquiries about his legitimate area of research — trying to figure out how Muslims in the military are affected when sent to fight against fellow Muslims. Says a counterterrorism official who spoke on condition of anonymity: "This wasn't Hasan saying, 'Preacher, bless me because I'm about to martyr myself.' "
The Pentagon said it never heard about the e-mails; thus began the finger-pointing. "Once they're assigned," a senior Pentagon official says of DCIS officers, "they work for the task force, not us." FBI Director Robert Mueller has ordered a review of the bureau's knowledge of Hasan to determine whether "any policies or practices should change based on what we learn." Among other challenges will be figuring out how to distinguish real threats from provocative behavior and how to train agents to be confident enough to make that judgment. At this moment, there are hundreds of thousands of people on terrorist watch lists. "When you have that many people," says a senior Democratic Hill source, "unless you're East Germany, you can't keep track of everyone."
A senior counterterrorism official from the Bush Administration says the FBI was very aware of al-Awlaki's profile; Hasan's emails, even if they sounded like academic inquiries, should have "rung bells," he says. "You don't typically think of John Gotti as a guy you'd write a letter to saying, 'I'm very interested in organized crime and how it works.' " After the shootings, al-Awlaki cheered Hasan on his website for doing his jihadist duty — killing soldiers about to be deployed to kill Muslims: "He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people."
And al-Awlaki was not the only red flag. About six months ago, authorities discovered a Web posting in which the writer, "NidalHasan," compared suicide bombers to soldiers who throw themselves on grenades to save their colleagues. A senior Administration official tells TIME that Hasan had other foreign connections as well: "It is clear that he had contacts with individuals overseas who have espoused the use of violence like al-Awlaki. It is unclear whether or not it was anything more than just contacts, or if there was any type of operational engagement. It appears as though Major Hasan was inspired by some of this extremist rhetoric and propaganda. But what we are trying to do is make sure that we don't reach conclusions based on just a preliminary review of information that is available to date. That's why we have to go back in, make sure we scour those files."
Congress is bound to ask, How was it possible that even as his performance was poor, his personnel file was being reviewed and his communications with a radical cleric were being analyzed, Hasan was promoted from captain to major last May and dispatched in July to Fort Hood, the largest active Army base in the U.S.? One explanation is a desperate need for mental-health professionals. With its 50,000 soldiers and 150,000 family members and civilian personnel, Fort Hood has the highest toll of military suicides; posttraumatic-stress-disorder cases quadrupled from 2005 to 2007.
But others are convinced that his religion protected him from stronger action by the Army. "He'd have to murder the general's wife and daughter on the parade ground at high noon in order to get a serious reprimand," says Ralph Peters, an outspoken retired Army lieutenant colonel who now writes military books and a newspaper column. While stressing "there shouldn't be witch hunts" against Muslims in uniform, Peters insists that "this guy got a pass because he was a Muslim, despite the Army's claim that everybody's green and we're all the same." A top Pentagon official admits there may be some truth to the charge. "We're wondering why some of these strange encounters didn't trigger something more formal," he says. "I think people were overly sensitive about Muslims in the military, and that led to a reluctance to say, 'This guy is nuts.' The Army is going to have to review their procedures to make sure someone can raise issues like this."
Pres. Obama's Response
Less than an hour after the shooting began, the Situation Room notified the White House that there had been an event at Fort Hood; Obama was briefed in the Oval Office a half hour later. Reports were all over the place — how many shooters, how many dead. As the day went on, the principals from the White House and Pentagon pushed for clarity as to whether this was part of a broader plot. Obama knew about the al-Awlaki e-mails long before he went to bed that night. "We were looking to see if there might have been any code or anything embedded in that," an official says.
The next morning, Obama ordered all the agencies to do an inventory of their files, collect every scrap they had on Hasan and review how that information had been handled. "We needed to understand what we knew and when we knew it," the official says, "and not to make any preliminary or premature judgments about anything."
Investigators continued to comb Hasan's computer, search his garbage, scrub his phone records. By Saturday, Hasan was awake and talking, though only to his doctors and lawyers. He will face a trial, most likely in a military court, and if convicted, he could become the 16th person sentenced to death under the current military death-penalty system. Ten of the previous 15 had their sentences commuted, and five sit on death row in Fort Leavenworth, Kans.
Meanwhile, the Fort Hood community does what it has had to do all too often: mourn the dead, minister to the living. At least 545 soldiers from Fort Hood have died in Iraq and Afghanistan; now 13 more are gone, ranging in age from 19 to 62. One victim was a newlywed; one was three months pregnant; 19 children were left without a parent. Support groups kicked in, delivering food to the families. Local blood banks were swarmed with donors. The Facebook group Sgt. Kimberly Munley: A Real Hero has close to 24,000 fans and counting.
A President can't go to every memorial service. But this one he had to attend, if only to make sure that the stories got told, the names got spoken — Aaron and Amy, Jason and John, Frederick, Francheska, Juanita, Kham, Libardo, Justin, Russell, Michael. A young President baptized a new Greatest Generation: "We need not look to the past for greatness," he said, "because it is before our very eyes." Our security is their life's work, he said, and peace is their legacy, and freedom their gift. To the great gray sea of soldiers that stood before him, the deaths were a hard reminder of the challenge of protecting all three at the same time.
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Sources: TIME, MSNBC, Google Maps
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