Suppose that on Nov. 4, 2009—the day before he would open fire on his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, killing 13 and wounding 30—Major Nidal Malik Hasan had been arrested by military police and charged with intent to commit acts of terrorism. Where would his case stand today?
My guess: a public uproar, complete with exacting doubts about the strength of the evidence against him. This would be followed by sage lamentations about how a "Christianist" military had indicted a patriotic Muslim-American simply for having religious scruples about the justice of our wars. Further down the line one can imagine a Pentagon apology, a book contract, a speaking tour.
This scenario is worth thinking about on news that as many as eight officers, most of them doctors at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, will be censured for failing to monitor, supervise and discipline Maj. Hasan properly as his behavior became increasingly suspicious. The censures will likely bring the officers' military careers to an end. Whether they'll do anything to change the mentality that permitted Maj. Hasan's career to proceed unchecked until he brought it to its ghastly conclusion is another question.
Three salient facts stand out about Maj. Hasan's case. One is that there was no shortage of available evidence prior to the Nov. 5 attack of his militantly Islamist inclinations. Among other details: An ABC story mentions that he once told his supervisor at Fort Hood that "she was an infidel who would be 'ripped to shreds' and 'burn in hell' because she was not Muslim."
Nor was there any shortage of opportunities for the military to put an end to Maj. Hasan's career. He received poor performance evaluations. His colleagues feared he was psychotic and could be a risk to fellow soldiers if deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Nothing would have been simpler for the Army than to pass him over for promotion and push him out the door.
This raises the third salient fact, which is that the Army failed to act. Why?
You won't find much of an answer in the Defense Department's "Lessons from Fort Hood" report, published last month. The report faults "some medical officers" for failing "to apply appropriate judgment and standards of officership with respect to the alleged perpetrator." But it fails to explore just why there was such a failure of officership to begin with when all the lights were blinking red.
Instead, the report dwells at soporific length on how the Army can improve its monitoring mechanisms, such as in Recommendation 2.1: "Develop a risk assessment tool for commanders, supervisors and professional support service providers to determine whether and when DoD personnel present risks for various types of violent behavior."
Creating "risk-assessment tools" is the kind of thing all bureaucracies excel at: It's the proverbial nail for the guy with the hammer. But the core problem exposed by the trajectory of Maj. Hasan's career is less about systems—the protocols by which Colonel X may authorize Captain Y to interface with task force Z—than it is about culture. Or, to be more specific, the intersection of two cultures: the Islamist culture in which Maj. Hasan was radicalized, and the military culture in which his lunatic views went unchallenged.
Much has been said and written about the first culture. About the second, I'm not the first to point out that the Fort Hood report never once mentions the word "Islam." There's a reason for that. Melting-pot institutions like the U.S. military prefer not to dwell too much on the particulars of a soldier's culture: Much of their purpose is to substitute personal belief with common standards of behavior. What a soldier might think about the afterlife is his own affair.
No wonder the Army was uniquely ill-equipped to deal with a problem like Maj. Hassan. Its unease with the issue could only have been compounded by past experience with Muslim soldiers suspected of Islamist sympathies.
In 2003, Capt. James Yee, a Muslim chaplain serving in Guantanamo, was arrested on suspicion of sedition and espionage. Eventually the charges were dropped, officially because of "national security concerns that would arise from the release of the evidence." The political fallout was swift. Sens. Ted Kennedy and Carl Levin demanded a full investigation. "This incident," wrote one terminally outraged blogger, "is particularly noxious at a time when we need to reassure patriotic Muslim-Americans that they are not going to come under clouds of suspicion for their faith or their identity—especially Muslims who are actually serving this country in uniform."
Capt. Yee went on to write a book and cast a nominating ballot for Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention.
In another life, something similar may have been Maj. Hasan's fate. In another life, eight officers could be under a cloud for casting aspersions on him based only on his identity and beliefs. In another life, too, 13 men and women would be with us today. That they are not reflects more than the failure of eight fall guys. It is a failure, by people far more senior, to heed a more fundamental military command. It's called Know Thine Enemy.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A17
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