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.

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?

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.