An American Lion

Fort Hood Memorial for 1st Cavalry Division Fallen Soldiers

Yes, it WAS a terrorist attack:

U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case told ABC News.

It is not known whether the intelligence agencies informed the Army that one of its officers was seeking to connect with suspected al Qaeda figures, the officials said.

One senior lawmaker said the CIA had, so far, refused to brief the intelligence committees on what, if any, knowledge they had about Hasan’s efforts.

CIA director Leon Panetta and the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, have been asked by Congress “to preserve” all documents and intelligence files that relate to Hasan, according to the lawmaker.

On Sunday, Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) called for an investigation into whether the Army missed signs as to whether Hasan was an Islamic extremist.

“If Hasan was showing signs, saying to people that he had become an Islamist extremist, the U.S. Army has to have a zero tolerance,” Lieberman told Fox News Sunday.

Investigators want to know if Hasan maintained contact with a radical mosque leader from Virginia, Anwar al Awlaki, who now lives in Yemen and runs a web site that promotes jihad around the world against the U.S.

In a blog posting early Monday titled “Nidal Hassan Did the Right Thing,” Awlaki calls Hassan a “hero” and a “man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people.”

According to his site, Awlaki served as an imam in Denver, San Diego and Falls Church, Virginia.

The Associated Press reported Sunday that Major Hasan attended the Falls Church mosque when Awlaki was there.

The Telegraph of London reported that Awlaki had made contact with two of the 9/11 hijackers when he was in San Diego.

Now, Hasan may not have been organized into a terrorist organization, but the attack he carried out was an act of violence in order to make a political statement, and that makes him a terrorist and his act a terrorist act against the United States. I said this on the day it happened and I knew then that there would be an attempt to claim that it wasn’t an act of terrorism, using the phony benchmarks of intellectual dishonesty employed to prop up a political viewpoint that doesn’t take these things seriously enough. If there wasn’t a terrorist threat to this country, and given all that went on during the Bush Administration, then there would be hundreds of former officials from that administration in jail right now now, wouldn’t there? Think that will happen? No, of course not. Hence, we need to reacquaint ourselves with the risks we face. This was a wake-up call, one we had better heed.

Anything that has the name “Brian Ross” attached to it should be read with a healthy dose of skepticism. If this information is true, it changes how we must deal with those who are ready to take up arms against innocent people and commit terrorist acts. While it is true that you can’t stop terrorists, you can hold people accountable for not doing a better job of dealing with someone like Hasan, as appears to be the case here.

It’s now time to heal the victims, deal with Hasan as a terrorist, and figure out why our government failed to deal with this man appropriately. Fire the people who passed the buck and did not do their job. Getting this fixed, and then applying these lessons learned to other examples that might be serving in the ranks or on the periphery is critical.

Finally, we must address the fact that Islam itself had nothing to do with what happened here. There are over a billion people who belong to this religion, and they should not be singled out or mistreated because of Hasan’s despicable actions. Islam is the marketing strategy, not the reason for the extremism practiced by a miniscule number of criminal fanatics. They could just as easily have chosen Scientology or Buddhism, but they went Medieval because that’s where all of the blood flowed. I can go back and come up with a Catholic fundamentalism that would justify everything that radical Islam supposedly justifies, and I wouldn’t even have to bring up the Spanish Inquisition.

Freedom of religion is a cornerstone of American freedom, and that freedom should never be challenged. Ignore the ignorant screechings of whoever says you cannot follow the Muslim faith and be loyal to the United States. That’s what an uninformed kneejerk reaction looks like.

Hasan perverted the Islamic faith to justify his own inability to deal with the responsibility he was handed and the career he had chosen. Islam became the excuse, not the road map.

Update on Monday, November 9, 2009 by Norman Rogers

I would like to add this. There is clearly something wrong with the image of Hasan as a devout Muslim, although you have to give him credit for finding a strip club that didn’t have a license to serve patrons alcohol. A few sips of light beer won’t get you into hell, will it? I hope not. Seriously, though. He has emotional and social problems that go well beyond his religious issues:

Starz is a strip club located just down the road from the main gate entrance to the Fort Hood Base. It does not serve alcohol, but customers bring their own beer and liquor and buy ice buckets and mixers at the club.

Hasan sat at a table in the back corner of the club, to the left of the stage on which strippers dance around a pole, employees said.

Jennifer Jenner, who works at Starz using the stage name Paige, said Hasan bought a lap dance from her two nights in a row. She said he paid $50 for a dance lasting three songs in one of the club’s private rooms on Oct. 29 and Oct. 30.

“I remembered his face because it was the first lap dance I [gave] to a customer while working here,” she said. “When I saw his face [Friday] on TV, I jumped out of bed, I knew it was him.”

Jenner, 31, said Hasan was dressed casually both nights he came to the club - in jeans and a T-shirt the first night and then wearing a baseball cap the next. She recalled that he arrived at about 6:30 p.m. and stayed until 2 a.m. She said he brought in a six pack of light beer, took only a few sips from one can and gave the rest to the strippers.

“He preferred the blondes,” said Jenner, whose hair was dyed blond at the time. “He said he was a medic and that he was being deployed soon, but mostly he wanted to ask us questions.”

“He asked us why we were working at the strip club, if we liked the lifestyle, if we had any kids,” she said. “It was right before Halloween so he asked what our kids were dressing up as. He just wanted to know a lot about us.”

Jenner said she asked Hasan why he liked coming to Starz instead of another of the roughly half a dozen other clubs nearby, all about an 8-minute drive from the Army base.

“I like it here because no one I work with is here,” she said Hasan replied.

At least now we know how he was spending some of his money, since he wasn’t spending it on rent or a fancy car. Anyone who asks a stripper about her children is weird. It’s nice to have a conversation, and if kids come up, fine. But a grown man who sits in the back of a strip club and asks a stripper what her kid is going as for Halloween is a stumbling freak show.