Army ordered Hasan into lecture series on Islam

The Army realized that Major Nidal Hasan had reached some sort of crisis point last year, but as the Washington Post reports today, they deliberately avoided a determination of danger that would have led them to separate Hasan from the service.  Instead, they sent him to a lecture series on Islam in the hope that it might clear up Hasan’s “delusional” thinking on his religion.  None of Hasan’s fellow psychiatrists at Walter Reed thought he was dangerous, but they almost willed themselves not to ask the real questions:

Army psychiatrists at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who supervised Maj. Nidal M. Hasan’s work as a psychiatric fellow tried to turn his growing preoccupation with religion and war into something productive by ordering him to attend a university lecture series on Islam, the Middle East and terrorism, according to a Walter Reed staff member familiar with Hasan’s medical training. …

The idea that Hasan attend the lectures, which he did late last year or early this year, came up during discussions among the psychiatric staffs of the hospital and the Army’s medical university about what was perceived as Hasan’s lack of productivity and his constant interest in Muslims whose religious beliefs conflicted with their military duties.

“You’re at an institution of higher learning. He seems to want to do work in an area no one knows anything about,” the staff member, who also requested anonymity because he had not been authorized to speak publicly, said of the order. “You don’t want to close him down just because it’s different.”

During those discussions, psychiatrists commented in passing about whether Hasan could be delusional or hurt fellow soldiers, but did not think he was dangerous and never took steps to have him evaluated either for mental fitness or as a security threat. On the contrary, his demeanor was regarded as gentle and polite, and he often responded to inquiries about his well-being by saying, “I’m doing well, thank God.”

“He had his struggles, and he embraced his religion with such intensity that one wondered whether he” could have suffered from a form of “delusion,” the staffer said. He cited as an example — without speaking of Hasan in particular — the belief that the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are against Muslims rather than against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein’s government and then insurgents in Iraq.

Contrary to his family’s statements, the Army says that Hasan never attempted to leave the service or declare himself a conscientious objector.  Had he tried to leave altogether, the Army probably would have refused the request, but they would also have been unlikely to promote him to major, as they did last May.  Even with a shortage of majors in the medical service, the Army would have looked on such a request very unfavorably to someone’s career.

Obviously the Army didn’t intend to keep a dangerous nutcase near its soldiers, but the decision-making described by the Post shows the dangers of political correctness.  The people closest to Hasan knew something was wrong with him; he repeatedly made statements about the primacy of his Muslim identity over his duty as an Army officer as well as his belief that the US was waging war on Islam.  Yet the Army was keen to show that they didn’t want to “shut him down.”  Instead, they decided in true patronizing fashion to show Hasan that they knew more about Islam than he did, a mission whose success can be judged in the events that unfolded last week.

It looks as though the Army was more interested in diversity than security.  How else would one explain the effort to keep and promote a psychiatrist whose colleagues thought him “delusional”?  Even if the delusional behavior wasn’t dangerous — and obviously it was — why would psychiatric professionals want a delusional doctor treating soldiers in a combat zone?  Do psychiatrists normally allow patients to be subjected to delusional colleagues, or does that only happen when they get intimidated by religious delusions?  And how would that lecture series have “cured” his delusional thinking?

I suspect that any other kind of “delusional” thinking would have landed Hasan into a treatment center as a patient rather than a provider.  Why didn’t that happen here?  The Army wanted to protect its diversity rather than its soldiers, even if only from a psychiatrist who needed a psychiatrist much more than a combat-zone assignment.

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