Nancy Gibbs: The Fort Hood Killer: Terrified ... or Terrorist?
[Nancy Gibbs is an essayist and editor at large for TIME magazine, a best selling author and commentator on politics and values in the United States. She is the co-author with Michael Duffy of the New York Times Bestseller The Preacher and the Presidents; Billy Graham in the White House (2007)]
What a surprise it must have been when Major Nidal Malik Hasan woke up from his coma to find himself not in paradise but in Brooke Army Medical Center, deep in the heart of Texas, under security so tight that there were armed guards patrolling both the intensive-care unit and checkpoints at the nearest freeway off-ramp. This was not the finalé he had scripted when he gave away all his earthly goods — his desk lamp and air mattress, his frozen broccoli and spinach, his copies of the Koran. He had told his imam he was planning to visit his parents before deploying to Afghanistan. He did not mention that his parents had been dead for nearly 10 years.
And who denied him his martyrdom? That would be Kimberly Munley, the SWAT-team markswoman nicknamed Mighty Mouse, who with her partner ran toward the sound of gunshots at the Soldier Readiness Center, where men and women about to deploy gather for vaccinations and eye exams. It's practically been a motto stitched on their sleeves —"Better to fight the terrorists there than here" — except now they were at home, and there was one of their own, a U.S. officer, jumping up, shouting"God is great" in a language he could barely speak and then opening fire.
For eight years, Americans have waged a Global War on Terrorism even as they argued about what that meant. The massacre at Fort Hood was, depending on whom you believed, yet another horrific workplace shooting by a nutcase who suddenly snapped, or it was an intimate act of war, a plot that can't be foiled because it is hatched inside a fanatic's head and leaves no trail until it is left in blood. In their first response, officials betrayed an eagerness to assume it was the first; the more we learn, the more we have cause to fear it was the second, a new battlefield where our old weapons don't work very well and our values make us vulnerable: freedom, privacy, tolerance and the stubborn American certainty that people born and raised here will not reject the gifts we share.
Even as the President weighs how to fight the wars he inherited, he and the entire U.S. security apparatus will have to figure out how you fight a war against an enemy you can't recognize, much less understand. In that sense, the war on terrorism has left the battlefield and moved to the realm of the mind. The good news is that al-Qaeda's throw weight is much diminished; the bad news is that terrorism is now an entrepreneurial arena, with the Internet as its global recruiting station, attracting the lost, the loners, the guy with a coffee cart on Wall Street buying up hair dye and nail-polish remover to blend into bombs, or the polite army major in uniform who took his time, bought his gun and turned it on his comrades.
In his tribute to the fallen, President Barack Obama invoked a"world of threats that know no borders." Soldiers sacrifice to keep us safe; somehow we failed to keep them safe. It would be grim news for the intelligence community and the Army if they just missed all the warning signs. It would be worse news if they saw but chose to ignore them.
A Whole New War
No one thought the battle between the West and radical Islam was going to be fought like a traditional war, but to the extent that we could, we did. We tightened our borders, hardened the targets, took off our shoes and sent troops and tanks and drones to crush opponents in Afghanistan and take out top al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan. We adapted our laws and intelligence services to make it easier to infiltrate terrorist cells, sniffing their emails, phone calls and Web traffic. The campaign has shown such success in crippling al-Qaeda's ability to deliver a massive blow that the U.K. has just reduced its national threat level.
But the terrorist techniques of even a decade ago are already outmoded."I used to argue it was only terrorism if it were part of some identifiable, organized conspiracy," says Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. But Hoffman has changed his definition, he says, because"this new strategy of al-Qaeda is to empower and motivate individuals to commit acts of violence completely outside any terrorist chain of command." Every month this year, he notes, there has been a terrorist event — either an act committed or one broken up before it could be carried out."The nature of terrorism is changing, and Major Hasan may be an example of that," Hoffman argues."Even if he turns out to have had no political motive, this is a sea change."
If"leaderless resistance" is the wave of the future, it may be less lethal but harder to fight; there are fewer clues to collect and less chatter to hear, even as information about means and methods is so much more widely dispersed. It is more like spontaneous combustion than someone from the outside lighting a match. Senator Joe Lieberman's Homeland Security Committee warned of this threat in a report last year."The emergence of these self-generated violent Islamist extremists who are radicalized online presents a challenge," the report concluded,"because lone wolves are less likely to come to the attention of law enforcement." At least until they start shooting.
It might help if there were at least agreement on what constitutes terrorism; one government study found 109 different definitions. As far as the FBI is concerned, it counts as terrorism if you commit a crime that endangers another person or is violent with a broader intent to intimidate, influence or change policy or opinion. If Hasan shot people because of indigestion, worker conflict or plain insanity without a larger goal of intimidation or coercion, it was probably just a crime. If, on the other hand, his crime was motivated by more than madness — say, a desire to protest U.S. foreign policy — it was effectively terrorism...
Read entire article at Time
What a surprise it must have been when Major Nidal Malik Hasan woke up from his coma to find himself not in paradise but in Brooke Army Medical Center, deep in the heart of Texas, under security so tight that there were armed guards patrolling both the intensive-care unit and checkpoints at the nearest freeway off-ramp. This was not the finalé he had scripted when he gave away all his earthly goods — his desk lamp and air mattress, his frozen broccoli and spinach, his copies of the Koran. He had told his imam he was planning to visit his parents before deploying to Afghanistan. He did not mention that his parents had been dead for nearly 10 years.
And who denied him his martyrdom? That would be Kimberly Munley, the SWAT-team markswoman nicknamed Mighty Mouse, who with her partner ran toward the sound of gunshots at the Soldier Readiness Center, where men and women about to deploy gather for vaccinations and eye exams. It's practically been a motto stitched on their sleeves —"Better to fight the terrorists there than here" — except now they were at home, and there was one of their own, a U.S. officer, jumping up, shouting"God is great" in a language he could barely speak and then opening fire.
For eight years, Americans have waged a Global War on Terrorism even as they argued about what that meant. The massacre at Fort Hood was, depending on whom you believed, yet another horrific workplace shooting by a nutcase who suddenly snapped, or it was an intimate act of war, a plot that can't be foiled because it is hatched inside a fanatic's head and leaves no trail until it is left in blood. In their first response, officials betrayed an eagerness to assume it was the first; the more we learn, the more we have cause to fear it was the second, a new battlefield where our old weapons don't work very well and our values make us vulnerable: freedom, privacy, tolerance and the stubborn American certainty that people born and raised here will not reject the gifts we share.
Even as the President weighs how to fight the wars he inherited, he and the entire U.S. security apparatus will have to figure out how you fight a war against an enemy you can't recognize, much less understand. In that sense, the war on terrorism has left the battlefield and moved to the realm of the mind. The good news is that al-Qaeda's throw weight is much diminished; the bad news is that terrorism is now an entrepreneurial arena, with the Internet as its global recruiting station, attracting the lost, the loners, the guy with a coffee cart on Wall Street buying up hair dye and nail-polish remover to blend into bombs, or the polite army major in uniform who took his time, bought his gun and turned it on his comrades.
In his tribute to the fallen, President Barack Obama invoked a"world of threats that know no borders." Soldiers sacrifice to keep us safe; somehow we failed to keep them safe. It would be grim news for the intelligence community and the Army if they just missed all the warning signs. It would be worse news if they saw but chose to ignore them.
A Whole New War
No one thought the battle between the West and radical Islam was going to be fought like a traditional war, but to the extent that we could, we did. We tightened our borders, hardened the targets, took off our shoes and sent troops and tanks and drones to crush opponents in Afghanistan and take out top al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan. We adapted our laws and intelligence services to make it easier to infiltrate terrorist cells, sniffing their emails, phone calls and Web traffic. The campaign has shown such success in crippling al-Qaeda's ability to deliver a massive blow that the U.K. has just reduced its national threat level.
But the terrorist techniques of even a decade ago are already outmoded."I used to argue it was only terrorism if it were part of some identifiable, organized conspiracy," says Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. But Hoffman has changed his definition, he says, because"this new strategy of al-Qaeda is to empower and motivate individuals to commit acts of violence completely outside any terrorist chain of command." Every month this year, he notes, there has been a terrorist event — either an act committed or one broken up before it could be carried out."The nature of terrorism is changing, and Major Hasan may be an example of that," Hoffman argues."Even if he turns out to have had no political motive, this is a sea change."
If"leaderless resistance" is the wave of the future, it may be less lethal but harder to fight; there are fewer clues to collect and less chatter to hear, even as information about means and methods is so much more widely dispersed. It is more like spontaneous combustion than someone from the outside lighting a match. Senator Joe Lieberman's Homeland Security Committee warned of this threat in a report last year."The emergence of these self-generated violent Islamist extremists who are radicalized online presents a challenge," the report concluded,"because lone wolves are less likely to come to the attention of law enforcement." At least until they start shooting.
It might help if there were at least agreement on what constitutes terrorism; one government study found 109 different definitions. As far as the FBI is concerned, it counts as terrorism if you commit a crime that endangers another person or is violent with a broader intent to intimidate, influence or change policy or opinion. If Hasan shot people because of indigestion, worker conflict or plain insanity without a larger goal of intimidation or coercion, it was probably just a crime. If, on the other hand, his crime was motivated by more than madness — say, a desire to protest U.S. foreign policy — it was effectively terrorism...