The Memory Scrub About Why Ft. Hood Happened Is Almost Complete ... If It Weren't for Archives

[laststeamtrain]

The Memory Scrub About Why Ft. Hood Happened Is Almost Complete ... If It Weren't for Archives
By Mark Ames, AlterNet

(Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond.)

Posted on November 23, 2009, Printed on November 23, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143964/

What happened to all the initial reports that accused Fort Hood killer Maj. Nidal Hasan snapped because he was distraught over the Army's refusal to grant him either a discharge or an exemption from being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, wars which the Muslim psychiatrist abhorred -- and how it was this callous Army refusal to accommodate Maj. Hasan that led to his downward spiral into despondency, rage and mass murder?

We heard quite a bit about this in the first couple of days, and then -- poof! That part of the Fort Hood story disappeared so neatly that I almost started to wonder if I'd imagined it -- such is the power of media bombardment versus a mere soap bubble like the human memory. I might have forgotten too and gone along with the reality-scrub, the way all of Official America has gone, but thanks to all the news archives, it was possible to check the record as it was first reported on November 5, and trace how a key part of the Nidal Hasan story was airbrushed away from reality.

The Army's pig-headed failure to accommodate Maj. Hasan was, for a time, the most important -- and most damaging -- detail forunderstanding his shooting rampage. Because if Maj. Hasan tried to get out of his deployment, and if he telegraphed every warning signal possible (emailing terrorists, cruising 7-11s in his Al Qaeda costume) to bolster his case to reverse his deployment orders, and all the while the Army bureaucracy ignored him despite his 20 years' service -- then that means the massacre can't be blamed just on one crazy Islamofascist's inner evil.

Instead, much of the blame for driving Maj. Hasan to crack would fall on his superiors in the Army, who held his fate in their hands. They could have shown some flexibility, but instead treated with the kind of callous bureaucratic insolence and nasty ethnic harassment you'd expect to find in a 19th century army, not 21st century America. If the Army really did fail to respond to a million-billion signals from Maj. Hasan, then it means we'd have to investigate more than just his evil little Muslim soul. We'd also have to look at the environment that changed him from a good loyal soldier into a cracked lunatic. That would mean examining just how screwed up the Army culture really is, how poorly it manages its resources and personnel, and why we went so long without knowing how bad things were…

<snip>

But here's the problem: there's far too much evidence out there in the public record that contradicts our new Army-friendly version of events, which implicates the exact opposite of political-correctness. What this evidence shows is that if the Army been even marginally politically-correct, or at the very least, intelligent and reasonable, the massacre could have been avoided, lives saved, and Maj. Hasan might have been discharged to freely marry his online Burqa Queen. Instead, he faced a cold, unresponsive and abusive Army bureaucracy which over time drove Maj. Hasan to despair.

I've gone back through the record and collected the early accounts that were more sympathetic to Maj. Hasan, and the point at which those sympathetic details got scrubbed out of the narrative, allowing the rightwing's Monty Python version to replace it. There are some other surprising details I found, details which show even more parallels to a classic going postal rampage shooting. First, here are some of the most credible early sources which prove that Maj. Hasan tried and failed to get the Army to relieve him. On November 5th, I found these statements by Texas Republican congressman Michael McCaul:

<snip>

Reading through these credible accounts now, you can see how everyone from the PR flaks in the military to the rightwing machine would want somehow distract people from all the accounts of their pigheaded refusal to exempt or discharge Maj. Hasan, and you can then start to imagine how a lot of editors and viewers wouldn't put up much of a fuss if the story changed to something more palatable to the American public. So with no one interested in protecting Maj. Hasan's motives, and everyone interested in protecting the Army's behavior, the story gets changed from one of "it could have been prevented if Army bureaucrats/officers weren't such raging assholes to Maj. Hasan" to a barrage of leaks from unnamed Army officials, who argued that Maj. Hasan never said peep to anyone about wanting out of the service (note however the fine language--they narrowed from deployment to discharge to "record of" requesting a discharge). And that it was really the US Army's Judeo-Christian word against Major Hasan's Muslim-terrorist relatives' "word." And who best to print a made-to-order reality-scrub than the corrupt neocons running the Washington Post:

<more>

http://www.alternet.org/rights/143964/the_memory_scrub_about_why_ft._hood_happened_is_almost_complete_..._if_it_weren%27t_for_archives

[hobbit709]

1. I see the unrec fairy is at it again.

The military machine's primary mission has always been CYAWP.

[Usrename]

5. The bigots here like to stay under the radar.

Skinnner accomodated them by adding the unrec feature which allows a more efficient representation of their apartheid views.

[JohnnyLib2]

2. One more rec.

Punch-counter punch, and I'm referring to the CYA factor. It doesn't seem likely that this disaster can be covered up, but the effort is/was predictable.

[OnyxCollie]

3. K&R. nt

[Miss Authoritiva]

4. Excellent article!

Absolutely must-read entire article. Ames does an excellent job of chronicling the ridiculous reframing of the story from freaked out Army guy to sleeper jihadist* enabled by US military politically correctness. Thanks for posting....

*Or alternatively, recently self-radicalized lonewolf jihadist.

[StarfarerBill]

6. +1, and oops!

Sorry; didn't see that you'd posted the same article not long before I did. Hope you get most of the recs, and I'll be more watchful in the future. :)

[laststeamtrain]

8. Thanks for being polite, you must be new here. Welcome to DU. n/t.

[StarfarerBill]

15. Thanks. :) I've been here a few weeks. Always try to give credit where credit is due.

:)

[JonQ]

7. To repeat what I said on the other version:

He tried to get a discharge largely because he was a muslim due to religious complaints about US soldiers being allowed to kill muslims.

[laststeamtrain]

9. "religious complaints about US soldiers being allowed to kill muslims" ?.

What does that even mean?

[JonQ]

10. He had religious qualms

that he was part of an organization of mostly non-muslims at war with, as he saw it, muslims. He saw himself as a muslim first and a US soldier second, apparently. And he was outraged that he had to play a role in what he believed was a war on islam.

[izzybeans]

11. A lesson my father learned after his brother died in the army:

"Generally speaking, if the army says it, believe the opposite". My family still doesn't know why my uncle died in a fire during peace time.

[Blue_Tires]

12. kick

[Soylent Brice]

13. K&R

[unc70]

14. The Archives can disappear, too. Particularly the on-line ones

While this particular story was reported widely enough and recently enough that the archives are relatively intact, that isn't always the case. I routinely see examples that are rather unsettling. For most purposes, if you can't find an article using the various search engines, the article doesn't exist for you. Same when that article you carefully bookmarked now reports a non-existent page.

The first of many problems involves cases where the online version is changed or even removed from the archives, as if it never existed or never contained important content. Search engines drop the altered or missing pages from their archive index. Like magic, you have The Memory Hole. (Remember that print and online versions of the same article can vary greatly.)

Often, online newspaper and journal archives are available only on a fee paid basis, either from the original publisher or increasingly through agregators who control access to the articles in hundreds or even thousands of research and news publications. Like the search engines, these restrictive archives become valuable assets for limiting the flow of information.

With the small number of choke points in the access paths to news and archives, it is relatively easy to use the same techniques to subvert them as are used by those pushing malware to "take over" hot stories, to make valid sites be banned for "duplicate content" although they are the original source, or to poison cache and keywords to hide alternative information.

At DU, we have watched with disappointment as "important" news stories are almost completely ignored by the MSM and are relegated to "fringe" web sites on the net. We need to be aware that just because Google News archive fails to find a story does not mean the story never existed.

[nashville_brook]

16. big kick for Ames' amazing work.