'Rampage' at american army base

[faceless]

This is a mad story considering there's 3 people identified as the shooters. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

It seems the main killer was a US Major - with a Pakistani sounding name. I'm sure his name will be focussed on more than anything, but you don't get to become a Major without showing a hell of a lot of support.

[Skylace]

When I heard he is supposed to be a psychiatrist that is what got to me. I am sure more will be coming out. It's just terrible.

[Sera_6969]

Let's see 'em try and pin this one on video games and music!!!

[pirtybirdy]

I agree Skylace. The fact that he was a psychiatrist was disturbing, as he's the one who went nuts. I'm also curious about the possibility of other shooters. How bizarre. I'm thinking it's Barry Manilow and Crash Bandicoot that drove him to it personally.

[faceless]

I read on some news site that they were checking to see if his name 'Malik Hasan' was a name he'd picked after the possibliity of him converting to Islam...

I did a bit of checking as it really sounds just like a normal Pakistani type name to me - and the literal translation is 'King Handsome' - not really the sort of name that a convert would pick!

[pirtybirdy]

Hasan sounds like a common last name. I actually worked with a Dr. Hasan at the pharmaceutical company. I'm not saying common like Jones or Smith, but I've seen it often enough.

[faceless]

yeah, they really seemed to want this to be something easily explainable, but Joe Bloggs doesn't fit... I know that a normal Doctor here gets the rank of Captain if they're in the armed forces, but I wonder if a Psychiatrist gets that automatic rank of Major too?

[buddy55]

FORT HOOD, Texas – An Army psychiatrist set to be shipped overseas opened fire at the Fort Hood Army post Thursday, authorities said, a rampage that killed 12 people and left 31 wounded in the worst mass shooting ever at a military base in the United States.

The gunman, first said to have been killed, was wounded but alive and in stable condition under military guard, said Lt. Gen. Bob Cone at Fort Hood. "I would say his death is not imminent," Cone said. Col. Ben Danner said the suspect was shot at least four times.

The man was identified as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a 39-year-old, eight-year veteran from Virginia.

President Barack Obama called the shooting at the Soldier Readiness Center, where soldiers who are about to be deployed or who are returning undergo medical screening, "a horrific outburst of violence."

"It's difficult enough when we lose these brave Americans in battles overseas," the commander in chief said. "It is horrifying that they should come under fire at an Army base on American soil."

There was no official word on motive. Hasan had transferred to Fort Hood in July from Walter Reed Medical Center, where he received a poor performance evaluation, according to an official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case publicly.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, said generals at Fort Hood told her that Hasan was about to deploy overseas. Retired Col. Terry Lee, who said he had worked with Hasan, told Fox News he was being sent to Afghanistan.

Lee said Hasan had hoped Obama would pull troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq and got into frequent arguments with others in the military who supported the wars.

Officials were investigating whether Hasan was his birth name or if he may have changed his name, possibly as part of a conversion to Islam. However, they were not certain of his religion.

Video from the scene showed police patrolling the area with handguns and rifles, ducking behind buildings for cover. Sirens could be heard wailing while a woman's voice on a public-address system urged people to take cover.

"I was confused and just shocked," said Spc. Jerry Richard, 27, who works at the center but was not on duty during the shooting. "Overseas you are ready for it. But here you can't even defend yourself."

Soldiers at Fort Hood don't carry weapons unless they are doing training exercises.

The Rev. Greg Schannep was about to head into a graduation ceremony when a man in uniform approached him, warning him that someone had opened fire. Schannep heard three volleys of gunfire and saw people running.

"There was a burst of shots and more bursts of shots and people running everywhere," said Schannep, who works for local Congressman John Carter.

The uniformed man who had warned him ran to the theater. Schannep said he could see the man's back was bloodied from a wound. The man survived, was treated and will be fine, Schannep said.

Cone said initially three people were held, and all have been interviewed. Authorities believe, however, that there was a single shooter.

The Soldier Readiness Center holds hundreds of people and is one of the most populated parts of the base, said Steve Moore, a spokesman for III Corps at Fort Hood. Nearby there are barracks and a food center where there are fast food chains.

The wounded were dispersed among hospitals in central Texas, Cone said. Their identities, and the identities of the dead, were not immediately released.

Amber Bahr, 19, was shot in the stomach but was in stable condition, said her mother, Lisa Pfund of Random Lake, Wis.

"We know nothing, just that she was shot in the belly," Pfund told The Associated Press. She couldn't provide more details and only spoke with emergency personnel.

Hasan was single with no children. He graduated from Virginia Tech, where he was a member of the ROTC and earned a bachelor's degree in biochemistry in 1997. He received his medical degree from the military's Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md., in 2001 and was at Walter Reed for six years for his internship, residency and a fellowship.

The attack happened just down the road from one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history. On Oct. 16, 1991, George Hennard smashed his pickup truck through a Luby's Cafeteria window in Killeen, Texas, and fired on the lunchtime crowd with a high-powered pistol, killing 22 people and wounding at least 20 others.

No other shooting at a military base in the U.S. has been anywhere near as deadly as Thursday's. In 1993, a gunman at Fort Knox shot five civilian co-workers, killing three, and then fatally shot himself.

Around the country, some bases stepped up security precautions, but no others were locked down.

Covering 339 square miles, Fort Hood is the largest active duty armored post in the United States. Home to about 52,000 troops as of earlier this year, it is located halfway between Austin and Waco.

___

Barrett reported from Washington, D.C. Associated Press Writers Pam Hess, Anne Gearan, Lara Jakes, Suzanne Gamboa and Lolita C. Baldor in Washington, D.C., Jay Root in Temple, Linda Stewart Ball, Anabelle Garay and Andre Coe in Dallas and Colin Fly in Milwaukee and the Associated Press News Research Center contributed to this report.

[buddy55]

WASHINGTON – The office of a Texas congressman says two soldiers who were taken into custody following a deadly rampage at Fort Hood have been released.

A spokesman for Rep. John Carter says Fort Hood officials informed Carter's office of the release. Carter's congressional district includes the Army post.

A soldier opened fire at Fort Hood on Thursday, killing 12 people and wounding 31 others. Authorities wounded the gunman.

Fort Hood spokesman Christopher Haug said a third person was in custody, however.

(This version CORRECTS corrects death toll to 12 std pvs 11.)

[faceless]

This page is alleged to be (according to The Guardian) one that the guy has made on scribd - I'm not convinced though, as the name is so common

http://www.scribd.com/NidalHasan

[luke]

Focusing on Ft. Hood Killer's Beliefs Are an Easy Out to Avoid the Deeper Reasons for the Massacre

It’s hard to pinpoint what’s the most shocking thing about Major Malik Nadal Hasan’s shooting rampage in Fort Hood, Texas. I’ll start with this: there’s nothing all that ground-breaking about it. Happens all the time, it’s just that we’re a nation of amnesiacs who forget all the unpleasantries, and refuse to learn the valuable lessons.

For starters, Fort Hood is located in Killeen, Texas -- where one of the deadliest rampage shootings in American history took place in 1991, when an unemployed ex-Navy enlistee, George Hennard Jr., crashed his pickup into a popular cafeteria, pulled out two handguns (Hasan also used two handguns), and murdered 23 people before taking his own life. The day before the massacre, Hennard was eating a hamburger in a local restaurant watching the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings and, according to the manager, “When an interview with Anita Hill came on, he just went off. He started screaming, ‘You dumb bitch! You bastards opened the door for all the women!'”

So yesterday’s Fort Hood shooting isn’t the worst or most deranged mass-killing in Killeen’s history -- not by a longshot. The mainstream media is enabling the screaming about the Muslim traitors in our midst, but Hasan killed far fewer Americans than the white, racist George Hennard. And they were bested by the federal government in nearby Waco Texas, in 1993, when federal forces slaughtered some 75 men, women and children in the Branch Davidian compound.

But in what may seem like a strange coincidence, Maj. Hasan and Killeen are connected to another American shooting rampage. Killeen held the record for America’s worst shooting massacre until 2007, when Virginia Tech student Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 33 fellow students. And Malik Nadal Hasan graduated from Virginia Tech in 1997. Both Hasan and Cho were bullied and harassed -- Hasan’s cousin told reporters that after 9/11, his military comrades regularly abused him, calling him “camel jockey.” But the cousin insisted that Hasan’s opposition to the war didn’t grow out of the bullying, but rather from the stories he heard while interning as a psychiatric counselor to veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Hasan even hired an attorney to try to come to a settlement with the US government and leave the service, but they wouldn’t settle for a deal and instead forced him to deploy. He apparently fought it up to the day before his deployment -- and instead of going to the war, he brought the war to the US military.

As is often the case, the wrong lesson was learned, and the solution was more guns and more militarization of society: after the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007: a new pro-gun student group was formed, calling for the arming of as many students as possible. The group is called Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, and today it claims over 40,000 members on over 363 campuses. Likewise in 1991 after the Killeen shootings, the state of Texas responded by enacting a law freeing up gun owners to carry concealed weapons. It was President Bush who signed the law as TX governor in 1995 -- and it was also Bush in 2008 who signed the first federal gun control law in 13 years after the Virginia Tech massacre.

So Hasan, whose parents came to the US from Palestine, had plenty of personal connections to “Made in the USA” violence and massacres; and yet there’s a frantic attempt to make him out to be a crazy Muslim monster hell-bent on killing Americans. Why would he need to take inspiration just from them, when Americans already provided so many excellent examples of how to mass-murder fellow Americans?

Fort Hood, the largest military base in America, has seen its share of violence as well. For one thing, it holds the record for most soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan -- 685 so far -- and though we don’t know the figures, it’s reasonable to assume that Fort Hood is responsible for a sizable percentage of the tens or hundreds of thousands killed in those countries since America invaded them. Over the same period, 75 soldiers have committed suicide at Fort Hood, ten in 2009 alone -- the highest of any base. In just one weekend in 2005, two soldiers who’d returned from Iraq killed themselves in separate incidents. Last year, in something right out of Full Metal Jacket, Specialist Jody Michael Wirawan, 21, of the 1st Cavalry Division, shot and killed his lieutenant, then killed himself when police arrived. And life in Killeen isn’t much nicer: it has one of the nation’s lowest median incomes and highest crime rates. Earlier this year, a 20-year-old Fort Hood soldier was killed by a Killeen cop who claimed he killed the soldier after being dragged underneath his SUV; the dead soldier’s mother filed a lawsuit claiming that the cop was notoriously out-of-control and violent, and that he shot her son while the car was pulled over.

All of this violence and despair led Fort Hood’s commander, Lt. General Rick Lynch, to build a post-traumatic stress disorder complex called the Resiliency Campus, featuring a Spiritual Fitness Center for soldiers to meditate, and a Cognitive Enhancement Assistance Center. As though a spiritual fitness workout routine could resolve the underlying cause of why a Resiliency Campus was built in the first place.

if the government really were concerned about all the suicides and PTSD cases, they could have prevented Mj. Hasan’s murder-suicide mission before it happened. It would have been easy: Hasan had pleaded with his superiors not to be sent to Iraq, where he was scheduled to be deployed, but his requests were denied. RIght-wing bloggers like Michelle Malkin and some mainstream outlets have seized on reports emerging that Hasan supposedly voiced opinions sympathetic to suicide bombers. But if he was an Al Qaeda sleeper-cell suicide bomber himself, it makes no sense why he’d a) argue with fellow soldiers that the wars are wrong and we should withdraw; and b) that he tried to get out of being deployed to Iraq. The 9/11 terrorists did their best to “blend in” and pretend like they were as American as apple pie, because the point is not to draw any attention to yourself if you’re a terrorist planning to suicide bomb a military base. Moreover, the timing of his shooting, the day before he was to be sent off, shows that his desperation had reached the limit. What this suggests is that the massacre could have been avoided if Maj. Hasan’s objections were taken into account.

Maj. Hasan’s opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars puts him where the majority of Americans are today. And he’s not the first soldier at Fort Hood to protest the war. Desertion rates have soared since the Iraq invasion, and Fort Hood has had some high-profile objectors making the news this year, such as Spc. Victor Agosto, who was court-martialed in August after he refused to go to Afghanistan, and Sgt. Travis Bishop, who filed for conscientious objector status after serving in Iraq for 14 months.

Going back to Vietnam War, Fort Hood was famous as the site of one of the first anti-war protests in 1965, when the so-called “Fort Hood 3” refused to be shipped off on the grounds that the war was wrong and illegal. Three years later, the movement expanded: hundreds of African-American GIs protested plans to deploy them to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, and 43 were court-martialed. It was a heroic act: US troops and cops staged one of the bloodiest police-on-citizen episodes in modern history. In 1971, the Fort Hood United Front, made up of soldiers from the base, marched into Killeen, even though the city refused to grant them a permit; hundreds were arrested.

Today, if you read through some of the forums out of Fort Hood, the antiwar mood is clearly strong and clearly a problem for the authorities. So they’ll do their best to paint Maj. Hasan as a Muslim loon. The rightwing has been trying for years now to equate opposition to the wars with pro-terrorist, anti-American sentiment, and by the poll numbers today, that would make most Americans anti-American terrorists.

You can already see the dark, rank heart of the American Soul in anonymous messages posted on underground right-wing sites like Free Republic, a few of which are posted below:

Why is anyone surprised?

We already have a DIRTY MOSLEM TRAITOR in the Oval Office.

What’s one more moslem piece of garbage?

* * *

[Quoting a previous posting] **If you are Islamic, you may not serve in our military. Period.**

I'm getting closer to:

If you are Islamic, you may not serve in our military live in this country.

Period.

* * *

I’m getting closer to:

If you are Islamic, you may not live.

* * *

The story is still fresh and there’s a lot we don’t know, and there are still a lot of conflicting reports and confusion. Since Hasan will be tried in a military court, the American public will only learn whatever the military wants us to learn. And to a nation slipping deeper into its own amnesiac fog, the last thing we want to learn are the painful, threatening truths.

from http://www.alternet.org/story/143779/?page=entire

[SpursFan1902]

Wow..that's scary...