DUCKPOND

Mass killings by single gunmen, is doubtless an example of terrorism? Who knows why any person would open fire on fellow soldiers at an army base?

Will the mainstream media be concerned to to discover the truth? Will they simply play the role of the embedded media in the cause of the holy war against Islam following the attacks of the hijacked civilian airliners of September 2001?

Vengeance it seems has only served to kick the cycle of violence around. Violence is a robust dynamic process that can take hold over a person, even it would seem a doctor and a psychiatrist. The more pressure that people perceive themselves to be under, and the less aware of the subtle effects of the range of violence, for example, the isolation of the individual. Dehumanization of the person, if for those who commit murder, is both a form of violence and part of the argument against capital punishment.

Al Jazeera reports on the events:

Investigators are searching for a motive behind the shooting at a US army base in Texas, in which 13 military staff were killed by an army psychiatrist.

The suspected attacker, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, was shot four times by police at the scene, Colonel John Rossi, a spokesman at Fort Hood, the biggest military facility in the world, said on Friday.

A woman died overnight from her wounds, raising the toll from Thursday’s shootings to 13 dead and 30 wounded, Rossi said.

The shooting took place inside the base as soldiers were awaiting medical and dental treatment at a processing centre for those being deployed on missions to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hasan, born in the US to Muslim Palestinian parents, was unconscious but in stable condition on Saturday.

. . . Hasan, 39, had spent years counselling severely wounded soldiers at the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington, many of whom had lost limbs fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He was transferred to Fort Hood in April and was to have been deployed to Afghanistan, where the US military is engaged in an increasingly bloody war against Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters.

Al Jazeera’s Josh Rushing, reporting from Fort Hood, said: “[Hasan] joined the army after high school and went to the Virginia Tech university to get a psychiatry degree through a military programme.

“Every day, he heard how horrible those stories were and he really started to question the wars, according to what his cousin and sources who knew him said.

“Hasan became more devout in his religion and started arguing with soldiers about whether the wars were right or not, to the point where he received disciplinary action and negative work reviews.

“It raises a major question – how can a person responsible for the mental health of soldiers returning [from war] be allowed to continue in this profession when he has these kinds of questions himself?”

The Army Criminal Investigation Command and the FBI were investigating the shootings and no charges had been brought against Hasan, John McHugh, the US army secretary, said.

The expectation will be the final story will concentrate on the pathology of the indiviudal and not weigh the effects of the social and policy context. The report in Al Jazeera also refers to “lax gun control laws” in the United States that contribute to the number of multiple shooting incidents, but not to the violence portrayed by the media and the dismissal of people from employment that means that they cannot sustain themselves, referred to as “letting them go”. It never occurred to me before, but it seems obvious that if the American policy makers were serious about preventing terrorism they would act to restrict access to guns. Apparently on the largest army base in the country where people are being trained to kill only the military police are allowed to carry weapons.

Whenever violence occurs the case for nonviolence can always be made, but nonviolence is not easy in a society that is saturated with violence and in which violent responses have become for most habitual and unthinking. Since I am in the act of criticizing the United States, it is salutary to remember that they have traditions of conscientious nonviolent practice, through the Christian tradition, in particular, but not exclusively, the Quakers and Pennsylvania, and more recently Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement.

Coda:

I suppose it could be suggested that religions have a soul, a spiritual centre, that seems to get lost when they are accommodated into state or institutional power. Constantine’s dream, or PR exercise at the Malvern Bridge marked the conversion from the exclusion of Christians to the point where the legions of Rome became wholly Christian. This story is so familiar that it is not shocking. What seems shocking is that a Buddhist government in Sri Lanka can engage, as seems to have occurred in perpetrating violence against the Tamils.

ELSEWHERE:

David Johnston and Eric Schmitt report in The New York Times that early investigations suggest that the Major acted alone, and the suggestion is that this act appears to have been premeditated. Aside from the legal and related matters, there are going to be questions from a military point of view as to why a officer and a psychiatrist was able to get to the mental state without his superior officers or colleagues expressing concern.

Benedict Carey, Damien Cave and Lizette Alvarez also in The New York Times report on the stress experienced by the relatively few psychiatrists treating soldiers with post traumatic stress disorder. They are suggesting that Major Hasan would have been pretty much left to his own devices. Aside from his personal circumstances, it could be that the Army is in denial over the issue of combat stress arising from killing, or seeing people killed. When a doctor is not able to experience compassion for their patients, they are in a bad space.

Kevin Drum has an eye witness account and opinion. The army, he claims, is not broken.

David Usborne in The Independent reports on the time the assailant had to reload repeatedly, the problems of constant redeployments after eight years, and the observation of a Muslim cleric who commented “there is something wrong with you”.

JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. and JAMES DAO at The New York Times seem to have done a good job following up on the Hasan story.

Whether the US Army is broken remains a open question, but it seems clear, as Tom Dispatch points out, that deployment and war fatigue are stretching the personnel, and the costs have not been reduced, so they are stretching the budget with wider social implications, such as forestalling universal health coverage.

So what is terrorism? I am using a subjective definition. Had I been one of the soldiers at the base and had had experience of war, those experience would have been come back in a place I would expect to be safe. To me terrorism is the use of violence not just to intimidate, to induce shock and fear. Kevin Drum takes up the issue. To suppose that weapons of mass murder, such as drones, are not forms of terrorism, is to be absurd. Glen Greenwald also has thoughts on the same topic.