If only the left hand knew what the right hand was doing

What makes the indiscriminant murder of 13 people and the wounding of dozens more at Fort Hood, Texas even more horrific is the sole suspect was held to the highest esteem by his comrades in arms. Major Nidal Hasan, 39, was a psychiatrist and an officer in the U.S. Army and was saluted daily by enlisted personnel, men and women he is alleged to have shot and killed or wounded during a rampage November 4 in the soldier-readiness center at Fort Hood.

He was counted on to help soldiers readjust and make sense of the mental anguish that followed them home after returning from sometimes multiple deployments

to Iraq or Afghanistan. Yet, people close to him report he was not happy with the U.S. being in either country. Beginning in

early 2008, National Public Radio reports officials at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. and the Uniformed Services University of Health and Sciences held a series of meetings to discuss whether they thought Hazan was himself psychotic.

The meetings were to determine what to do with Hasan, whom officials had considered a problem since he began his training at Water Reed six years earlier. Apparently, the doctor often missed scheduled visits with his patients. Fellow students and faculty reportedly were troubled by his behavior. He was reprimanded by his supervisors for expressing his Islamic beliefs in what was perceived by some as extremist views.

Meetings on what to do with Hasan continued until spring of this year. Meanwhile, officials had no idea that intelligence analysts from the FBI had been tracking e-mail transmissions between Hasan and radical iman Anwar al-Awlaki.

So, it’s uncanny that some of the officials discussing Hasan during the same time period said they feared if Hasan was deployed to the Middle East he might be capable of passing on military secrets to Islamic extremists. One of the officials involved in those meetings even voiced concern that Hasan might be capable of fratricide, giving the example of the Army sergeant who killed two of his comrades and injured 14 others when he threw grenades at a U.S. Army base in Kuwait in 2003.

What’s troubling is Walter Reed, like most medical institutions, have a mountain of red tape to climb before getting rid of a doctor. Rather than going through the cumbersome process of hearings and lawsuits and without the knowledge of Hasan’s correspondence with a radical extremist, which was summed up as his own investigative work for a patient, he was simply reassigned to Fort Hood.

Officials on the committee looking into Hasan said they were afraid to appear prejudice against his Muslim beliefs and naively thought he would do better at a bigger institution like Fort Hood.

Problem taken care of.

Soon after, he received deployment orders to Afghanistan.

Was there no debriefing process of Hasan’s record before he entered Fort Hood?

Blood didn’t have to flow on U.S. soil or at a foreign base.

They were so close to figuring Hasan out. If only information had been shared.

If only the left hand knew what the right hand was doing.

– Kelly Ruhoff

Editor