EDITORIAL: Few answers on Fort Hood shootings

Thursday’s shooting at the Fort Hood, Texas, Army post is the deadliest shooting on an American military base in U.S. history.

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a 39-year-old from Virginia, was the culprit, and the incident left 12 people dead and 31 wounded.

The details of the shooting are still murky, and we urge everybody to withhold judgment until all the facts are in.

As of the writing of this editorial, motive was unclear, but the shooter is alive, so there is a chance for some answers. What we do know raises disturbing questions.

We know that Hasan transferred in July from Walter Reed Medical Center. We know he was given a poor performance evaluation there.

We also know that Hasan was about to be deployed overseas.

So, how was someone who received a poor performance evaluation at Walter Reed ready to be deployed overseas only about four months later?

We also know that Hasan was an Army psychiatrist, which doesn’t bode well for the Army’s judgment. Bad enough when a regular soldier goes on a rampage. Worse when that soldier is someone
responsible for other soldiers’ mental health.

We also know that Hasan was a Muslim, which, of course, is going to raise the specter of terrorism and extremism in the minds of many.

We also know that Hasan’s name showed up on radical Internet postings, that he required counseling as a medical student and that he didn’t approve of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What we have is a picture of a man who appears mentally disturbed and not dedicated to the wars in which his country engaged. But this is just a picture.

Two days have passed since the shooting and to rely too much on sketchy information without proper reflection and investigation would be an insult to the truth.

Investigators will get to the bottom of this, more details will emerge and hopefully we will all eventually understand what happened at Fort Hood.

And at the very least, the Army will have to answer how this man was able to get to his position in the military branch. If nothing else, we can say that something was not right with him, and that is
something the Army should have realized sooner.