Focusing on Fort Hood Killer's Beliefs Is an Easy Out to Avoid the Deeper Reasons for the Massacre

By Mark Ames, AlterNet. Posted November 6, 2009.

All of this violence and despair led Fort Hood's commander, Lt. Gen. Rick Lynch, to build a post-traumatic stress disorder complex called the Resiliency Campus, featuring a Spiritual Fitness Center for soldiers to meditate, and a Cognitive Enhancement Assistance Center. As though a spiritual fitness workout routine could resolve the underlying cause of why a Resiliency Campus was built in the first place.

If the government really were concerned about all the suicides and PTSD cases, it could have prevented Hasan's deadly mission before it happened. It would have been easy: Hasan had pleaded with his superiors not to be sent to Iraq, where he was scheduled to be deployed, but his requests were denied.

Right-wing bloggers such as Michelle Malkin, and some mainstream outlets, have seized on reports emerging that Hasan supposedly voiced opinions sympathetic to suicide bombers.

But if he was an al-Qaida sleeper-cell suicide bomber, it makes no sense why he would, a) argue with fellow soldiers that the wars are wrong and we should withdraw; and b) that he tried to get out of being deployed to Iraq. The 9/11 terrorists did their best to "blend in" and pretend they were as American as apple pie, because the point is not to draw any attention to yourself if you're a terrorist planning to suicide bomb a military base.

Moreover, the timing of his shooting, the day before he was to be sent off, shows that his desperation had reached the limit. What this suggests is that the massacre could have been avoided if Hasan's objections were taken into account.

Hasan's opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars puts him where the majority of Americans are today. And he's not the first soldier at Fort Hood to protest the war. Desertion rates have soared since the Iraq invasion, and Fort Hood has had some high-profile objectors making the news this year, such as Spc. Victor Agosto, who was court-martialed in August after he refused to go to Afghanistan, and Sgt. Travis Bishop, who filed for conscientious objector status after serving in Iraq for 14 months.

Fort Hood was famous as the site of one of the first protests against the Vietnam War in 1965, when the so-called Fort Hood Three refused to be shipped off on the grounds that the war was wrong and illegal.

Three years later, the movement expanded: hundreds of African-American GIs protested plans to deploy them to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, and 43 were court-martialed. It was a heroic act: U.S. troops and cops staged one of the bloodiest police-on-citizen episodes in modern history.

In 1971, the Fort Hood United Front, made up of soldiers from the base, marched into Killeen even though the city refused to grant them a permit; hundreds were arrested.

Today, if you read through some of the forums out of Fort Hood, the anti-war mood is clearly strong and clearly a problem for the authorities. So they'll do their best to paint Hasan as a Muslim loon. The right wing has been trying for years now to equate opposition to the wars with pro-terrorist, anti-American sentiment, and by the poll numbers today, that would make most Americans anti-American terrorists.

You can already see the dark, rank heart of the American Soul in anonymous messages posted on underground right-wing sites such as Free Republic, a few of which are posted below:

Why is anyone surprised?

We already have a DIRTY MOSLEM TRAITOR in the Oval Office.

What's one more moslem piece of garbage?

* * *

[Quoting a previous posting] **If you are Islamic, you may not serve in our military. Period.**

I'm getting closer to:

If you are Islamic, you may not serve in our military live in this country.

Period.

* * *

I'm getting closer to:

If you are Islamic, you may not live.

* * *

The story is still fresh, and there's a lot we don't know, and there are still a lot of conflicting reports and confusion.

Since Hasan will be tried in a military court, the American public will only learn whatever the military wants us to learn. And to a nation slipping deeper into its own amnesiac fog, the last thing we want to learn are the painful, threatening truths.

See more stories tagged with: afghanistan, walter reed, rage murder, ft. hood, nidal malik hasan

Read more of Mark Ames at eXiledonline.com. He is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond.

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