AP photo of a war zone in Texas

As more information emerges about jihadi-Major Nidal Hassan, I’m reconsidering my declaration that it’s “silly” to debate “whether Hasan’s rampage could have been prevented if authorities had paid more attention to warning signs.”  Based on reports since I posted Sunday (actually late Saturday night), I might now refrain from using the word “silly.”

But I still believe it’s unrealistic to think atrocities can be prevented by flawless foresight based on evidence that seems screamingly significant in hindsight.

Here is the passage from Jenifer Rubin (a hard-working blogger with whom I frequently agree on other matters) that sparked my previous post:

The Post’s own report tells us:

Six months ago, investigators came across Internet postings, allegedly by Hasan, that indicated sympathy for suicide bombers and empathized with the plight of Muslim civilians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a federal official briefed on the situation. The official, and another source, said investigators never confirmed whether Hasan was the author of the postings and did not pursue the matter.

Didn’t pursue the matter?

And then we learn: “Friends and acquaintances said Hasan had been increasingly agitated over the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he reportedly said the U.S. ‘war on terror’ was a ‘war on Muslims.’ Officials have seized Hasan’s computer to determine his role in the blog posts and other writings.” It seems he even had a PowerPoint presentation. (”Val Finnell, a classmate of Hasan’s at the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda a few years ago, recalled a presentation that ’started out with a semblance of a health issue but his PowerPoint turned into his view that the war was against Muslims. He brought that up throughout the year.”)

Listen, ignoring reality and feigning indifference to the views and behavior of Major Hasan is how we wound up with 13 dead and 30 wounded, right?

I have a confession to make.  Although I have no sympathy for suicide bombers, I do “empathize with the plight of Muslim civilians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.”  Better lock me up.

Seriously, while everything in the passage above is clearly ominous now, there’s simply nothing there that would, in advance of the shootings, justify cashiering Hasan from the Army or putting him under physical surveillance as a potential jihadi.  And nothing short of those actions would have prevented the massacre.

Subsequent to my post, the London Telegraph reported:

Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the gunman who killed 13 at America’s Fort Hood military base, once gave a lecture to other doctors in which he said non-believers should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats.

Gulp. OK, if true, that’s a big fat warning sign.  But did any investigative authority know about these alleged statements before the shooting?  The Telegraph article doesn’t attribute the boiling-oil statement or put it in quotes, but the story appears to be based on discussions with Hasan’s former colleagues at Walter Reed.  Plenty of bloggers and pundits have cited this supposed statement, but I can’t find any independent reporting confirming it.

Here’s one thing the authorities did know before the shootings: Hasan carried out an extended email correspondence with “a radical cleric in Yemen who has criticized the United States for waging war against Muslims,” as the Washington Post and others report today. That comes closer than anything else I’ve seen to justifying complaints that Hasan’s rampage should have been prevented.  But it’s still not very close.  From the Post:

The FBI determined that the e-mails did not warrant an investigation, according to the law enforcement official. Investigators said Hasan’s e-mails were consistent with the topic of his academic research and involved some social chatter and religious discourse.

We can all fervently wish that the FBI had taken things further at the time.  But like any organization, the FBI has finite resources, and it doubtless spends a lot of time and energy gathering huge amounts of information, most of which ends up bearing no fruit. Any investigative agency must make decisions every day to refrain from pursuing this lead or that one.

I’m making only a limited argument here.  Despite admonitions that we should not “jump to conclusions” about Hasan’s motives, I’ve concluded that Hasan was a jihadi.  Certainly his movements and associations should now be examined in intense detail.  My point is just that while there may be comfort in the notion that the feds could have stopped Hasan, I don’t buy it, based on what has emerged to date. The various clues that now appear so ominous in the aggregate did not constitute a smoking gun when viewed individually a week ago.  It’s hard to protect against a lone gunman who is prepared to die.

The first debate is about whether the shooting spree constitutes “terrorism.” This issue comes up every time a Muslim commits a high-profile violent crime.  Just a week before Fort Hood, when a mosque leader was killed in Michigan in a gun battle with the FBI, authorities quickly declared that it was not “terrorist-related.”

The debate is silly because terrorism has become a meaningless word.  The term “Global War on Terrorism” is a politically correct euphemism that conflates the enemy with the enemy’s tactic. Through this misuse, the word “terrorism” has taken on more significance than it deserves.  It’s simply not useful to debate whether Nidal Malik Hasan is a terrorist. [Update: We should instead be debating whether he is a jihadi.]

It would be useful, of course, to determine whether he acted in concert with others.  So far it appears that he did not.

The second silly debate is about whether Hasan’s rampage could have been prevented if authorities had paid more attention to warning signs.  “One of the most obvious questions as investigations go forward is whether the FBI or military authorities missed an opportunity to prevent Maj. Hasan from acting,” said the Washington Post, citing internet postings expressing sympathy for suicide bombers and his opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which he apparently considered a “war on Muslims.”

Hasan’s political beliefs are clearly significant in hindsight — but it’s absurd to think the Army somehow should have known he was dangerous.   Our society doesn’t take action against people for thinking wrong thoughts, or for giving voice to them. Nothing I’ve read about Hasan’s behavior comes close to justifying the kind of heightened scrutiny that would have been required to prevent his rampage.

And yet, some on the right insist otherwise. On Contentions, Jennifer Rubin writes, “Listen, ignoring reality and feigning indifference to the views and behavior of Major Hasan is how we wound up with 13 dead and 30 wounded, right?” Roger L. Simon takes the argument even further:

But that pathology of political correctness has now been laid bare before us. More than the two handguns, it was the murder weapon in that room at Fort Hood. Those thirteen innocent people are indeed PC deaths because it was PC that allowed Hasan to be there.

Please.  Political correctness didn’t kill anybody.  Hasan killed them.  The authorities certainly should make every effort to learn anything that might help them prevent a recurrence.  But they’ll never be able to eliminate the possibility of a lone gunman.

(I planned to upload a graph showing the tightening survey results, but the @#$^& WordPress upload function isn’t working, again.  The troubleshooting tips start with “reinstall WordPress”, and the reinstall process starts with the instruction to back up your database and files, along with a link to the handy 27-step backup process.  Not today.  So: imagine a red line well above  a blue line at the left of the graph, converging into a red/blue/red/blue dance at the right. Or I suppose you could look at the actual graph at Real Clear Politics.)

Where was I?

Republican Chris Christie lost his chance at my vote when he pledged to veto any legislation enabling same-sex marriage, and to support a state constitutional amendment to the same end.  But it’s one thing to cast a protest vote for the Democrat in what looks to be a lopsided race.  When I realized my vote actually might be meaningful, I had to take another look.

Ex-prosecutor Christie pledges tax cuts and clean government in a corrupt, high-tax state, and I’ll count that as a silver lining if he wins.  But there’s no guarantee he would actually be effective at cutting taxes and fighting corruption, whereas he undoubtedly would follow through on his anti-gay veto threat.

Republicans apparently will sweep the races in Virginia, New York City and NY-23, and a GOP victory in New Jersey would add to the perception of an anti-Obamanomics backlash.  Another silver lining, if it happens.  But I reluctantly hope Corzine wins, and I did my part today.

FDD Update, the indispensable newsletter of the indispensable Foundation for Defense of Democracies, each week offers a breadcrumb trail to the best writing on the misnamed Global War on Terror.  This week, FDD President Cliff May points to these Gitmo highlights:

• Yet another released former Gitmo detainee has returned to jihad, highlighting the dilemma of what to do with the detainees.  (Fortunately, the incident that confirmed the true nature of Yousef Mohammed al Shihri also resulted in his death.)
• In separate articles, Andrew McCarthy, who prosecuted the 1993 WTC bombers, and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey describe the perils of trying to prosecute enemy combatants in civilian courts.
• Tom Joscelyn burrows into the case of a particular terrorist who was transferred to Kuwait earlier this month after a nonsensical ruling that the U.S. government had insufficient reason to hold him.
  

In the ruling Joscelyn describes, a judge applied a “beyond-a-reasonable-doubt” standard in finding that Khaled al Mutairi could not be held as an enemy combatant.  Unfortunately, it was not a jury trial — because a jury might well have found that the government proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

Let us connect the dots on al Mutairi: (1) He left for Afghanistan shortly after September 11 without making any plans for a return trip; (2) He used a known al Qaeda/al Wafa smuggling route to get into Afghanistan; (3) He carried $15,000 in cash with him and admittedly gave at least some of this money to al Wafa–which, again, is a known al Qaeda front–to an al Wafa representative in Kabul; (4) He spent well more than a month in the Taliban’s Afghanistan and could not offer any valid explanation for what he was doing during that time; (5) He fled towards the Tora Bora Mountains in a manner that is entirely consistent with al Qaeda and Taliban members, according to the court; (6) His “non-possession” of his passport is consistent with “al Qaeda’s standard operating procedures”; (7) His contact information appeared on multiple rosters of “captured fighters,” including one that was kept by a senior al Qaeda terrorist; (8) His passport information appeared on multiple “passport lists” maintained by al Qaeda; and (9) Kuwaiti security claims that al Mutairi was a “hardcore extremist” affiliated with al Qaeda before he ever went to Afghanistan in the first place.

Now, if you think that the above indicates that al Mutairi “more likely than not became part of Taliban and al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan” (a phrase used by Judge Kollar-Kotelly in a previous habeas ruling), then you share the opinion held by the U.S. military and intelligence officials who detained him.

But the judge did not see it that way.

The Miami Herald reported that al Mutairi will not immediately be released, but rather will be placed in “a Kuwaiti rehabilitation center at the emirate designed to help men jailed for years as jihadists reenter society in the oil-rich emirate.”  Good luck with that — al Shihri went through a similar program in Saudi Arabia.

At least al Mutairi will be released on the other side of the world from America, because Kuwait was willing to repatriate him.  But think about this: most Gitmo detainees will have to be held within the United States if Gitmo is closed, because other countries want nothing to do with them.  In a post-Gitmo era, enemy combatants released by misguided judges will have to be released on our own soil if their homelands will not take them.

But sometimes it seems like only the Democrats know how to win an argument by framing the issue strategically.  For example, there is no controversy about the established historical fact that Saddam Hussein actually used weapons of mass destruction (chemical weapons) not just against the Iranians in the Iran-Iraq War, but also against his own Kurdish citizens in Halabja.  I can’t help thinking that the Bush Administration would have enjoyed more support for the Iraq War if Bush and every senior Republican had insisted, in every interview and public statement from 2003 through 2006, that the only proper way to frame the debate was to consider whether Saddam still had WMD.

But I digress.  (Even before I get started!)

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — who has always struck me as a fairly reasonable guy, at least by the standards of partisan Congressional leaders — today calls out the other side for dishonest framing of the healthcare debate, in a USA Today op-ed (emphasis added):

Listening to [Congressional Democratic leaders], you would think Republicans haven’t been part of the health care debate at all. I understand the tactic. It’s an old political trick to accuse one’s opponents of being against something very worthwhile when what they’re really against are the specifics that you’re proposing.

In this debate, though, proponents of the administration’s health care plan have turned this old strategy into something of an Olympic sport.

The simple fact is, every Republican in Congress supports reform.

Health care costs are too high, and too many Americans lack health insurance. I have said so in just about every one of those 50 speeches and in dozens of interviews. And every other Senate Republican is on record favoring common-sense reforms for a system that needs them — ideas such as medical liability reform and equalizing the tax treatment for businesses and individuals who buy insurance.

Republicans are also on record about what we don’t favor, and that’s a 1,500-page bill that includes a lot of things Americans didn’t ask for and very little of what they did.

An intellectual case can be made that conserve-atives should proudly embrace the Democrats’ derisive description of the GOP as “the party of no.”  (Bill Buckley standing athwart history yelling Stop, and all that.)  But “no” is intrinsically… well… negative.  I fear the Republicans may have lost the healthcare battle simply by letting the issue be framed, improperly, as healthcare “reform.”

Rather than let themselves be tarred as the enemies of reform, the Republicans should propose a different enemy, and McConnell hints at it above when he uses the term “medical liability reform.”  The more precise term is “tort reform,” and the “enemy” is John Edwards and every other legal charlatan who has ever struck it rich by repeatedly rolling the dice in hopes of getting a third of an unjust award from an inflamed jury.

Oh, and the reference above to “tarred”?  That comes from the Early American practice of tarring and feathering.  No, dammit, it’s not racial code — and opposing the President’s proposal is not racism just because the President is black.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger discusses the mindset that just awarded a Nobel Peace Prize to a freshman president:

The unanswered question at the center of this odd Nobel is whether Barack Obama admires Old Europe for the same reasons it admires him.

When it was a vibrant garden of ideas, Europe gave the world more good things than one can count. Then it discovered the pleasures of the welfare state.

Old Europe now lives in a world of unpayable public pension obligations, weak job creation for its youngest workers, below-replacement birth rates, fat agricultural subsidies for farms dating to the Middle Ages, high taxes to pay for the public high-life, and history’s most crucial proof of decay—the inability to finance one’s armies. Only five of the 28 nations in NATO (the U.K., France, Turkey, Greece and Spain) achieve the minimum defense-spending benchmark of 2% of GDP.

Old Europe has come to resent the world’s only superpower “merely because it possesses the resources to do something Europe can no longer do, for good or ill” — i.e., protect its citizens.

Al Qaeda and its Islamofascistic fellow travelers have unequivocally demonstrated (Madrid 3/11/04, London 7/7/05) that their enemy is not just America, but Western Civilization itself.  Now that a basic (if tenuous) level of stability has been achieved in Iraq, the front lines of the war have shifted to the Afghanistan theater.

Our European allies clearly have no stomach for the fight.  As America considers sending up to 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, even the (relatively) stalwart UK today announced plans to send… um… 500.  As in Iraq, it will fall to the United States to achieve any victory (or even stability) in Afghanistan.  It remains to be seen whether President Obama has the fortitude to wage a war that Candidate Obama opportunistically (albeit correctly) described as “urgent.”

(Map of tiny Europe from Wikipedia)

Or, as Claudia Rosette frames the question, “What Price for Obama’s Nobel Prize?“  Her conclusion:

America, in the course of defending its own freedoms, has long extended to the likes of Norway, Denmark and Sweden a protective umbrella. Under that shelter, too many Europols have come to believe that peace is a function of nothing more than talk and hope and dreams and … premature prizes.

Obama said on Friday morning that he will accept this award as “a call to action.” Action on whose behalf? The five Norwegians who make up the Nobel peace prize committee chose to give him this award, for their own purposes. Obama, and America, owe them nothing. The real hope is that Obama will remember he took an oath (twice) not to serve as global spokesman for the Norwegian Nobel Committee, but “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Before his presidency is over, keeping faith with that oath may require him to do things [that] would knock the stuffing out of the featherbed philosophy of this sanctimonious crowd of Scandinavian free-riders.

To pick a completely unhypothetical example, it may require him to send tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan.  At first blush, the Nobel Prize may seem to make it harder for an Obama administration to do anything involving a projection of American military power.

But there’s another way of looking at it.  While the prize is ridiculous, it’s not Obama’s fault that it was awarded.  At the risk of indulging in wishful thinking, the prize may give him protective cover to act in the long-term interests of peace — even when it involves military action in the short run.  If so, it would be part of the silver lining I’ve been monitoring since Election Day.

Last week U.S. automakers reported that new car sales for September, the first month since the clunker program expired, sank by 25% from a year earlier. Sales at GM and Chrysler fell by 45% and 42%, respectively. Ford was down about 5%. Some 700,000 cars were sold in the summer under the program as buyers received up to $4,500 to buy a new car they would probably have purchased anyway, so all the program seems to have done is steal those sales from the future. Exactly as critics predicted.

Okay.  I’d want to see a few more months of statistics before concluding that most C4C buyers bought cars “they would probably have purchased anyway,” although that’s undoubtedly true in many cases.  Also, how does the September report compare with year-ago comparisons for the months just before C4C went into effect?  (I spent a frustrating 10 minutes looking for raw statistics before realizing I just didn’t care enough to spend 11 minutes.  But why don’t news reports provide links to data sources the way blog posts do?) Since September marked the start of the financial meltdown I suspect that might have been the last relatively strong month for car sales, which would skew the year-earlier comparison.

I’m still largely opposed to the very idea of artificial spending programs in the name of stimulating the economy, and I’m ferociously opposed to the wasteful and dishonest porkulus bill.  But if there was going to be a fiscal stimulus plan — and the political realities of the spring left no doubt about that — then I still think C4C was as good a stimulus as any.  And Larry Kudlow agrees with me!

Joe Halderman, on the other hand, reportedly negotiated terms with David Letterman’s lawyer, then accepted a check for $2 million, and was arrested when he tried to deposit it.

I also find it bizarre that he thought the revelation of Letterman’s affairs would cause the late-night host’s “world to collapse.” In an entertainment industry where people are lining up in support of admitted child-raper Roman Polanski, disclosure of garden-variety infidelity is hardly likely to be catastrophic.

The New York Times reported Saturday:

“Many students of terrorism believe that in important ways, Al Qaeda and its ideology of global jihad are in a pronounced decline — with its central leadership thrown off balance as operatives are increasingly picked off by missiles and manhunts and, more important, with its tactics discredited in public opinion across the Muslim world.

While stopping short of actually saying so, the article makes the case for staying the course in Afghanistan:

Even counterterrorism officials who agree that Al Qaeda is on the wane, for example, say the organization might well regroup if left unmolested in a lawless region in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Somalia.

And here’s the meat of the matter:

Nevertheless, some government officials do take quiet, if wary, satisfaction in two developments that they say underlie the broad belief that Al Qaeda is on a downhill slope. One is the success of military Special Operations units, the C.I.A. and allies in killing prominent terrorists.

…

In Pakistan, missile strikes from C.I.A. drone aircraft have taken a steady toll on Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies since the Bush administration accelerated these attacks last year, a policy reinforced by President Obama. A count of such strikes, compiled by the Center for American Progress in Washington, found a handful in 2006 and 2007, rising rapidly to 36 in 2008, and another 36 so far in 2009, nearly all in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

In addition to thinning the ranks of potential plotters, the constant threat of attack from the air makes it far harder for terrorists to move, communicate, and plan, counterterrorism officials say. And while the officials say they worry about a public backlash in response to the civilians killed during the air attacks, those officials also say the strikes may be frightening away potential recruits for terrorism.

The second trend is older and probably more critical. The celebration in many Muslim countries that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has given way to broad disillusionment with mass killing and the ideology behind it, according to a number of polls.

Between 2002 and 2009, the view that suicide bombings are “often or sometimes justified” has declined, according to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, from 43 percent to 12 percent in Jordan; from 26 percent to 13 percent in Indonesia; and from 33 percent to 5 percent in Pakistan (excluding some sparsely populated, embattled areas). Positive ratings for Osama bin Laden have fallen by half or more in most of the countries Pew polled.

The phenomenon of Islamic fascism is broader than just Al Qaeda, but it’s heartening to see the decline of support for Al Qaeda in Muslim countries.  I’ve long believed that the best  hope for a stable peace lies in an Islamic Reformation, parallel to what Martin Luther kicked off in Christianity with his 95 Theses in 1517.  I just hope that Islam can reform itself more quickly than Christianity did.  More than 130 years of religious violence passed between the 95 Theses and the Treaty of Westphalia.

(Photo of pro-Osama T-shirts in Islamabad in 2007 from AFP, via Gateway Pundit.)