No, this isn’t an article about some dangerous right-wing extremist or even some dangerous left-wing extremist–it’s about giving Congress the information they are looking for regarding the shooting at Fort Hood.
Today’s Washington Post posted an editorial about the difficulties the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has had getting access to documents and witnesses in the Fort Hood shooting investigation.
According to the article:
“The committee’s chairman and ranking Republican, respectively Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (Maine), have taken the dramatic step of subpoenaing the Defense and Justice departments. The committee is looking into what advance warning the Army or others had about the risks posed by the accused Fort Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal M. Hasan.”
The Washington Post points out that the Congressional investigation could easily proceed without interfering with the criminal charges. The goal of the Congressional investigation is different from the goal of the criminal investigation. The Congressional investigation is looking into the incident in order to find ways of preventing future incidents–they are not involved in criminal prosecution.
I have only one idea on how to prevent future incidents–common sense. The information that has come out about Major Hasan since the shooting shows a number of incidents that should have set off alarms. Evidently, those alarms were ignored our of fear of being labeled anti-Muslim.
According to the UK Telegraph on November 8th of last year:
“He (Major Hasan) also told colleagues at America’s top military hospital that non-Muslims were infidels condemned to hell who should be set on fire. The outburst came during an hour-long talk Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, gave on the Koran in front of dozens of other doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington DC, where he worked for six years before arriving at Fort Hood in July.”
He is entitled to his belief that infidels are condemned to hell. The problem is that he made it clear that he put no value on their lives. The shooting at Fort Hood had nothing to do with a lack of laws–it had to do with an unwillingness on the part of the military to see what was right in front of them.