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Tuesday, December 16, 2014

The Unfinished Business of Fort Hood

``````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````` Dec. 11, 2014 7:00 p.m. ET

There has finally been a significant upturn in the case of the 2009 Fort Hood terror attack in Texas that took the lives of 13 Americans—a saga drenched, since its inception, in official lies and evasions. Not to mention the Defense Department’s studious indifference to the fate of the more than two-dozen survivors, many suffering serious wounds, but who discovered themselves ineligible for the Purple Heart and medical benefits given to military personnel injured in combat. Thanks to strong bipartisan support, the House agreed last week to an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2015 that would provide such benefits for Fort Hood’s and other military victims of terror attacks on American soil.

The provision is now given a good chance of passing the Senate. The question remains whether President Obama will veto it as he has, in the past, threatened to do with any such bill.

In the repeated pronouncements of the Defense Department and the office of the president, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan ’s shooting spree at the Soldier Readiness Processing Center—while shouting “Allahu Akbar!”—could not be categorized as a terror attack. Therefore the surviving servicemen and women could not be said to have suffered combat-related wounds.

Army spokesmen declared that Hasan’s assault should be considered a “criminal act” by a single individual. Or, in the classification soon to become famous, a case of “workplace violence”—an infuriating description that would stick, burning, in the throats of Americans with a memory of that day every time they heard it.

Every time they heard it, that is, applied to the bloodbath carried out by Hasan, an Army psychiatrist who carried a card identifying him as a “Soldier of Islam,” and whose jihadist sympathies were unconcealed throughout his Army and medical-school training. Who had delivered lectures to fellow medical students that were so awash in sympathy for the 9/11 terror attacks, and for Osama bin Laden and suicide bombers, that his angered audience left the room. Hasan, who had left a trail of email contacts with jihadist luminaries like al Qaeda recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki and who—despite his rants against the U.S. military, his incendiary speeches, his distinctly undistinguished record, which put him in the lowest 25% of his class—was pushed ahead by supervisors at Walter Reed who managed to discover in him the makings of “a star officer” and one of “unique talents.”

At Fort Hood, this star officer and psychiatrist was known for berating soldiers—patients sent to him for treatment after return from their deployment—as war criminals. Hasan was convicted and sentenced to death in 2013.

Despite last week’s promising House vote on benefits for the Fort Hood survivors, there is no indication of any planned change in the “workplace violence” classification. In the years since the attack, the official reason has been that there was no evidence of a terrorist motivation in Hasan’s assault. Further, that for the government to call it terrorism might leave his prosecution open to charges of prejudice and thus undermine chances of a conviction.

To argue for this rationale is to accept that no terrorist who carried out a plan to murder Americans can be tried for what he clearly did without risk of tainting his trial. It is to accept, as well, the suppression of truth as a core requirement of a successful prosecution.

Now that Hasan has been convicted, there can be no excuse for not changing the classification and calling terrorism by its name. In April, then-White House spokesman Jay Carney , confronted with questions about the “workplace violence” designation, explained that, among other things, Hasan had never deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan and so was “unable to absorb any extremist message.”

In its detachment from reality, this statement is of a piece with numerous others that have distinguished this administration, not least those connected with ObamaCare. Now comes a related twist—the Jonathan Gruber story, in which this once much-praised, much-cited White House consultant and favorite agent for the selling of ObamaCare is now described as someone Mr. Obama and the rest of the Democratic leadership has barely heard of, if at all. Mr. Gruber’s consignment to the status of unremembered nobody was occasioned by the emergence of videotaped commentaries in which he confides that Americans were too stupid to recognize all the evasions and duplicity deliberately built into the health-care bill to ensure its passing.

The Obama administration’s propensity for denying reality has been a conspicuous feature from its beginnings, never more so, perhaps, than in the White House aversion to making any connection between Islam and terrorism. Not for nothing was Janet Napolitano, Mr. Obama’s first Homeland Security head, reduced to telling Der Spiegel in 2009 that rather than use words like terrorism, she favored “man-made disasters.” Denial and determined obfuscation created the famous Benghazi talking points and the false story, sustained for weeks, about a sleazy film insulting to Islam as the cause of the murderous assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

In the case of Nidal Hasan, lies and obfuscation driven by a horror of seeming insufficiently concerned with Muslim sensibilities made it possible for a raging anti-American Islamist to be promoted with honors and ultimately put in a position to fulfill his wish to kill American soldiers.

Every branch of the military delivered its own exhaustive report on the Fort Hood assault. In none was there any mention of the taboo topic of Hasan’s well-known connection with radical Islam.

The denial of reality that led his politically concerned superiors to advance Hasan, and give him glowing performance reviews, is of a piece with the determination to categorize his murderous attack on unarmed members of the U.S. military as a case of “workplace violence.” Both perfectly reflect the values and spirit of the administration.

In the months to come there will be a new candidate for defense secretary. One of the first questions asked during confirmation hearings ought to be whether the murder of those Americans at Fort Hood can be called workplace violence. The answer would tell a lot.

By--- Ms. Dorothy Rabinowitz

Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.

posted by chris # 4:46 AM 0 Comments

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Tuesday, December 16, 2014

The Unfinished Business of Fort Hood

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