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"Right" Idea, Wrong Place, Wrong Time, Wrong Price

Calvin Massey at the Faculty Lounge summarizes an NPR story about how peers and supervisors at Walter Reed Medical Center perceived Major Hasan in years, months, and weeks before he massacred 13 American soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas. At least some officials expressed concern that should Hasan be deployed, he might "engage in precisely the murderous behavior he exhibited at Fort Hood."

The reasons nothing was done? There are three, according to NPR:

First, Walter Reed and most medical institutions have a cumbersome and lengthy process for expelling doctors, involving hearings and potential legal battles. As a result, sources say, key decision-makers decided it would be too difficult, if not unfeasible, to put Hasan on probation and possibly expel him from the program.

Second, some of Hasan's supervisors and instructors had told colleagues that they repeatedly bent over backward to support and encourage him, because they didn't have clear evidence that he was unstable, and they worried they might be "discriminating" against Hasan because of his seemingly extremist Islamic beliefs.

Third, the officials involved in deliberations [official meetings about what to do with respect to the "Hasan problem"] this year reportedly were not aware, as some top Walter Reed officials were, that intelligence analysts had been tracking Hasan's e-mails with at least one suspected Islamic extremist since December 2008.

Let's do some analysis here. Number one is neither an excuse nor a justification; all number one means is that officials knew the system required revision. This hardly exonerates their failure to question its results.

Number three is irrelevant under any reasonable conception of how the world works: knowledge that an authority is conducting an investigation should make one less likely to reach a final conclusion, not more. Put another way, absent knowledge that others were examining and perhaps handling the problem, officials at Walter Reed were under a duty to act.

That leaves number two. Loathsome, shameful, guilty number two.

Full post as published by Nuts & Boalts on November 12, 2009 (boomark / email).