- 20 Dec 2009, 14:00
#14008
Fort Hood: the alternative narratives
By Yusuf Dhia-Allah of Crescent Magazine (December 2009)
Even before the blood-splattered floor at the sprawling Fort Hood military base — the largest in US — had been washed away, the spin masters were hard at work to project only one narrative: a “Jihadi” terrorist had attacked patriotic US soldiers! The November 5 shooting left 13 dead and 31 injured. Initially it was reported that there were three or even five gunmen involved and that one of them — Major Malik Nidal Hassan — a psychiatrist, had been killed. Eight hours later, Major Hassan was resurrected from death; he was not dead after all, only in a coma as a result of the bullet wounds leaving him paralysed from the waist down, we were told. The story was changed to a single individual being responsible for the rampage and that others were no longer suspect. What had happened to the others was not revealed.
It is worth noting that the official story kept on changing in the first 12 hours. Soldiers at the scene told a number of US television stations that when the shooting started they thought it was a “drill” or a “training exercise”. The drill theory was so persistent and consistent that it has to be assumed that this is routine at Fort Hood and indeed at other US military bases.
Let us look at some sample reports. CBS News reported on November 7, “Two days after narrowly escaping death at Fort Hood and just hours after his release from the hospital, Corporal Nathan Hewitt still can’t believe what happened was real. The survivor spoke to CBS News correspondent Don Teague about those fateful minutes. Even after being shot, Hewitt didn’t believe what was happening. He thought the gunfire was a training exercise and that he’d been hit by a rubber bullet. He says other victims thought the same thing.” When ABC’s Bob Woodruff interviewed shooting victims who were recovering in hospital, he found, “For many of the 43 people wounded when an Army psychiatrist allegedly went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, the scene was unreal — it seemed like something out of a movie. Maybe it was a drill. Captain Dorrie Carskadon, a combat stress specialist from Wisconsin, who was at Fort Hood training for a deployment to Afghanistan, said she initially thought the shooting was a drill.” Other soldiers interviewed by the local Austin television station KXAN as well as The Miami Herald also talked about the drill. ABC News Good Morning America, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (November 9, 2009) and NBC’s Today echoed the same “drill” story.
Why did all soldiers interviewed keep on referring to a drill if it was not a routine part of activity at the base? The idea that the shooting was part of a drill or exercise was so widespread that it had to be expressly countered in the first emergency announcement posted on the Fort Hood web site, which read, “Effective immediately. Fort Hood is closed. Organizations/units are instructed to execute a 100 per cent accountability of all personnel. This is not a drill. It is an emergency situation.”
If drills are so common at US military bases, is it too far-fetched to assume that Major Nidal Malik Hassan also thought he was involved in a drill? Could he have been set up to take the fall for a rampage organized by someone else, a shadowy group that had its own ulterior motives? The drill theory has striking parallels with the 9/11 attacks when air force planes were ordered to stand down during the hijackings because there was air force exercises going on at the time. Only top US officials could have been privy to such information, not someone sitting in a cave in Afghanistan.
Major Hassan has been widely reported in media reports to be preparing for deployment to Afghanistan. He had sold whatever possessions he had and had said goodbye to neighbours and friends. While he was critical of US policy in Afghanistan and Iraq and had spoken out against it, this would hardly constitute the kind of behaviour leading to such extreme reaction.
All information about the Fort Hood shootings has come from second or third hand sources. For instance, it has been claimed that the 13 people killed were all shot by Major Hassan. Has this been verified; if so, how and by whom? Is it possible that a single individual — no matter how good a marksman — could have killed all the people and wounded another 31? There are reports of shootings by others as well. In fact, there is speculation that some soldiers were refusing to go to Afghanistan based on the horror stories they had heard from veterans who had returned from there. The soldiers had led a mini-revolt and both Major Hassan and the military police were called in to deal with the situation. Is it possible that the 13 dead soldiers were part of the mutiny and that Major Hassan was simply caught in the middle trying to calm them down?
There is also the aspect of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a major problem faced by many returning soldiers. At least 76 deaths — murders and suicides — have occurred since 2003 as a result of PSTD, many of them at Fort Hood. Soldiers have killed loved ones, including wives, girl friends, mothers, daughters, and in some instances other friends, before killing themselves. Violence against women has risen by 71 percent since 2001. Writing in Psychology Today (November 7), Dr Ken Eisold, who holds a PhD in Psychology, had this to say, “Newsweek sees it [the Fort Hood shootings] as a harbinger of more violence from our soldiers, exposed to the violence in Iraq and Afghanistan. It suggests that such post-traumatic acts increasingly will come back to haunt us. Along similar lines, colleagues of mine who have worked extensively with trauma victims point out that ‘treating PTSD is itself traumatic.’ Those who work with trauma victims are likely to suffer from the repeated exposure to the trauma of painfully damaged minds. (See Todd Essig’s comments, Vicarious traumatization: PTSD is contagious and deadly, on TrueSlant.).”
Was Major Hassan also a victim of PTSD? The US army has been very reluctant to accept the scale of the problem afflicting its soldiers. American soldiers are trained to dehumanize others and consider them as unworthy of respect. Others are treated as dispensable and could be murdered because they “oppose the American way of life.” Human beings by nature are created with certain innate qualities of goodness. When they are turned against their own nature, they become worse than animals. For instance, beasts kill only to satiate their hunger; beyond that they do not indulge in wanton killings. Only humans are capable of sinking to this low level. When the human mind is conditioned, as it is in the case of American soldiers, to treat others as less than humans and must be killed before they kill you, then the same mind is unable to distinguish between an enemy and a loved one. Gradually the subconscious mind begins to view all human beings as “enemies”. This is what has happened to American soldiers.
It would be tempting but wrong to assume that only American soldiers behave in this manner. Violence is as American as apple pie. Those who have worked themselves into lather over the Fort Hood shootings should reflect on America’s murder statistics before they start chasing every Muslim down the street holding him/her personally responsible. According to figures released by the FBI, in 2008, there were more than 16,400 murders in the US. These were not perpetrated by Muslims. There were also 89,000 women raped in different parts of the country. Figures for other crimes such as theft, armed robbery etc are equally horrendous. America is a very violent place; Americans should do some self-reflection before pointing fingers.
The rightwing media have had a field day, as has the Zionist cabal for whom Fort Hood is further confirmation that every Muslim in the US, indeed in the West is a potential terrorist. Daniel Pipes and Charles Krauthammer are ecstatic. But it was not just these or the racists and bigots at Fox News that were projecting the “terrorist” attack theory; Lou Dobbs and Campbell Brown of CNN were also hard at work presenting this as the work of a “jihadi” terrorist network. In a November 6 interview with Texas Congresswoman, Kaye Bailey Hutchin-son, Fox News’s Shepard Smith revealed his channel’s true agenda when he blurted out, “his name [Malik Nidal Hassan] tells us a lot, doesn’t it?” Hutchinson agreed, “Yea, it sure does. It sure does!”
On November 9, Lou Dobbs frothed on CNN about “Islamic terrorists” and that Major Hassan had been receiving instructions from an “al-Qaeda affiliated imam”. He was referring to Shaikh Anwar al-Awlaki who was Imam of Dar al-Hijrah Masjid in Virginia before he left the US and settled in Yemen in 2002. While Shaikh Awlaki has said killing soldiers at Fort Hood is justified because they are legitimate targets in war, the Americans have not provided proof that Major Hassan was ever in direct contact or had received any specific instructions from him. The Americans have shut down Shaikh Awlaki’s website. If what he says is so bad, why not let people find out for themselves? Why does the US not allow the same kind of media freedom that it insists others must follow?
But some Americans have seen through this game. Ted Rall (author of, To Afghanistan and Back [2002 travelogue]), wrote on November 19, “American lives are worth a lot. So when Americans get killed, it’s a big story. There are lots of editorials. Congressmen call for investigations… The lives of foreigners, on the other hand, are pretty much worthless. Even when they die because Americans killed them, news accounts marking their deaths are short, sweet, and short-lived. Congressional investigations? No way… Thirteen soldiers die in Texas and it’s all we talk about. Two million die in Afghanistan and Iraq and we don’t notice and we don’t even want to hear about it. Only 12 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 can find Afghanistan on a map.” Glenn Greenwald, writing in Salon (November 9) asked an even more probing question, “Can Attacks on a Military Base Constitute ‘Terrorism’?” He went on, “If attacks on soldiers now qualify, how is it possible to exclude many American actions?”
More Americans need to become aware of this bitter reality visited by their soldiers on others on the orders of their political masters. When Americans realize what horrors have been perpetrated in their name, far fewer of them would get so worked up about Fort Hood. Such events, multiplied many times, are the daily experiences of countless millions of people around the world, thanks to America’s wars based on greed and hubris.
By Yusuf Dhia-Allah of Crescent Magazine (December 2009)
Even before the blood-splattered floor at the sprawling Fort Hood military base — the largest in US — had been washed away, the spin masters were hard at work to project only one narrative: a “Jihadi” terrorist had attacked patriotic US soldiers! The November 5 shooting left 13 dead and 31 injured. Initially it was reported that there were three or even five gunmen involved and that one of them — Major Malik Nidal Hassan — a psychiatrist, had been killed. Eight hours later, Major Hassan was resurrected from death; he was not dead after all, only in a coma as a result of the bullet wounds leaving him paralysed from the waist down, we were told. The story was changed to a single individual being responsible for the rampage and that others were no longer suspect. What had happened to the others was not revealed.
It is worth noting that the official story kept on changing in the first 12 hours. Soldiers at the scene told a number of US television stations that when the shooting started they thought it was a “drill” or a “training exercise”. The drill theory was so persistent and consistent that it has to be assumed that this is routine at Fort Hood and indeed at other US military bases.
Let us look at some sample reports. CBS News reported on November 7, “Two days after narrowly escaping death at Fort Hood and just hours after his release from the hospital, Corporal Nathan Hewitt still can’t believe what happened was real. The survivor spoke to CBS News correspondent Don Teague about those fateful minutes. Even after being shot, Hewitt didn’t believe what was happening. He thought the gunfire was a training exercise and that he’d been hit by a rubber bullet. He says other victims thought the same thing.” When ABC’s Bob Woodruff interviewed shooting victims who were recovering in hospital, he found, “For many of the 43 people wounded when an Army psychiatrist allegedly went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, the scene was unreal — it seemed like something out of a movie. Maybe it was a drill. Captain Dorrie Carskadon, a combat stress specialist from Wisconsin, who was at Fort Hood training for a deployment to Afghanistan, said she initially thought the shooting was a drill.” Other soldiers interviewed by the local Austin television station KXAN as well as The Miami Herald also talked about the drill. ABC News Good Morning America, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (November 9, 2009) and NBC’s Today echoed the same “drill” story.
Why did all soldiers interviewed keep on referring to a drill if it was not a routine part of activity at the base? The idea that the shooting was part of a drill or exercise was so widespread that it had to be expressly countered in the first emergency announcement posted on the Fort Hood web site, which read, “Effective immediately. Fort Hood is closed. Organizations/units are instructed to execute a 100 per cent accountability of all personnel. This is not a drill. It is an emergency situation.”
If drills are so common at US military bases, is it too far-fetched to assume that Major Nidal Malik Hassan also thought he was involved in a drill? Could he have been set up to take the fall for a rampage organized by someone else, a shadowy group that had its own ulterior motives? The drill theory has striking parallels with the 9/11 attacks when air force planes were ordered to stand down during the hijackings because there was air force exercises going on at the time. Only top US officials could have been privy to such information, not someone sitting in a cave in Afghanistan.
Major Hassan has been widely reported in media reports to be preparing for deployment to Afghanistan. He had sold whatever possessions he had and had said goodbye to neighbours and friends. While he was critical of US policy in Afghanistan and Iraq and had spoken out against it, this would hardly constitute the kind of behaviour leading to such extreme reaction.
All information about the Fort Hood shootings has come from second or third hand sources. For instance, it has been claimed that the 13 people killed were all shot by Major Hassan. Has this been verified; if so, how and by whom? Is it possible that a single individual — no matter how good a marksman — could have killed all the people and wounded another 31? There are reports of shootings by others as well. In fact, there is speculation that some soldiers were refusing to go to Afghanistan based on the horror stories they had heard from veterans who had returned from there. The soldiers had led a mini-revolt and both Major Hassan and the military police were called in to deal with the situation. Is it possible that the 13 dead soldiers were part of the mutiny and that Major Hassan was simply caught in the middle trying to calm them down?
There is also the aspect of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a major problem faced by many returning soldiers. At least 76 deaths — murders and suicides — have occurred since 2003 as a result of PSTD, many of them at Fort Hood. Soldiers have killed loved ones, including wives, girl friends, mothers, daughters, and in some instances other friends, before killing themselves. Violence against women has risen by 71 percent since 2001. Writing in Psychology Today (November 7), Dr Ken Eisold, who holds a PhD in Psychology, had this to say, “Newsweek sees it [the Fort Hood shootings] as a harbinger of more violence from our soldiers, exposed to the violence in Iraq and Afghanistan. It suggests that such post-traumatic acts increasingly will come back to haunt us. Along similar lines, colleagues of mine who have worked extensively with trauma victims point out that ‘treating PTSD is itself traumatic.’ Those who work with trauma victims are likely to suffer from the repeated exposure to the trauma of painfully damaged minds. (See Todd Essig’s comments, Vicarious traumatization: PTSD is contagious and deadly, on TrueSlant.).”
Was Major Hassan also a victim of PTSD? The US army has been very reluctant to accept the scale of the problem afflicting its soldiers. American soldiers are trained to dehumanize others and consider them as unworthy of respect. Others are treated as dispensable and could be murdered because they “oppose the American way of life.” Human beings by nature are created with certain innate qualities of goodness. When they are turned against their own nature, they become worse than animals. For instance, beasts kill only to satiate their hunger; beyond that they do not indulge in wanton killings. Only humans are capable of sinking to this low level. When the human mind is conditioned, as it is in the case of American soldiers, to treat others as less than humans and must be killed before they kill you, then the same mind is unable to distinguish between an enemy and a loved one. Gradually the subconscious mind begins to view all human beings as “enemies”. This is what has happened to American soldiers.
It would be tempting but wrong to assume that only American soldiers behave in this manner. Violence is as American as apple pie. Those who have worked themselves into lather over the Fort Hood shootings should reflect on America’s murder statistics before they start chasing every Muslim down the street holding him/her personally responsible. According to figures released by the FBI, in 2008, there were more than 16,400 murders in the US. These were not perpetrated by Muslims. There were also 89,000 women raped in different parts of the country. Figures for other crimes such as theft, armed robbery etc are equally horrendous. America is a very violent place; Americans should do some self-reflection before pointing fingers.
The rightwing media have had a field day, as has the Zionist cabal for whom Fort Hood is further confirmation that every Muslim in the US, indeed in the West is a potential terrorist. Daniel Pipes and Charles Krauthammer are ecstatic. But it was not just these or the racists and bigots at Fox News that were projecting the “terrorist” attack theory; Lou Dobbs and Campbell Brown of CNN were also hard at work presenting this as the work of a “jihadi” terrorist network. In a November 6 interview with Texas Congresswoman, Kaye Bailey Hutchin-son, Fox News’s Shepard Smith revealed his channel’s true agenda when he blurted out, “his name [Malik Nidal Hassan] tells us a lot, doesn’t it?” Hutchinson agreed, “Yea, it sure does. It sure does!”
On November 9, Lou Dobbs frothed on CNN about “Islamic terrorists” and that Major Hassan had been receiving instructions from an “al-Qaeda affiliated imam”. He was referring to Shaikh Anwar al-Awlaki who was Imam of Dar al-Hijrah Masjid in Virginia before he left the US and settled in Yemen in 2002. While Shaikh Awlaki has said killing soldiers at Fort Hood is justified because they are legitimate targets in war, the Americans have not provided proof that Major Hassan was ever in direct contact or had received any specific instructions from him. The Americans have shut down Shaikh Awlaki’s website. If what he says is so bad, why not let people find out for themselves? Why does the US not allow the same kind of media freedom that it insists others must follow?
But some Americans have seen through this game. Ted Rall (author of, To Afghanistan and Back [2002 travelogue]), wrote on November 19, “American lives are worth a lot. So when Americans get killed, it’s a big story. There are lots of editorials. Congressmen call for investigations… The lives of foreigners, on the other hand, are pretty much worthless. Even when they die because Americans killed them, news accounts marking their deaths are short, sweet, and short-lived. Congressional investigations? No way… Thirteen soldiers die in Texas and it’s all we talk about. Two million die in Afghanistan and Iraq and we don’t notice and we don’t even want to hear about it. Only 12 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 can find Afghanistan on a map.” Glenn Greenwald, writing in Salon (November 9) asked an even more probing question, “Can Attacks on a Military Base Constitute ‘Terrorism’?” He went on, “If attacks on soldiers now qualify, how is it possible to exclude many American actions?”
More Americans need to become aware of this bitter reality visited by their soldiers on others on the orders of their political masters. When Americans realize what horrors have been perpetrated in their name, far fewer of them would get so worked up about Fort Hood. Such events, multiplied many times, are the daily experiences of countless millions of people around the world, thanks to America’s wars based on greed and hubris.
Watch 'The Mukhtar Narrative / Mukhtar Nama' on Ask - a series narrating Mukhtar al-Thaqafi's revenge for Karbala.- Watch 'The life of the Father of Chemistry, Jabir ibn Hayyan'
- By BatoolM