Gray Lady Down (30 page)

The
Washington Post
intensified these questions by reporting that when Hasan was a medical resident in psychiatry at Walter Reed Army Hospital, he gave a PowerPoint presentation not on a medical topic but on “The Koranic World View As It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military.” He included the comment, “It’s getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims,” and presented some basics of Islamic thought and teaching, such as: “We [Muslims] love death more then [
sic
] you love life!” The final slide read: “Recommendation: Department of Defense should allow Muslims [
sic
] Soldiers the option of being released as ‘Conscientious objectors’ to increase troop morale and decrease adverse events.” The
Post
also reported on a presentation that Hasan gave as part of a master’s program in public health, this one asking whether the war on terror was “a war against Islam.”

According to NPR, such inappropriate actions, along with others, drew the attention of senior Army medical personnel at Walter Reed. The senior psychiatric officer drafted a memo citing Hasan’s lack of professionalism and work ethic. NPR also reported that he had been chastised for proselytizing to patients. Colleagues said he was someone with whom they would never want to be “in a foxhole”; others worried that once deployed to Afghanistan he might give secrets to the enemy. One classmate called him a “ticking time bomb.”

Many news organizations were upfront about the underlying reasons why Hasan’s superiors, especially those at Walter Reed, had dropped the ball so egregiously. As
Time
magazine reported four days after the shooting, the most troubling possibility in the Hasan case was that “the Army looked the other way precisely because he was a Muslim.” Some in a position to do or say something
were afraid of a discrimination complaint “that could ruin careers.”

The
New York Times,
however, was oddly reluctant to explore the facts behind Hasan’s religious extremism and the institutional hypersensitivity that may have allowed him to advance in his medical career. The paper took a back seat to other news organizations, citing facts associated with Nidal’s apparent jihadist tendencies only well after the
Post
and other media did so, and only in language that downplayed the most disturbing information about Hasan’s motives. Instead, the
Times
focused on what had become part of its multicultural creed: anti-Muslim discrimination and second-hand combat stress from an illegitimate, incompetently waged war. In the first ten days after the massacre, beyond reporting that Hasan had gotten up on a desk and screamed
“Alahu Akbar,”
the
Times
saw an isolated psychological event.

A report on day two from a mosque in Fort Hood where Hasan had worshipped carried a statement by another worshipper: “When a white guy shoots up a post office, they call that going postal,” said Victor Benjamin II, a former member of the Army. “But when a Muslim does it, they call it jihad.” An editorial the same day counseled that it was important “to avoid drawing prejudicial conclusions from the fact that Major Hasan is an American Muslim whose parents came from the Middle East.... But until investigations are complete, no one can begin to imagine what could possibly have motivated this latest appalling rampage.”

The
Times
expressed concerns about an anti-Muslim backlash in the services and affirmed the much-criticized comments of General George Casey, who said on
Meet the Press
that “Our diversity, not only in our Army but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.” In a report headlined “Complications Grow for Muslims Serving in U.S. Military,” Andrea Elliott cited Casey’s concern for diversity and stressed the theme of alienation and discrimination. “Whatever his possible motives, the emerging portrait of Major Hasan’s life in the military casts light on some of the struggles and frustrations felt by other Muslims in the services,”
Elliott wrote. According to friends and relatives, Hasan was disillusioned with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which he perceived as part of a war on Islam, and had been singled out and taunted by fellow soldiers for being Muslim. Elliott quoted his uncle in Ramallah, Rafik Hamad, saying that Hasan had once been called a “camel jockey.”

The other story line that the
Times
used to dodge the idea of religious motivation was “combat stress,” which it implied Hasan had developed in treating returning soldiers who themselves had post-traumatic stress disorder. “Every man has his breaking point,” wrote Erica Goode, quoting World War II military doctors. For Nidal Hasan, she continued, that breaking point “may have come even before he experienced the reality of war.” His own psyche may have been “undone by the kind of stress he treated.”

A report on November 15, nearly ten days after the attack, marked the first time the paper reluctantly acknowledged facts that other news organizations had dug up nearly from the beginning. Headlined “Investigators Study Tangle of Clues on Fort Hood Suspect,” it disclosed that Hasan had the letters “SOA” (for Soldier of Allah) on the business cards he used when moonlighting as a civilian psychiatrist. The article also noted that some of his supervisors at Walter Reed were wary of “appearing insensitive to Muslim culture,” and finally mentioned the PowerPoint presentation about the Koranic worldview and its effects on Muslim soldiers.

Political and moral seriousness was lacking in the
Times’
coverage of the Army’s January 2010 report on the Fort Hood case. The
Times
called the report a “sobering look” at “Major Hasan’s Smooth Ascension,” but never noted—as
Time
did—that the 86-page report “not once mentions Major Nidal Hasan by name or even discusses whether the killings may have had anything to do with the suspect’s view of his Muslim faith.” (The report referred to him as the “alleged perpetrator.”) Although the report, and the
Times,
did acknowledge that there were missteps on the part of Hasan’s superiors as he rose through the ranks, both the report and the
Times
failed to identify perhaps the key driving factor in his ascent. As the military analyst Ralph Peters wrote, “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 p.c. tyranny of today’s armed services, no non-minority officer was going to take him on.”

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the
Times
reported on the disarray in the country’s visa and deportation systems that had allowed Mohammed Atta and his gang to pull off their assault on America, and on the number of Arab men in the United States who fit virtually the same background profile as the nineteen hijackers. The
Times
also reported on problems in communication between our national security, intelligence and law enforcement bureaucracies, most notably “the Wall” erected in the Clinton years that made it illegal for the FBI and the CIA to communicate and cooperate with respect to leads and intelligence reports related to the 9/11 attack. But it was not long before an oppositional stance asserted itself. Within two months of the attack, the paper was casting aspersions on the ability of the government to fight terrorism; expressing grave concerns that the fight against terrorism might lead to the “loss of the country’s soul”; and opining that the theoretical loss of civil liberties under the USA Patriot Act would do “lasting damage to our 217-year-old nation of laws,” as one editorial put it in 2004.

The paper’s antagonistic posture was dictated in part by the sweeping nature of the policy changes required to fight a war on terrorism. A more fundamental reason, however, was a set of
idées fixes
about the nature of the threat represented by militant Islam, and about a supposed overreaction based on “Islamophobia” encoded in the nation’s DNA. Instead of seeing the radical Islamic jihad as a fundamental challenge to the West, the
Times
has invoked inappropriate, shallow and alarmist historical analogies—for instance, likening crackdowns on militant Muslims and illegal Islamic immigrants to the infamous Palmer Raids during the Red Scare of the early 1920s or the internment of Japanese American
citizens and resident aliens during World War II. Rather than inventory the ways in which the Islamic jihad targets the West’s commitment to Enlightenment values of equality between the sexes, religious pluralism and tolerance for dissent, the
Times
has insisted that Islam is “a religion of peace,” that the government has overreacted to fringe elements in a cynical grab for power, and that Muslims in this country are victims of Islamophobia just as blacks are victims of racism and Hispanics are victims of nativism. Invoking the anticommunism of the Cold War, the
Times’
regular Web contributor Robert Wright wrote in June 2010, “Once you decide that some group is your implacable enemy, your mind gets a little warped.”

One result of this script is that the
Times
has basically put its head in the sand regarding the various terror plots that have been mounted against the United States and its allies. The dangers that these plots represent are typically minimized and the role that jihadism plays in animating them is denied or downplayed, often in a journalistically clumsy way.

The
Times’
treatment of Sami al-Arian was an early example of the paper’s prejudices. A Palestinian-born professor of computer science at the University of South Florida who ran an Islamic charity and think tank in Tampa, al-Arian first came under investigation by federal authorities in the mid 1990s, when news reports noted calls for the destruction of Israel and donations to terrorist groups. Later, al-Arian and his organizations came under closer scrutiny when a Palestinian colleague he had brought to the university disappeared abruptly, only to end up in Damascus as the leader of the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The University of South Florida suspended al-Arian at first, then dismissed him. Meanwhile, the government launched a terrorism funding case against al-Arian. According to the government, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which al-Arian’s think tank had helped found, had mounted a number of terrorist bombings that had killed civilians in Israel.

The case polarized the university community and infuriated Muslims throughout the country. Al-Arian’s supporters saw him as a free-speech martyr, “the new Alger Hiss.” (Al-Arian humbly
played the Islamophobia card: “I’m a minority, I’m an Arab, I’m Palestinian. That’s not a popular thing to be these days.”) But his opponents saw someone who had infiltrated the university to advance a terrorist agenda. As the case against al-Arian grew, many former supporters felt burned, especially fellow faculty who had bought into the argument about free speech and academic freedom.

The
Times
went to bat for al-Arian, seeing him as a victim of a “New McCarthyism.” In late January 2002, the editorial board scolded the University of South Florida and the state’s Republican governor, Jeb Bush, insisting they dishonored “the ideals of public universities” in trying to fire al-Arian for his “anti-Israel statements.”

During his trial in 2005 and 2006, federal prosecutors introduced convincing evidence that al-Arian was not just another tweedy professor with eccentrically heterodox ideas. After a double suicide bombing killed twenty-two people in Israel, al-Arian, the government maintained, had written a letter soliciting “true support of the jihad effort in Palestine so that operations such as these can continue.” Al-Arian eventually reached a plea agreement with the government in which he acknowledged that his fundraising efforts were intended to finance terrorist attacks and did, in fact, make terrorist acts possible. Part of the agreement read that “the defendant, knowing the unlawful purpose of the plan, willfully joined it.”

Still, the
Times
continued to carry al-Arian’s banner. It took his side in a controversy over whether he should be compelled to testify before a federal grand jury in Virginia, which was investigating other branches of Islamic terrorism in America and which, the government claimed, would benefit from his knowledge. In April 2008, Neil MacFarquhar, ignoring all prior court evidence, said that al-Arian was “nothing more sinister than an outspoken Palestinian activist” who was being unjustly punished with threats of being jailed on contempt of court charges.

The
Times
was also solicitous toward Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, a 23-year-old Virginia Muslim who in November 2005 was convicted on charges of plotting to assassinate President George Bush,
among other charges. Abu Ali had ties to several men convicted as part of the Virginia Jihad, known derisively to many, including many at the
Times,
as the “Paintball Jihad” because of their military training routines. Abu Ali had traveled to Saudi Arabia and had been arrested there in a government crackdown after terrorist bombings in Riyadh in 2003, thought to be the work of al-Qaeda.