Academic

BLINDNESS: Major Hasan: ?Star Officer.? Every branch of the military issued a final report on the?

By Glenn Reynolds

BLINDNESS: Major Hasan: “Star Officer.” Every branch of the military issued a final report on the Fort Hood massacre. Not a single one mentioned radical Islam. “For the superiors in charge of Hasan’s training at Walter Reed and his two years at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, the taboo was of a more complicated order?one that required elaborately inventive analyses through which Hasan’s stated beliefs, ominous pronouncements, and evident unconcern with standards of behavior required of an officer could all be represented as singular virtues, proof of his exceptional value to the Army. It could not have been easy. Still, they managed. . . . A resident who didn’t represent the diversity value that Hasan did as a Muslim would have faced serious consequences had he behaved half as disturbingly. Here was a world in which Hasan was untouchable, in which all that was grim and disturbing in him was transformed. He was a consistently mediocre performer, ranking in the lowest 25% of his class, but to his evaluators, he was an officer of unique talents.”

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on February 16, 2011 (boomark / email).