Michael Smerconish’s Fort Hood strawman

Michael Smerconish wants you to believe that the Fort Hood massacre is proof that warrantless wiretapping is good and necessary:

HERE’S one thing you’re not hearing in all the coverage of the Fort Hood gunman:

Complaints that the government was reading his e-mail.

No, the outrage is just the opposite – that not only should it have been read – but also acted upon.

Most of the Monday-morning quarterbacking stems from revelations that the alleged Fort Hood shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan, sent as many as 20 e-mails to Anwar al-Awlaki. He’s the imam now based in Yemen who had ties to two, maybe three of the 9/11 hijackers and whom officials have deemed an al Qaeda recruiter. (Al-Awlaki hardly tries to conceal his sympathies to radical Islam. He bragged on his Web site that the murder at Fort Hood was “a heroic act.”)

All of which explains why intelligence authorities were tracking his communications. That’s how the National Security Agency intercepted the e-mails exchanged between the shooter and the imam. And an ABC News report this week indicated that al-Awlaki wasn’t the only connection the alleged gunman had to individuals being tracked by U.S. intelligence.

This case ends the debate.

No it doesn’t.

Despite Smerconish’s assertions, the debate has never been about “wiretapping potential terrorists” versus “not wiretapping potential terrorists.” Rather it’s been about two things: A) What kind of safeguards will be in place to ensure the civil liberties and privacy of innocent, non-terrorist Americans. And B) Whether the Bush Administration violated federal eavesdropping laws when it started its “warrantless wiretapping” program.

On the second debate, the answer is “probably,” but we’ll never get any justice on that score. But the first debate is still alive — and in fact, the Hasan case does nothing, so far at least, to settle it. We know, yes, that the National Security Agency and FBI had intercepted Nidal Hasan’s communications with a radical cleric. But unless I’ve missed something, we don’t know the circumstances of those intercepts. Was it a random Muslim-guy-calling-Muslim-guy pickup? Or did they have specific cause to monitor Hasan? And if they did, did they go through any kind of eavesdropping-warrant process once they knew they had an American citizen in their sites?

What little we know suggests eavesdropping authorities were trying to play by the rules. The eavesdroppers decided they didn’t have enough information to pursue a full-blown investigation. If we care about civil liberties in the country — and that’s kind of the point of this country, isn’t it? — then we have to accept that we can’t make ourselves perfectly safe from harm. Smerconish is right: We should be eavesdropping on terrorists. But he’s wrong to suggest the eavesdroppers should get carte blanche.

“Modern Warfare 2″: Slaughtering civilians is fun!

Hey, maybe there’s a “create your own character” mode where you can make yourself into Nidal Hasan! The New York Times review:

Basically, the player, in the guise of an American commando, can participate in a massacre of unarmed civilians.

The commando has been given the task of infiltrating the inner circle of a terrorist named Makarov. “It will cost you a piece of yourself,” your commander says of the mission. “It will cost nothing compared to everything you’ll save.”

Makarov and his band of killers, including you, are sent to an airport terminal in Moscow. Makarov and the others open fire with heavy-duty machine guns, tearing into a crowd that flees in panic. The terrorists wade through the security checkpoint, driving the screaming civilians before them. Soon the floor is covered with bodies.

It must be pointed out that the entire level is wholly optional. At the very beginning the game asks if you want to skip a potentially offensive scene. Perhaps more interesting, the player does not actually have to kill any civilians; you can watch as your comrades do all the shooting. The player is not forced into combat until all of the civilians are dead and you go up against the police and military forces now surrounding the terminal.

But even though you don’t have to kill any civilians, you can’t save them either. If you go through the scene at all, you will watch them mown down, then crawling for their lives before finally being dispatched.

Even though my politics are decidedly on the dovish side, I’ve been a fan of well-made war movies: Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now. (But not Saving Private Ryan: Good lord, was that movie awful.) Though brutal, at times, in their depiction of battle, I thought that very brutality was in the service of a profound artistic mission: Depicting the awful truth of war, instead of depicting it as  some kind of John Wayne romance. I was disabused of that notion while reading Jarhead, and realizing that Marines see these movies as kind of awesome. It made me a little uncomfortable.

First-person video games, I think, are different. I’m not going to claim moral purity here: I’ve played earlier iterations of the Call of Duty franchise. It’s one thing to be told a story; it’s another to be placed in the position of directly making deeply immoral choices. And I grant you that it’s a virtual world. But still.

A few months back, Jonah Lehrer wrote about how porn works in the brain, and I wonder if these cognitive processes aren’t similar to gaming:

Porn does not cause us to think about sex. Rather, porn causes to think we are having sex. From the perspective of the brain, the act of arousal is not preceded by a separate idea, which we absorb via the television or computer screen. The act itself is the idea. In other words, porn works by convincing us that we are not watching porn. We think we are inside the screen, doing the deed.

If that is how the brain works when gaming, the implications for Modern Warfare 2 are deeply troubling. I’m not the kind of guy to call for a ban. But I won’t be playing the game.

NPR: Army officials thought Nidal Hasan ‘psychotic’

Disturbing report from NPR that Walter Reed Hospital officials actively considered the question of whether Nidal Hasan — the Fort Hood shooter — was “psychotic” long before his killing spree.

So why didn’t officials act on their concerns and seek to remove Hasan from his duties, or at least order him to receive a mental health evaluation? Interviews with these officials suggest that a chain of unrelated events and factors deterred them.

For one thing, 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 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.

And finally, Hasan was about to leave Walter Reed and USUHS for good and transfer to Fort Hood, in Texas. Fort Hood has more psychiatrists and other mental specialists than some other Army bases, so officials figured there would be plenty of co-workers who would support Hasan — and monitor him.

So maybe “political correctness” played a role in all of this — assuming this reporting holds up — but so did good old-fashioned bureaucratic inertia. Walter Reed officials didn’t want to deal with it; and they kind of figured he was about to end up as somebody else’s problem, so why worry?

Maybe Fort Hood couldn’t have been prevented

My friend and nemesis Jim Lakely wants to pin at least some of the blame for the Fort Hood massacre … on the ACLU and its intimidation of the Army into “politically correct” modes of thought.  The glib answer is to suggest that civil rights groups don’t kill people — people kill people. And if the ACLU were so powerful in the ranks of the armed forces, I imagine we would’ve seen gays serving openly by now. It’s kind of a problematic theory.

Less glibly, it sounds like Maj. Nidal Hasan was raising red flags all over the place, essentially rooting on suicide bombers before an audience of Army doctors. But if he wasn’t drummed out of the service after that incident, it seems to me that political correctness isn’t really the Army’s problem — or, at least, not the only one.

As with 9/11, though, the question looms: Why wasn’t this prevented? There will be Congressional hearings, investigations and perhaps some new legislation that will supposedly seal the cracks in our national security infrastructure. But somewhere along the way, it should maybe be considered that large parts of the system worked the way they should’ve — and it still wasn’t enough. Sometimes bad things happen.

I mention this because of today’s Wall Street Journal report on pre-massacre communications between the FBI and the military about Hasan’s calls to a radical cleric:

The content of the pair’s communications didn’t raise red flags because terrorism task-force members checked with the military and found that Maj. Hasan was an Army psychiatrist who conducted research and was working on a master’s degree, FBI officials said.

The FBI checked on Maj. Hasan’s record with the military, but the Pentagon says it wasn’t given information about why those checks were being made. Typically, the FBI isn’t keen to raise suspicions about individuals without solid indications of possible wrongdoing. And in this case, it appears sharing more information would have been up to the FBI’s discretion.

It also isn’t clear whether military officials on those FBI task forces raised concerns to the counterterrorism supervisors they were assigned to serve, or whether the military members sought permission to report directly to the Army on Maj. Hasan — as they would have been required to do under post-9/11 rules on information-sharing. The bureau declined to answer whether such permission was sought.

There is also no way to know whether a tip to the Pentagon would have made a difference.

Notwithstanding the shortcomings, it appears some crucial information was shared in ways it wouldn’t have been before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Maj. Hasan’s communications with Mr. Awlaki were most likely intercepted by the National Security Agency. In either case, that means U.S. foreign-intelligence officials sent the communications to their domestic counterparts at the FBI.

Again: It’s early. We might find that FBI agents were cowed by notions of political correctness. But we might find that they simply didn’t have enough to go on. And that a bad thing happened despite the vigilance of critical parts of our national security infrastructure. It’s happened before. It will most certainly happen again. We can’t stop every bad thing from happening.

Fort Hood: Why Christians can’t be trusted

This is certainly shocking:

“Of course, most U.S. Christians don’t shoot up abortion doctors. Fine. As soon as Christians give us a foolproof way to identify their doctor-killers from their moderates, we’ll go back to allowing them to carry guns. You tell us who the ones are that we have to worry about, prove you’re right, and Christians can once again carry guns. Until that day comes, we simply cannot afford the risk. You invent a doctor-killing-detector that works every time it’s used, and we’ll welcome you back with open arms. This is not Christian-phobia, it is Christian-realism,” – Director of Issues Analysis, Bryan Fischer, at the American Family Association.

Oh wait. Sorry. The quote got a little screwed up. Here’s the real one:

“Of course, most U.S. Muslims don’t shoot up their fellow soldiers. Fine. As soon as Muslims give us a foolproof way to identify their jihadis from their moderates, we’ll go back to allowing them to serve. You tell us who the ones are that we have to worry about, prove you’re right, and Muslims can once again serve. Until that day comes, we simply cannot afford the risk. You invent a jihadi-detector that works every time it’s used, and we’ll welcome you back with open arms. This is not Islamophobia, it is Islamo-realism,” – Director of Issues Analysis, Bryan Fischer, at the American Family Association.

You know what? We absolutely need to be careful when Army officers go around rooting for suicide bombers. It seems increasingly clear the armed forces dropped the ball when it came to the proclivities of Maj. Nidal Hasan. There are fundamentalist extremists Muslims out there — we all lived through September 11 — and we clearly need to be on guard. But there are extremists and fundamentalists in many religions. I doubt Bryan Fischer would appreciate being lumped in with doctor killers. And it wouldn’t be fair to do so. Too bad he doesn’t understand that.

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

Reihan Salam on the Fort Hood shooting

I’ve been at a loss over what to say about the Fort Hood shooting. I think Atrios was on to something yesterday when he wrote “When your first reaction to tragic events is to consider how they might support your politics, it’s time to go for a nice long walk.” Indeed. I was initially tempted this morning to write something like: “When Christians commit murder in politically motivated contexts, it’s an aberration. When Muslims commit murder in politically motivated contexts, it’s time to gird our loins for a clash of the civiliations.” That feels right, but it also feels snarkier than events deserve.

A few months ago, when Scott Roeder killed George Tiller, lots of conservatives urged us not to blame the wider anti-abortion movement for the crimes of one disturbed man. Lots of us on the left — including me — suggested it wasn’t so easy. Now, however, the shoe is on the other foot. Some of the “clash of the civilization” conservatives are making the case that the Fort Hood shootings are exactly what millions and millions of Muslims love to see. I’d rather not believe that. But it’s truly depressing to see all the usual suspects flee to all the usual positions when something catastrophic happens. The sound you just heard? A million knees jerking all at once.

At the Daily Beast, conservative Reihan Salam offers some thoughts worth considering:

Overnight, Twitter feeds and message boards pulsed with anti-Muslim anger. This kind of venting is important to a free society. But it could also be an ominous sign of tensions to come. It is thus no surprise that groups like the controversial Council on American-Islamic Relations have been so quick to condemn the violence. The vast majority of Americans recognize that Hasan doesn’t represent all Muslims, just as the Virginia Tech killer Seung-Hui Cho didn’t represent all Korean-Americans. Yet people who are on the fence about whether Muslims can be trusted could tip over into believing that they can’t.

Hasan’s most important victims are the families who’ve lost loved ones and the soldiers who’ve lost comrades. They deserve our deepest sympathies. Yet Hasan’s other victims are the millions of Muslim Americans who’ve fully embraced American life, and who feel a profound sense of dread whenever innocent people are murdered in the name of Islam.

And the wise James Fallows offers these remarks at his Atlantic blog:

In the saturation coverage right after the events, the “expert” talking heads are compelled to offer theories about the causes and consequences. In the following days and weeks, newspapers and magazine will have their theories too. Looking back, we can see that all such efforts are futile. The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre “mean”? A decade later, do we “know” anything about Columbine? There is chaos and evil in life. Some people go crazy. In America, they do so with guns; in many countries, with knives; in Japan, sometimes poison.

We know the emptiness of these events in retrospect, though we suppress that knowledge when the violence erupts as it is doing now. The cable-news platoons tonight are offering all their theories and thought-drops. They’ve got to fill time. I wish they could stop. As the Vietnam-era saying went, Don’t mean nothing.

Fort Hood

Good lord. According to MSNBC, there were at least three shooters. One of them was a major. This is a tragic and horrifying story on the face of it: Eleven killed and 31 wounded. But the first details suggest the story is going to get scarier and more discomfiting.

Update: CNN suggests one gunman, with two other soldiers detained as suspects.