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Major Hassan gave away all his worldly goods, walked into a building at Fort Hood in Texas and killed 13 fellow soldiers. What is unsettling about this incident is that he is a psychiatrist who apparently was inspired by terroristic propaganda. The other thing that bothers me is the Army knew ahead of time Hassan’s Muslim beliefs were a problem with his dealing with potential deployment to Iraq. Did something trigger him to become a murderer for Islam?

The Army was aware that over the past few years Hassan had been emailing Anwar al-Awlaki, a Muslim cleric who asserted terrorists claiming to be good Muslims had “perverted thier religion.” He was raising money for Hamas, had met with some of the 9/11 hijackers and was associated with extremist groups. When al-Awlaki left the United States, Hassan stayed in touch. The Pentagon has reported it never knew about these emails. FBI director Robert Mueller has ordered an investigation to review the bureau’s knowledge of Hassan. Agents need to be better trained on how to be confident enough to make a judgement call on terrorism within the government agencies or the population of the U.S. There are hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens who are on the terrorist watch lists right now.

Major Hassan was born in the U.S., raised by parents who came here to improve their lives. On his website he posted that he compared suicide bombers to soldiers who threw themselves onto grenades to save their comrades. A top Pentagon official said he was surprised that some of the encounters Hassan had with certain individuals didn’t trigger something. People have to realize they need not be so sensitive about Muslims in the military. The Army will need to review their procedures to make sure issues like this are not raised again.

President Obama has ordered all the agencies to do an inventory of their files to collect every scrap of information previously gathered about Hassan and see how that information had been handled. This should have been done a lot sooner. Perhaps those 13 soldiers would still be alive, their families would not be greiving, and Major Hassan would not be considered a terrorist. Currently he is under heavy guard in a hospital, reportedly paralysized from the waist down. If given a military trial he would more than likely be sentenced to death. If this is what he wanted from the beginning, why didn’t he just write a note and commit suicide? Only Hassan knows and I don’t think he will be talking anytime soon.