Now They Tell Us: "You Don't Want Hasan in Your Foxhole"

It looks like Jihadist Nidal Malik Hasan had his teachers, colleagues, and superiors over a barrel. Ain't PC just grand?

From Daniel Zwerdling at NPR:

Starting in the spring of 2008, key officials from Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences held a series of meetings and conversations, in part about Maj. Nidal Hasan, the man accused of killing 13 people and wounding dozens of others last week during a shooting spree at Fort Hood. One of the questions they pondered: Was Hasan psychotic?

"Put it this way," says one official familiar with the conversations that took place. "Everybody felt that if you were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, you would not want Nidal Hasan in your foxhole."

Yet, Hasan was about to be deployed to give psychiatric care to American warriors. Appalling.

Deeply Troubling, Schizoid Behavior

When a group of key officials gathered in the spring of 2008 for their monthly meeting in a Bethesda, Md., office, one of the leading — and most perplexing — items on their agenda was: What should we do about Hasan?

Hasan had been a trouble spot on officials' radar since he started training at Walter Reed, six years earlier. Several officials confirm that supervisors had repeatedly given him poor evaluations and warned him that he was doing substandard work.

Both fellow students and faculty were deeply troubled by Hasan's behavior — which they variously called disconnected, aloof, paranoid, belligerent, and schizoid. The officials say he antagonized some students and faculty by espousing what they perceived to be extremist Islamic views. His supervisors at Walter Reed had even reprimanded him for telling at least one patient that "Islam can save your soul."

Exactly how low were their standards? This guy wouldn't last a day as a receptionist in the office of any doctor that I know.

[P]sychiatrists and officials who are familiar with the conversations, which continued into the spring of 2009, say they took a remarkable turn: Is it possible, some mused, that Hasan was mentally unstable and unfit to be an Army psychiatrist?

But they still assigned brave soldiers in mental and physical pain to Hasan for "treatment." Nightmare material. Horrible.

One official involved in the conversations had reportedly told colleagues that he worried that if Hasan deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, he might leak secret military information to Islamic extremists. Another official reportedly wondered aloud to colleagues whether Hasan might be capable of committing fratricide, like the Muslim U.S. Army sergeant who, in 2003, killed two fellow soldiers and injured 14 others by setting off grenades at a base in Kuwait.

So why didn't officials act on their concerns and seek to remove Hasan from his duties, or at least order him to receive a mental health evaluation? And why was he about to get shipped to Afghaistan or Iraq to treat seriously distressed service men and women?

Good questions.

Zwerdling offered some possible explanations:

For one thing, Walter Reed and most medical institutions have a cumbersome and lengthy process for expelling doctors, involving hearings and potential legal battles. As a result, sources say, key decision-makers decided it would be too difficult, if not unfeasible, to put Hasan on probation and possibly expel him from the program.

Focusing for just a moment on the concept of "unfeasible," it isn't difficult to speculate about the sound of the wheels humming in the brains of that psychiatric team: Think what would happen when lawsuits started to fly. / The Army's priority is to keep that multiculturalism thing going. And Hasan is not from just any old culture. / How feasible will it be to hassle a guy named Hasan when the commander-in-chief's name is Hussein? Who bows to the monarch of Saudi Arabia. And who spent his formative years as "a street kid" in a country with the largest Muslim population on the planet, where he studied the Koran in school, and later grew up to describe the Muslim call to prayer as "one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset" (see the report in the New York Times). Oh, and who had a Muslim grandfather and stepfather. A commander-in-chief who wants to give foreign Islamic terrorists U.S. Constitutional rights and have captured enemy combatants Mirandized on the battlefield. Who appointed an attorney general whose law firm defended Islamic terrorists. Etc.

Second, some of Hasan's supervisors and instructors had told colleagues that they repeatedly bent over backward to support and encourage him, because they didn't have clear evidence that he was unstable, and they worried they might be "discriminating" against Hasan because of his seemingly extremist Islamic beliefs.

See Reason #1 again. Teachers and supervisors had been making excuses for Hasan and letting him slide for so long that it had become just about impossible to back out. For years, no one had had told Hasan that he wasn't cut out for psychiatry. Like Charles Krauthammer pointed out, political correctness is both immoral and dangerous.

Third, the officials involved in deliberations this year reportedly were not aware, as some top Walter Reed officials were, that intelligence analysts had been tracking Hasan's e-mails with at least one suspected Islamic extremist since December 2008.

Back to Reason #1 again. Hearings and potential legal battles. In a political and working environment in which the only correct answer is that Islam is the religion of peace and the U.S. is the world aggressor who should be apologizing to "victimized" Muslims in danger of experiencing "backlash." And, as Charles Krauthammer did not point out, political incorrectness, however moral, also can be dangerous. Especially to one's career and livelihood.

And finally, Hasan was about to leave Walter Reed and USUHS for good and transfer to Fort Hood, in Texas. Fort Hood has more psychiatrists and other mental specialists than some other Army bases, so officials figured there would be plenty of co-workers who would support Hasan — and monitor him.

In other words, "He's not our problem anymore. Let Fort Hood deal with him."

Zeidling and NPR named the names of participants in the spring meeting and subsequent conversations:

• John Bradley, chief of psychiatry at Walter Reed;
  
• Robert Ursano, chairman of the Psychiatry Department at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS);
  
• Charles Engel, assistant chair of the Psychiatry Department and director of Hasan's psychiatry fellowship;
  
• Dr. David Benedek, another assistant chairman of psychiatry at USUHS;
  
• psychiatrist Carroll J. Diebold;
  
• and Scott Moran, director of the psychiatric residency program at Walter Reed, according to colleagues and other sources who monitor the meetings.

I shudder that these psychiatrists' buried concerns about Hasan, now resurrected, will support any insanity defense brought up in his favor, serving to bury Americans' outcry against terrorism and treason, making us less safe.

And I would be remiss--even politically correct--if I did not point out that these doctors' unrecorded concerns about Hasan also speak volumes about the kind of medical attention that, speaking in practical terms, they were willing to consider adequate for Hasan's patients. When push came to shove and these physicians had to weigh their concerns on the political and career balance, assuring effective medical care by a caring physician for some of our brave soldiers at Walter Reed and at Fort Hood turned out to be a feather being weighed against a brick, that brick being involvement in messy lawsuits and a possible avalanche of ill will directed at those doctors, against a backdrop of headlines and editorials, talking heads, and public radio opinion pieces portraying America as racist and intolerant rather than properly wary and, quite reasonably, intent on survival.

The lesson for the Walter Reed psychiatrists and officers who couldn't believe their lying eyes is one that all America must learn.

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