More on Hasan’s physically threatening, professionally unethical, and treasonous behavior in the Army, which the Army and the FBI knew about but did nothing about

In his column today, Daniel Pipes lists the things that have come out about Nidal Hasan’s connections with jihad since Pipes’s earlier column about the Fort Hood massacre. Some of the items Pipes mentions have already been posted at VFR. I’m just copying the items that are new or that add new information. There’s a lot. Fasten your seat belt.

• His supervisor, Captain Naomi Surman, recalled his telling her that as an infidel she would be “ripped to shreds” and “burn in hell.” [LA replies: And apparently Captain Naomi didn’t do anything about that. She didn’t report him, didn’t start a court marshal against him, didn’t even reprimand him. Note the similarity to Muhammad Atta’s interview with Agriculture Department officlal Johnelle Bryant. He threatened to cut her throat, and she continued to talk to him helpfully.]

• In his psychiatric counseling sessions with soldiers returned from Iraq and Afghanistan, Hasan heard information he considered tantamount to war crimes. As late as Nov. 2, three days before his murderous spree, he tried to convince at least two of his superior officers, Surman and Colonel Anthony Febbo, about the need legally to prosecute the soldiers. [LA: In fact, Hasan formally reported his own patients for war crimes, based on things they had told him in psychiatric counseling sessions. See more on this below.]

• Hasan routinely signed his e-mails with “Praise Be to Allah.”

• He listed his first name as Abduwalli, rather than Nidal, in the e-mail address in his official Army personnel record. ‘Abd al-Wali is an Arabic name meaning “Slave of the Patron,” where Patron is one of God’s 99 names. It is not clear why Hasan did this, but Abduwalli could have been a nom de guerre, this being a common practice among Palestinians (Yasir Arafat even had two them—Yasir Arafat and Abu Ammar).

• He designed green and white personal business cards that made no mention of his military affiliation. Instead, they included his name, then “Behavior Heatlh [sic] Mental Health and Life Skills,” a Maryland mobile phone number, an AOL e-mail address, and “SoA (SWT).” SoA is the jihadi abbreviation for Soldier of Allah and SWT stands for Subhanahu wa-Ta’ala, or “Glory to Him, the Exalted.”

• Hasan contacted jihadi web sites via multiple e-mail addresses and screen names.

• He traded 18 e-mails between Dec. 2008 and June 2009 with Anwar al-Awlaki, Al-Qaeda recruiter, inspiration for at least two other North American terror plots, and fugitive from U.S. justice. Awlaki had been Hasan’s spiritual leader at two mosques, Masjid Al-Ribat Al-Islami in San Diego and the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center outside Washington, D.C., and he acknowledges becoming Hasan’s confidant. Awlaki speculates that he may have influenced Hasan’s evolution and praises Hasan for the massacre, calling him a “hero” who “did the right thing” by killing U.S. soldiers before they could attack Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• In those e-mails, Hasan asked Awlaki when jihad is appropriate and about killing innocents in a suicide attack. “I can’t wait to join you” in the afterlife for discussions over non-alcoholic wine, Hasan wrote him. One Yemeni analyst calls Hasan “almost a member of Al-Qaeda.” [LA replies: Hold on. Haven’t we been told that the joint terrorist task force dropped its investigation of Hasan’s e-mail contacts with Awlaki because Hasan was only asking Awklaki questions related to the treatment of soldiers with post traumatic stress disorder? Now we find out that Hasan was asking Awlaki when its Islamicaloy permissible conduct a suicide attack. Did the joint terrorist task force miss that one?]

• “My strength is my financial capabilities,” Hasan boasted to Awlaki, and he donated $20,000 to $30,000 a year to Islamic “charities” outside the United States, some of it going to Pakistan.

• Hasan had “more unexplained connections to people being tracked by the FBI,” other than Awlaki, including some in Europe. One official characterized these as “Islamic extremists if not necessarily al Qaeda.”

• Duane Reasoner Jr., the 18-year-old Muslim convert whom Hasan mentored in Islam, calls himself a “extremist, fundamentalist, mujhadeen, Muslim” who outspokenly supports Awlaki, Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban, Omar Abdur Rahman (the blind sheikh) and Adam Gadahn (Al-Qaeda’s top American figure).

That’s the end of my excerpts of Pipes’ column. Here is the text from the Nov. 16 ABC story that Pipes is referencing concerning Nasan’s accusing his own patients of war crimes:

Investigators believe Hasan’s frustration over the failure of the Army to pursue what he regarded as criminal acts by U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan may have helped to trigger the shootings.

“The Army may not want to admit it, and you may not hear much about it, but it was very big for him,” said one of the federal investigators on the task force collecting evidence of the crime.

His last effort to get the attention of military investigators came on Nov. 2, three days before his alleged shooting spree, according to the reports.

Colonel Anthony Febbo at Fort Hood reportedly told investigators he was twice contacted by Hasan, on Nov. 2 and a week earlier in October, about the question of whether he could legally provide information on “war crimes” he had learned in the course of psychiatric counseling he provided soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Col. Febbo told ABC News he could not comment because of the on-going investigation.

His supervisor in the Department of Psychiatry, Captain Naomi Surman, told investigators that Hasan raised similar issues with her in conversations in October, according to documents reviewed by ABC News.

Captain Surman told investigators that Hasan had formally contacted military prosecutors to report patients he was evaluating, according to people briefed on the exchange. She said Hasan signed his e-mails with “Praise Be to Allah.” Legal analysts say psychiatrists are strictly bound by the rules of patient confidentiality except in cases where they might become aware of crimes about to be committed.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 20, 2009 09:37 AM | Send