Jan 27 2010
Reaction to DoD’s Ft Hood Massacre Report
“The Vulcan Neck Pinch is not half as powerful as the Vulcan Groin Kick, but it’s more politically correct” – Star Trek
Summary
Following the release of the Department of Defense’s report on the Ft. Hood tragedy, there has been ample criticism in the press regarding how DoD handled the situation and the resulting conclusions of the report. Below you will find an email alert that was sent out by Act! for America, an organization started by a Lebanese immigrant that fled her homeland during that nation’s long civil war and is dedicated to rooting out anti-Israeli and anti-American media bias. Both the introduction and the article that it references are opinion pieces and both make valid points about the report and the colossal disaster of management that led to the rampage.
The Email
Ft. Hood Jihadist Massacre Report – “Gutless and Shameful”
How bad is the cancer of political correctness in the Defense Department?So bad that the 86 page report on the Ft. Hood jihadist massacre mentions “Islam” or any of its derivatives only once—in a footnote.
So bad that CNN commentator Jack Cafferty called it a “joke.”
Unfortunately, the only ones laughing are the Islamists.
They must be looking at our military and political leadership and thanking Allah for their good fortune. It’s easy to envision discussions among Islamists where they tell each other “surely Allah is with us; the infidel leaders are so blind and stupid they won’t even acknowledge who is fighting them!”
Ralph Peters’ column below is RIGHT ON POINT!
We believe American outrage at this suicidal level of political correctness is only going to grow. Let us resolve together to make 2010 the year that “main street America” shouted back at Washington that we’ve had enough!!
Hood Massacre Report Gutless and ShamefulBy RALPH PETERS
January 16, 2010
There are two basic problems with the grotesque non-report on the Islamist- terror massacre at Fort Hood (released by the Defense Department yesterday):* It’s not about what happened at Fort Hood.
* It avoids entirely the issue of why it happened.
Rarely in the course of human events has a report issued by any government agency been so cowardly and delusional. It’s so inept, it doesn’t even rise to cover-up level.
“Protecting the Force: Lessons From Fort Hood” never mentions Islamist terror. Its 86 mind-numbing pages treat “the alleged perpetrator,” Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, as just another workplace shooter (guess they’re still looking for the pickup truck with the gun rack).
The report is so politically correct that its authors don’t even realize the extent of their political correctness — they’re body-and-soul creatures of the PC culture that murdered 12 soldiers and one Army civilian.
Reading the report, you get the feeling that, jeepers, things actually went pretty darned well down at Fort Hood. Commanders, first responders and everybody but the latest “American Idol” contestants come in for high praise.
The teensy bit of specific criticism is reserved for the “military medical officer supervisors” in Maj. Hasan’s chain of command at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. As if the problem started and ended there.
Unquestionably, the officers who let Hasan slide, despite his well-known wackiness and hatred of America, bear plenty of blame. But this disgraceful pretense of a report never asks why they didn’t stop Hasan’s career in its tracks.
The answer is straightforward: Hasan’s superiors feared — correctly — that any attempt to call attention to his radicalism or to prevent his promotion would backfire on them, destroying their careers, not his.
Hasan was a protected-species minority. Under the PC tyranny of today’s armed services, no non-minority officer was going to take him on.
This is a military that imposes rules of engagement that protect our enemies and kill our own troops and that court-martials heroic SEALs to appease a terrorist. Ain’t many colonels willing to hammer the Army’s sole Palestinian-American psychiatrist.
Of course, there’s no mention of political correctness by the panel. Instead, the report settles for blinding flashes of the obvious, such as “We believe a gap exists in providing information to the right people.” Gee, really? Well, that explains everything. Money well spent!
Or “Department of Defense force protection policies are not optimized for countering internal threats.” Of course not: You can’t stop an internal threat you refuse to recognize.
The panel’s recommendations? Wow. “Develop a risk-assessment tool for commanders.” Now that’s going to stop Islamist terrorists in their tracks.
The Fort Hood massacre didn’t reflect an intelligence failure. The intelligence was there, in gigabytes. This was a leadership failure and an ethical failure, at every level. Nobody wanted to know what Hasan was up to. But you won’t learn that from this play-pretend report.
The sole interesting finding flashes by quickly: Behind some timid wording on pages 13 and 14, a daring soul managed to insert the observation that we aren’t currently able to keep violence-oriented religious extremists from becoming chaplains. (Of course, they’re probably referring to those darned Baptists . . .)
To be fair, there’s a separate, classified report on Maj. Hasan himself. But it’s too sensitive for the American people to see. Does it even hint he was a self-appointed Islamist terrorist committing jihad? I’ll bet it focuses on his “personal problems.”
In the end, the report contents itself with pretending that the accountability problem was isolated within the military medical community at Walter Reed. It wasn’t, and it isn’t. Murderous political correctness is pervasive in our military. The medical staff at Walter Reed is just where the results began to manifest themselves in Hasan’s case.
Once again, the higher-ups blame the worker bees who were victims of the policy the higher-ups inflicted on them. This report’s spinelessness is itself an indictment of our military’s failed moral and ethical leadership.
We agonize over civilian casualties in a war zone but rush to whitewash the slaughter of our own troops on our own soil. Conduct unbecoming.
Origins
The article from Ralph Peters appeared January 16th, 2010 in the New York Post and can be found here. The DoD report on the massacre, entitled ‘Protecting the Force: Lessons from Ft. Hood’, which is a very large .pdf file and will be tough to download unless you use broadband service, is here.
Evaluation
While MOAA as an organization has not taken a stance on the DoD report, Battle of the Bilge found much to agree with in the New York Post article. Although the article under represents the recommendations of the panel, the general theme that political correctness and the failure of so many people that could have stopped this from ever happening is undeniable. The statement that there were gigabytes of intelligence data that were missed or ignored is spot on. Nidal Hasan was a radical Islamic extremist and his actions were motivated by his religious beliefs, but our nation and our military have been ingrained with the concept of tolerance that sometimes makes us blind to obvious warning signs.
It is true that the word Islam is only mentioned once and in a footnote, and it is also true that ‘Muslim’ does not appear anywhere in the report. But then again neither do ‘Christian’, ‘Buddhist’, ‘Hindu’ or ‘Atheist’. It is standard run of the mill PC from DoD reports and in most cases, it is prudent to exclude specific groups. But we are not at war with nations that are composed primarily of those religions. Like it or not, we are at war with Islam, or rather Islam is at war with us. It is not the entire population of Muslims, some are very much on our side in this civilization clash. But the extremists are the ones that cause the damage, and a religion, ethnic group or organization that can not control its extremist elements must be held accountable for their actions. Where is the public outrage on the Muslim street to the actions of Nidal Hasan and the failed perpetrator of the Christmas day airline plot? There is none, and the silence speaks much louder than words.
The US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs had much of the same reaction to the report as Ralph Peters and I do:
“I am encouraged that the Department recognizes the need to update its policies to protect servicemembers and welcome the Department’s intention to hold accountable those who failed to take necessary protective action.
“I am disappointed, however, that the report does not adequately recognize the specific threat posed by violent Islamist extremism to our military, a threat directly addressed by Senator Collins and me in a January 13 letter to Secretary Gates. I believe firmly that if DoD educates its personnel about violent Islamist extremism – and how terrorists distort the Islamic faith to promote violence – we will increase trust between the thousands of Muslim-Americans serving honorably in the military and their colleagues.
“This omission underscores the need for our Committee’s independent investigation. Unfortunately, the Department of Defense has been less than forthcoming in providing us access to the documents and witnesses we require. Now that the DoD review is public, the Department must cooperate fully with our Committee so that we can fulfill our constitutional duty to determine our vulnerabilities and correct them.”
I don’t believe that the report was a ‘whitewash’ but I do believe that it was watered down to the point of being ineffective. The Executive Summary list of recommendations (found on page 7), however, are important going forward:

Yet, at the same time, three findings in the report come close to violating the ‘no religious test for employees of the government’ clause in the Constitution:
Finding 2.3: DoD standards for denying requests for recognition as an ecclesiastical endorser of chaplains may be inadequate…. This limited authority to deny requests for designation as ecclesiastical endorsers could allow undue improper influence by individuals with a propensity toward violence…..
Finding 2.7: DoD policy regarding religious accommodation lacks the clarity necessary to help commanders distinguish appropriate religious practices from those that might indicate a potential for self-radicalization….
Finding 4.9: The lack of published guidance for religious support in mass casualty incidents hampers integration of religious support to installation emergency management plans.
While it seems on the surface perfectly practical given the state of the world and the reality of Islamic terrorism, ignoring our Constitution can’t be the reaction to a tragedy like this. Because the next group they put limitations on may be one more broadly followed by Americans. First they came for…
Additional Sources
New York Post Op-Ed
Act! for America
Religious Clause Blog
Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Reaction
Discussion
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