You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (928)

PLAYS: (609)

Revelations that the FBI, the Pentagon and even his medical colleagues were aware of Fort Hood shooting suspect Nidal Malik Hasan's extremist ideology have raised serious questions about the U.S. military's ability to screen, monitor and remove dangerous personnel from its ranks. But far from justifying the discrimination against patriotic American Muslims predictably called for by the usual suspects, the Fort Hood bloodbath should remind Americans that extremisms of all stripes have no place in the armed forces of the United States.

A nation which has chosen to depend on an all-volunteer military must have clear standards for admitting and retaining those courageous few who wish to serve in its name. Needless to say, they should not pose a threat to themselves or their fellow servicemen and women. They should uphold their oath to the Constitution of the United States and its government. And importantly, they should not undermine either American national security objectives or our timeless democratic values by advancing their own.

To be sure, as the always execrable Michelle Malkin fumed in the wake of the Fort Hood slaughter, potential Al Qaeda sympathizers and possibly deranged Muslim extremists like Major Hasan and Sgt. Hasan Akbar must be prevented from entering or quickly weeded out of the American military.

But the danger to America's security at home and goals abroad hardly ends there.

Consider the growing infiltration of neo-Nazi groups within the armed services. In 2006 and again in 2009, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group which monitors racist and right-wing militia groups, concluded:

A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization...

The report quotes Scott Barfield, a Defense Department investigator, saying, "Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members."

That zero-tolerance policy was put in place in the aftermath of the devastating Oklahoma City bombing which killed 168 Americans, the largest death toll from a terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland before 9/11.

Continue reading »

ABC's Brian Ross has a history of bizarre "scoops" (like this one, when he announced that Hillary Clinton had indeed been in the White House the day Monica went down on her knees). And yet, ABC News is still proud to have him as their chief investigative correspondent, for some odd reason.

Now he overreaches on yet another story, this one claiming Nidal Malik Hasan attempted to contact al Qaeda. You heard it all over the news, right? Via Gawker:

ABC News' Brian Ross has a breathtaking record of recklessly inaccurate, overhyped stories that don't live up to the headline. His scoop yesterday about Nidal Malik Hasan's "attempt to reach out to al Qaeda" was one of them.

Ross' report yesterday that Hasan had attempted to "make contact with people associated with al Qaeda" took over the internet yesterday and sparked a furious round of speculation that Hasan's attack was part of an Islamic terrorist plot. The headline, "Officials: U.S. Army Told of Hasan's Contacts with al Qaeda," said it all. The far more mundane truth emerged today in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post: Hasan had communicated via e-mail with Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American cleric living in Yemen who formerly served as the imam of a mosque Hasan had attended in Virginia. What did they talk about? From the Washington Post:

The FBI determined that the e-mails did not warrant an investigation, according to the law enforcement official. Investigators said Hasan's e-mails were consistent with the topic of his academic research and involved some social chatter and religious discourse.

We were confused this morning, because Ross had clearly reported that Hasan had made contact with "people associated with Al Qaeda," and the only contacts that other reporters were confirming were with al-Awlaki, who is, as far as we know, a single person. We called Ross and asked him if there were more "people." No, he told us, his initial report was only in reference to al-Awlaki.

"That's how it was initially described to me by my sources," he says. "Given what they told me, that's all I could say. It's a strange use of the word 'people.' But when pinned down, my sources said it's just al-Awlaki."

A strange use, indeed. How about false, too? Especially because Ross' original story did, in fact, report that al-Awliki was among the "people" Hasan was suspected of having contacted. So he reported that Hasan contacted more than one person associated with al Qaeda, and then named one person that he was suspected of contacting. What he apparently didn't bother to do was "pin his sources down" on exactly what they were saying. The result was a clear suggestion that Hasan had tried to communicate with the al Qaeda network on more than one occasion.

So did he? Al-Awlaki is routinely described by the FBI and others as an al Qaeda supporter, and a fiery inciter of violence against infidels. And he was the imam at the Virginia mosque attended by two of the 9/11 hijackers, as well as Hasan. But while it's clear that Al-Awlaki is a bad guy, what's not clear is whether he's simply a propagandist or someone who actually operates as a part of al Qaeda. It's one thing for Hasan to have sent e-mails to someone who vocally supports al Qaeda, and quite another for him to have sent e-mails to al Qaeda itself, or to operatives actively involved in trying to kill people. Ross told us that, according to his sources, "Al-Awlaki is considered a recruiter," which is how he justified invoking the name of the terrorist network. We'll defer to him on that point.

But without knowing what the e-mails are about, can it really be known that Hasan's communications were "attempts to reach out"? The FBI didn't consider them as such. Ross didn't know the contents of the e-mails when he described them that way, but felt perfectly justified in doing so based solely on the knowledge that Hasan had sent the e-mails.

We asked Ross if he had tried to contact Al-Awlaki in reporting the story:

"Yes."

So you reached out to al Qaeda, then?

"To al Qaeda? No. I reached out to him. Oh. I see what you're saying."

Since we're already seen so much innuendo and the "how do we know whether this guy was a terrorist?" routine from the "get it quickly if not accurately" television news, I thought readers would be interested in a more human slant on the Ft. Hood tragedy:

Reporting from Al Birah, West Bank - When Rafik Ismail Hamad last traveled from the West Bank to visit relatives in America, he was struck by the pressures one of his nephews was facing.

The younger man, an American-born Muslim of Palestinian descent, spoke to his uncle of ethnic taunts by army colleagues. He was haunted by the wartime disabilities of soldiers he treated as an army psychiatrist, Hamad recalled, and was overwhelmed by a growing caseload he felt unable to manage.

On top of that, the uncle said, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had drifted apart from his family; he was a sensitive, solitary man bearing his burdens alone.

Late Thursday, Hamad was home in the West Bank town of Al Birah when he heard the news on television: A shooting spree at Fort Hood, Texas, had left 13 people dead, and Maj. Hasan, wounded and in a coma, was being accused of the killings.

"The whole family is in a state of denial," Hamad said today. "We don't believe he is capable of doing something like that. I was amazed and shocked, because it's not him. He's very quiet, gentle."

"Maybe it built up together -- the harassment, too many patients, the workload, the tragedies his patients brought to him," said the 65-year-old retired real estate broker. "Whatever it was, it must have been big pressure, something terrible he couldn't handle."

[...] Hamad described his nephew as a gentle soul who once, as a young adult, mourned for three months after rolling over during a nap and crushing his pet parakeet. During medical school, the uncle said, Hasan switched his major to psychiatry after fainting at the sight of blood while delivering a baby.

Continue reading »

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1694)

PLAYS: (1009)

Homeland Security Chairman Sen. Joe Lieberman told Fox News' Chris Wallace that he wants the Department of Defense to launch an investigation into the shooting rampage at Ft. Hood. Lieberman said evidence indicates that Major Nidal Malik Hasan was probably a "self-radicalized, homegrown terrorist."

"If the reports that we're receiving of various statements he made, acts he took, are valid, he had turned to Islamist extremism, and, therefore, if that is true, the murder of these 13 people was a terrorist act and, in fact,it was the most destructive terrorist act to be committed on american soil since 9/11," Lieberman said Sunday.

Lieberman wants the Department of Defense to conduct a special investigation to see if the shootings could have been predicted. "While the Army and the FBI are conducting the criminal investigation about exactly what happened and what Dr. Hasan should be charged with, the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense has a real obligation to convene an independent investigation to go back and look at whether warning signs were missed, both the stress he was under, but also the statements that he was making which really could lead people to believe that Dr. Hasan had become an Islamist extremist," said Lieberman.

"A couple of years ago, after a two-year investigation, my committee put out a report that said the new face of terrorism in America would not just be the attacks as 9/11 organized abroad and sending people in here, it would be people within this country, homegrown terrorists, self-radicalized, often over the internet, going to jihadist websites, and there's concern from what we know now about Hasan that, in fact, that's exactly what he was, a self-radicalized home grown terrorist," Lieberman concluded.