Schieffer on the Hasan SNAFU

What Gov't and Military Often Do - Deal With Problems by Passing Them Off Elsewhere - Was Exposed in a Tragic Way

(CBS)  The President has asked the nation not to jump to conclusions about what happened at Fort Hood, which is usually good advice, but it is also what government officials generally say when the government fouls up.

Good advice or not, I am jumping to an obvious conclusion: This should not have happened. That doctor should not have been at Fort Hood.

I don't care how hard-up the Army is for mental health professionals - a government psychiatrist with bad performance ratings who had been trying to get out of the Army and who had been saying what Dr. Hasan had been saying about the war on terrorism, should not have been shipped off to Fort Hood to give grief counseling.

What do you suppose he was telling the soldiers, that after what they had done they OUGHT to feel bad?

Certainly, no officer with his record would have been allowed to lead soldiers into combat.

Sadly, this shows that the Army still does not take protecting soldiers' mental health as seriously as it does training them to shoot.

And then there is the other part that often happens in government: Don't deal with a problem, shuffle it off to somewhere else. When he had problems at Walter Reed Hospital, the doctor was just packed off to Fort Hood.

Investigators confirm now that someone by his name had been posting messages on the Internet about how suicide bombers are as heroic as American soldiers who fall on grenades to save their comrades.

But the investigators say it is not clear if Dr. Hasan actually wrote those messages.

Based on what we know so far, my question is, do you suppose anyone has even asked him?

[spirittospirit]

Excuse me. What ungodly math are we using?
There are FOURTEEN who died.: Pvt. Francheska Velez was pregnant. The number of murdered is fourteen and not thirteen. There has been no mention of counting the unborn baby who was also killed, who also endured death. This is atrocity upon atrocity. 14, Not 13, died that day. And the shooter should be charged with the baby's death. It is another count of murder.
Do we have to agonize over whether a baby in the womb suffers less, because the baby is unborn? Please, please, do not dishonor the baby like this. It is making me sick to think of it.
There was a legal case, a few years ago, and the woman was pregnant, and the death of the baby along with her mother was counted as a second murder. I'm sorry, I don't remember the circumstances and facts, but I remember noting that it happened, because I was glad to see the truth honored and respect given to the baby. This is a legal precedent. It establishes the unborn baby as a human being. Has everyone forgotten this milestone in the long battle for the unborn to be recognized as human beings?
Was this baby shot, too? Was there an attempt to save the baby's life? Or did the baby smother to death inside the womb? I am imagining that no one knew, in all the confusion. Poor baby. Poor mother. Poor dear good men and women. Woe, oh woe is America. We should be having national mourning. This is a national atrocity. Is it naive, to say that there is something very ominous, in the fact that our nation's response to Michael Jackson's death was much greater than its response to the death of these fourteen innocent victims - virtuous, distinguished servants of our national cause? Has our nation sunk into a daze induced by drugs and pornography, fast food and everyday violence? WAKE UP, AMERICA. WAKE UP, BELOVEDS, WAKE UP!

[50BMS13]

spirittospirit
Good post! Good points! Liberal media is the reason why. Look at Carrie Prejean and Sarah Palin. They may be this or that but they don't deserve to be HATED. Have they done so wrong to be constantly badgered? Why are muslim mullahs aloud to scream hate in New York City daily while the FBI just watch them. Politically correct is killing us. Liberals are for abortion so the Liberal media dare not offend the liberal base by counting 14. The commander in Chief would not dare say this was an act of terror, for it would offend his muslim brothers. Good post. Thanks.

[dadlucas]

let's call it for what it is.a scumbag decides to kill a bunch of people and the media keeps pointing finger at everyone but the stinking coward who shot unarmed people.quit giving this worthless thing its 15 minites of fame.lets worry about the good people that got shot. i'm sick of having its face on ever news casts. you can report about this without having this scums face on our tv.

[KDScott40]

Bob: You're an extraordinarily good journalist, but you're wrong on this one. What you want to do is find more people to blame and create even more victims of this tragedy by shaming them on national media. People in the army are already second-guessing and blaming themselves for this, why do you want to hurt them even more by making them national scapegoats? If you want someone to blame for this tragedy, let's put it all on the shoulders of the guy who pulled the trigger and let the other innocent people blame themselves without adding the public embarrassment that you want to add to them. There are already enough dead, why add more by pushing people to suicide, which is what your public shaming has the potential to do?

[50BMS13]

Bob is right on this one. Heads gotta roll for it. Not the victims heads....the ones that allowed it to happen starting with the Muslim loving administration.

[roach9703]

Murder can never be justified by existential angst.
Shieffer's main point is why a joint Congressional Investigation is a necessity.

[riptide213]

Pathetic terrorist from within, feeble coward, and dejected zealot.

Claiming he was battling racial harassment because of his "Middle Eastern ethnicity" is a rebuff to avoid confronting some deep rooted truths and a repugnant smoke screen pretext.

Once background facts are investigated it will be increasingly obvious that certain danger signs were consistently presented by this embittered Muslim who voluntarily entered and continued to serve in the US military during the easy times, yet when it was his time to endure true hardship of a call to duty, to put service above self; he unmistakably felt more earnest allegiance to personal religious beliefs than his obligation to sworn duty as a military officer and creed as a medical professional.

His government security clearance, post access, and licenses to own a firearm should have been revoked long before this raging outburst of discriminate violence.

Were any risk flags raised or if so just ignored?

Why he was not investigated for disloyal statements and affiliation with potentially unsavory radicals to validate any factors toward termination of security clearance raises serious issues.

Why wasn?t a Security Information File (SIF) established?

Use this profile to reveal, watch, and vet any other latent threats from within the armed services.

Unceremoniously drum out of the military or government any disgruntled tax paid public servants who wish to pursue their own personal exasperated inclinations or indoctrinations against national policy or military good order and discipline.

Fear to challenge, investigate, or proactively keep in check any citizen or public servant for openly extremist and seditious religious or ethnic demeanor is a security Achilles Heel.

External threats pose enough challenges so US leaders must now work even more robustly to reduce trauma from insider threats.

[fie#]

Hasan has simply demonstrated the old Existentialism argument that man can make choices. He chose what to do (although I am sure from a state of mental depression). No mind-controlling terror cell was necessary. The fact of the matter is that he knew a lot. Maybe he was the man who knew too much: about what really went on in our warfare. All we have to do is invade a country at dawn - pick a country any country - and by sundown there will be "insurgents" picking off our boys (wouldn't you do that to an invader?). They don't hate us for our freedoms, they hate us because we make free with their country and kill a lot of innocents in the process. What ever happened to common sense? Hasan must have had a certain idealism and seen himself as an avenger. Look no farther than the latest movie with its heroes and antiheroes, and no more into foreign thought than dozens of well-known 19th century novels with musketeers and Bravehearts. And then, there is, when all else fails, the good old resort to "suicide by cop" when you know you are really in a bad place. To go down with guns blazing, like so many, many Americans. But Hasan gives us a break. We can project the evil outwards onto the Moslems. For we would never harm anyone that way. Not in this country. We who only invade to liberate and to bring our superior way of life to the down-trodden of the earth.

[carwatt]

Nothing less than an inside terrorist attack!

[tjl456]

Bottom line - there were red flags everywhere "for years" by many different people and situations, but for the sake of political correctness 12 solders and 1 civilian are dead.

[roach9703]

You have an excellent point. Judgement must be made on facts, not political convenience.

[tjl456]

Bottom line - there were red flags everywhere "for years" by many different people and situations, but for the sake of political correctness 12 solders and 1 civilian are dead.

[up1284]

Bob Shieffer summed up the Hassan situation in a nutshell. A doctor with the records of Major Hasan should not have been assigned to Ford Hood to give grief counseling. We focus our attention on the war, the battlefield so much that we don't employ the right resources in the right places to take care of the troops when the troops come home. Then there are the comments to blame the Commander In Chief, the President. But the blame falls on the Army, Major Hasan's superiors at Walter Reed. You take a medical doctor a mental health profession with problems and ship him off to a base where he will be exposed to combat troops on a large scale? What sense does that make? This officer should have been taken out of the loop long before he got to Fort Hood. The horror at Fort Hood is a result of substituting quality because of quantity.