The Army finds someone to blame for Fort Hood massacre (hint: it’s not George Casey, it’s not Barack Obama, it’s not George W. Bush)

Charles T. writes:

The Wall Street Journal has article concerning last year’s shooting at Fort Hood. The article mentions that six to eight officers may be disciplined. It says:

” Senior Army officials said the decision to punish so many officers reflects the military’s belief that the November assault, which killed 13 people at the Army base in central Texas, could have been prevented if Maj. Nidal Hasan’s superiors had alerted authorities to his increasing Islamist radicalization.”

Yes, this is true, but would senior officers have listened if Hasan’s supervisors had taken action against him in order to have him removed from service? The Army needs to review—and scrap—it’s own politically correct culture as well. The most effective way to have prevented this was to never allow a Muslim to join our military. We are currently fighting them.

Also, from the article: “The officials said that as many as eight officers could ultimately be censured over Hasan, mostly with letters of reprimand that effectively end their military careers.”

The letters of reprimand are deserved. However, if this is all the Army does, if the Army does not scrap the politically correct attitudes which have infested the military, then the Army itself deserves a letter of reprimand. Further, if the Army does not scrap political correctness, then nothing has changed; the unchanged institutional attitudes will allow this to happen again in the future.

The officers who were in Hasan’s chain of command were afraid of being cashiered if they reported Hasan, so they—in serial fashion—did not remove Hasan—even though there were complaints about him. Hasan eventually goes on a rampage with the shootings and the supervisory officers get the letter or reprimand. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Better to do the right thing and get fired than keep quiet, hope nothing happens, only to find out that soldiers die because of this, and you lose your career because you were afraid of political correctness.

I once had a supervisor who stated numerous times: ” Better to be hung for being a ram, than being a lamb.”

LA replies:

Well, well, well. Does this mean the Army is rejecting George Casey’s idea that the mass murder was better than removing Hasan and thus harming diversity? No, it would appear not, since, as you point out, the individuals are being reprimanded without there being any change in the tacit policy those individuals were implicitly following.

So this looks like a Breaker Morant situation in reverse: They’re being punished for following a tacit but not officially ordered policy NOT to take action to defend the Army from enemies.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 11, 2010 10:19 AM | Send