Ft. Whodunnit?

Senator Joe Lieberman, captain, cook and first mate of the USS Goonsville (the Senate), has made a shocking revelation today: the murderous rampage at Fort Hood was a “homegrown terrorist attack.” Let’s ignore for a moment that if Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had instead been named something like, say, Seung-Hui Cho, honorable monsieur Lieberman would have gotten no traction out of these allegations. Let’s even forget that for the entire six years Maj. Hasan worked at Walter Reid he was in constant conflict with his superiors, consistently received negative psychiatric evaluations, and that his fellow students and teachers called him ‘paranoid’ ‘belligerent’ and ‘schizoid’. Terrorists are pretty often anti-social unhinged psychopaths; it’s not impossible that Maj. Hasan could be both a nut job and a terrorist.
So let’s take Sen. Dopey at his word: Maj. Hasan is a “homegrown terrorist.” What exactly turns an unbalanced American army psychologist from bad couch jockey to violent maniac? The key is from Shoeless Joe’s own mouth: “homegrown.” Maj. Hasan’s work in an American psychiatric hospital did not expose him to extremist ideology: he wasn’t administering to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but traumatized, wounded, PTSD-afflicted infantrymen. Hasan was made a terrorist by the horror of the war, a fact most inconvenient for most of the congress and the White House. Lieberman is perhaps more invested than most in maintaining American denial of the trauma of these wars: he’s one of the most vocal and belligerent of the moldy-minded, mealy-mouthed old farts responsible for sending an ever-increasing number of our youth through the wringer.
Joe’s three-card-monte is pretty clear: imply that Hasan was receiving clandestine instructions from an undiscovered cave in Afghanistan, rather than direct orders from an undisclosed bunker in Wyoming, and slip the ace of spades off the table: these wars are so ugly that it turns the psychiatrists treating our soldiers into terrorists. Maj. Hasan sure could be a homegrown terrorist, but, without the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, without Hasan administering terrible psycho-therapy to the broken shells of twenty-one year olds, does even Joe Lieberdouche believe the slaughter at Fort Hood would’ve happened?
Maj. Hasan, a Palestinian fundamentalist Muslim, gave no ideological defense of his actions. No terrorist group has taken credit for his spree. He cracked, he was a lone gunmen, he is, indeed, a “homegrown terrorist.” The wars have crossed the Atlantic: they don’t only make more suicide bombers in Palestine, more Taliban diehards in Afghanistan, more Sunni extremists in Iraq. Now they are turning American soldiers onto the path of pointless martyrdom too.
Thank God Obama hasn’t given up this war on terror, but merely tried to euphemize it away. We’re gonna need all the experience we can get fighting terrorism for when the two-hundred thousand potential “homegrown terrorists” return to the US from our sickening misadventures in the desert.

- No Innocents