Streetwise Professor

If I thought I might have been a little to rough and negative in my assessment of the Department of Defense’s report on the Fort Hood massacre, reading Ralph Peter’s jeremiad on the subject suggests if anything I was too lenient:

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.

. . . .

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.

. . . .

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.

. . . .

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.

I agree with Peters pretty much 100 percent.  He is absolutely right that the essential question–and arguably the only one that matters–is the one question this report completely ignores: Why was Hasan even in a position to commit mass murder given all that was known about his jihadist sympathies?  It is hard to argue with Peters’s conclusion (and mine) that mindless political correctness is to blame.  But I’m willing to consider alternative views.

The very fact, however, that the report and its lead authors refuse even to consider in public the issue of political correctness, let alone advance a credible alternative explanation means that (a) it’s almost certain that PC was the primary culprit, and (b) it will continue to wreak havoc in our military in years to come.