Yesterday, I railed on Joe Lieberman for convening a witch hunt over the Ft. Hood shootings. One man’s witch hunt is another’s “responsible statesmanship,” per Jamie Kirchick over at TNR’s The Plank. He makes two points:
Given the gravity of this incident and the potential for future such attacks, it makes eminent sense that such a hearing would occur, in order to find out how such clear and visible signals of impending danger were ignored by the Army hierarchy….It’s not “Going Rogue.” It’s responsible statesmanship.
The point Jamie misses is that though the Army’s performance evaluations clearly indicated that Nidal Hasan was a very poor psychiatrist (so poor that, as NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling’s excellent reporting indicates, Hasan’s boss had at least one discussion about the possibility of discharging him) with significant other problems, Lieberman’s witch hunt will be unable to find “clear and visible signs of impending danger.”
Why? Based on the evidence, the red flags just weren’t there. Only in hindsight could you connect Hasan’s questionable, disturbed past with a propensity for extreme violence. I worked at the Navy’s internal criminal investigation agency (NCIS), which examines threats to crimes against the Navy and Marine Corps. If I had to make a decision on resource allocation to the Hasan case one month ago based on what we know, I would have recommended no additional surveillance and that his file be reviewed perhaps six months down the road.
The Pentagon’s internal reviews are better equipped than Lieberman’s hearings to comb through the Army bureaucracy and propose mechanisms to address sub-standard performers with probable mental fragility. That said, even that investigative process can hardly be a guarantee of preventing another Ft. Hood.
The Washington Independent reports that Lieberman has determined that Ft. Hood was a “terrorist” attack, and that he has called Hasan a “lone wolf.” That’s subtle code for the controversial provision in the USA Patriot Act that allows the FBI to eavesdrop on individual “terrorists” who plot without outside assistance. The provision was removed in a recent House mark up in part because the Justice Department had a hard time making the case it was actually necessary. The constant invocation of Hasan as a “lone wolf” – which the Independent’s Daphne Eviatar argues actually doesn’t fit Hasan – could well serve as a pretext for re-authorizing the provision, and suggest some clues into Lieberman’s motives.
But that’s all speculative. At the very least, Lieberman should allow the military and FBI investigations to be completed before jumping in with his own highly public process. Leaping in front of the cameras to assign blame for Ft. Hood before the formal probes have concluded seems like something a politician, not a statesman, would do.
