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Attention turns to the accused killer, Major Nidal Hasan, a 39-year-old army psychiatrist. "The picture emerging of Hasan is of a man increasingly anguished over his imminent deployment to Afghanistan," NBC's Lester Holt told us. ABC's Brain Ross added that one of the soldiers he was counseling recently committed suicide. Hasan's friends and family were speculating that this death have been a "final straw."

Hasan's professional reputation was hardly stellar. ABC's Ross was told by unidentified "army officials" that he received a "poor evaluation" for his work at Walter Reed Army Hospital. CBS' David Martin, looking at the "debris of a military career gone horribly wrong," reported that Hasan's supervisors at Walter Reed found him having "difficulties." On NBC, Jim Miklaszewski noted that "army officials say he was a loner, reprimanded for launching into religious rants during counseling sessions for soldiers with combat stress. In most of his performance evaluations his commanders gave him sub-par ratings." Yet he was assigned to Fort Hood to go to war anyway: "The army is so short on psychiatrists, commanders may have chosen to overlook the warning signs."

Someone calling himself Nidal Hasan made an Internet posting six months ago praising Moslem suicide bombers as "heroic," CBS' Dean Reynolds pointed out: "If one suicide bomber can kill a hundred enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory." The post asserted an equivalence between falling on a grenade to save the lives of one's comrades and blowing oneself up to kill one's enemies. Reynolds stated that CBS News has confirmed that the poster and the psychiatrist are one and the same. So did Ross at ABC. NBC's Pete Williams was not so certain, limiting himself to reporting that the FBI is "looking into whether he wrote this blog posting…So far nothing proves that he wrote it."

Andrew Tyndall 11/10/09 6:32:36 pm

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