Ft. Hood

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:the point is not whether or not the "charities" were legit or not. I am sure we will learn soon enough. point is, obviously, that a major in the us army living in a fleabag apartment who gives that much money to Islamic groups is clearly a man who is very, very religious. just another step in putting together his profile ...

In your previous post, your implication was that the charities were not legitimate. Otherwise you wouldn't have clearly stated that "some" have been found to have links to terror organizations. Making that point is not necessary to show that Hasan is religious. Anyway, I've never seen anyone doubt that he is religious. But, there is nothing wrong with being religious. The main dispute is whether he is a wack job like so many other wack jobs or whether he is a terrorist.

BTW, Hasan was apparently a regular at a strip bar. How does that fit the "profile" of him that you are so eagerly developing? He also seems to have been freaked out by an HIV test.

[Anonymous]

In physics there is something called a thought experiment. I have one in mind, although I don't have the focus to carry it through in detail: Imagine the reaction if Gandhi had walked up to a crowd at some point in his life, pulled out a machine gun, and killed a dozen people. Mightn't people have looked back over his life and found all sorts of strange things he had done that should have alerted people: "How could people not have seen that this guy was too good to be true; they surely should have seen the tensions beneath the surface!"

Please note that I am not trying to imply that there was a dark side to Gandhi, just that one can find, after the fact, all sorts of things that look different in the light of later developments. Clearly Hasan was no Gandhi, and people certainly saw problems far in advance. But things are different in hindsight. The past is much easier to predict than the future.

I am not saying that we should just shrug and forget about it. We need to learn what we can about how to avoid recurrences. But spending too much effort on finding people to blame detracts from that effort. And coming to conclusions before we have all the facts also detracts.