Remember, remember, the Fifth of NovemberThe Gunpowder Treason and plotI know of no reason why the Gunpowder TreasonShould ever be forgot.--Popular verse, seventeenth century England.
By now you've all know that poem, and you've all heard of Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who staged his own Gunpowder Treason yesterday at the Ft. Hood, Texas, Soldier Readiness Center, killing thirteen and wounding thirty, including the police office who eventually stopped him, Sgt. Kimberly Munley. All but two of the wounded are out of the hospital,
according to USA Today. Major Hasan remains in the coma Sgt. Munley put him, attached to a ventilator at the Brook Medical Army Center in San Antonio,
according to the Press Trust of India. (Nothing says the Brits once ruled our country like spelling “center” with that extra “e”).
It's difficult to write about one of these things as the reports come in. Our Glorious Leader has already warned us against jumping to conclusions. Mosques everywhere within the Empire are battening down the hatches, fearing reprisals from “mainstream” (no one dare call them “white”) Americans.
The New York Times reports:
When the shooting began, members of three units of Army reservists in the Combat Stress Control Detachments were inside a medical and services center at Fort Hood signing medical forms and getting last-minute vaccinations before they went overseas.
There is no evidence that Major Hasan singled out his fellow combat stress counselors, but an Army official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation, said Major Hasan had been scheduled to deploy with the three Reserve units.
Hasan, the son of Palestinian immigrants who owned a restaurant in Roanoke, VA, graduated with honors from Virginia Tech in 1995. He joined the service, got his commission, and received his medical degree from Uniformed Services University, Bethesda, in 2003, just in time to serve his residency at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He became a psychological counselor for wounded soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, and stayed on until July of this year, when he transferred to Ft. Hood, the largest military base in the world.
Sometime in August, Hasan legally purchased two FN Herstal Tactical Five-seveN pistols from Guns Galore, a self-evidently-named gunshop in Killeen, Texas, the town Ft. Hood supports. FN Herstal's website describes the Five-seveN (which comes “NATO Recommended”) as “Well balanced, with smooth contours and no protruding parts,” needlessly insisting that it “will instinctively be handled correctly and is extremely easy to use.”
All the classic hallmarks of a public murder rampage are present in the absolute deluge of press accounts (15000 in Google News alone). The initial rumors of four, five, six shooters (no doubt all part of a secret Muslim plot to allow President Obama to take away our guns). The (attempted) suicide by cop. The terse statements of local authority figures. The rush to exploit tragedy by national ones. The fetishistization of the victims. The shocked insistence by co-workers, neighbors, family members and community religious leaders that Hasan was a dedicated professional, a quite man who turned to religion for solace after his parent's deaths in 1998 and 2001, attended Friday prayers in uniform, and toured his apartment building days before his rampage giving away personal belongings.
The standard, disingenuous “Why?” is already under debate on comment boards and talking head shows across the media landscape. As NPR noted in their own, alright-but-not-great report, two narratives are emerging: Maj. Hasan-as-crazed-Muslim-extremist and Maj. Hasan-as-crazed-PTSD-psychologist. Lost in the babel is any stable picture of Maj. Hasan-the-dedicated-professional who was “performing quite well” according to Col. Kimberly Kesling, deputy commander of clinical services at Darnall Army Medical Center, Ft. Hood's hospital. At the bottom of a sudden media dogpile, Col. Kesling is already rushing to distance herself from Hasan. “You would hope you never know someone who would have such a demon.”
S. Ward Casscells, a former Assistant Secretary for Health Affairs, came close to asking an impertinent question of USA Today (they being too chicken to ask it themselves):
“You're entitled to ask, was he moved to Fort Hood because he wasn't doing well at Walter Reed and they thought the fresh start would help?' " he said.
“Talking to people who knew him," Casscells said, "no one thinks that this was (post traumatic stress), and they are skeptical that he was subject to religious harassment.”
“That is not tolerated in the military. The military will look at all this closely and decide if there is any mental or physical illness, whether this is just a lonely guy with a remote personality who got a bad officer evaluation report and lost the confidence of his peers, maybe withdrew into religion as solace. What could we have missed? How could we do better?”
Every one seems to be missing the fact that, less than three years ago, Walter Reed was synonymous with bureaucratic inefficiency, crumbling infrastructure, criminally-neglectful mistreatment of patients, and the complicity of top brass in concealing all of the above. Two and half years can seem like a lifetime in America, but thanks to the internet, yesterday becomes today. Or March 1, 2007, as the case may be. That was the day the Washington Post reported:
A procession of Pentagon and Walter Reed officials expressed surprise last week about the living conditions and bureaucratic nightmares faced by wounded soldiers staying at the D.C. medical facility. But as far back as 2003, the commander of Walter Reed, Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, who is now the Army's top medical officer, was told that soldiers who were wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan were languishing and lost on the grounds, according to interviews.
Lt. Gen. Kiley resigned from his position as Army Surgeon General eleven days after that story saw print. The day after, March 2, Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA's 30th) of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sent a letter to Major General George Weightman, the man who replaced Kiley as Walter Reed's commander (and was himself temporarily replaced by Kiley after being relieved of command on March 1, 2007). In the letter, Waxman informed Gen. Weightman to prepare himself for questions regarding an internal Army memo that fell into the Committee's hands. Written by Walter Reed Garrison Commander Peter Garibaldi in September, 2006.
The memo (titled: “Challenges Concerning the Base Operations A-76 Study and resulting Reduction in Force (RIF) at Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC)”) details the sad story of life inside Walter Reed from its worker's perspective. “It appears that over the past six years,” Waxman wrote,
the Defense Department has been engaged in a systematic effort to replace federal workers at Walter Reed with private companies for a host of functions, including facilities management, patient care, and even guard post duty entrance. This effort occurred under the A-76 process, which is shorthand for OMB Circular A-76.
The A-76 process was an element of Vice President Gore's reinventing government initiative. The idea behind A-76 is to force federal employees to compete with the private sector for the jobs being performed by the federal employees.
Then Florida happened, and Our (former) Glorious Leader, George W. Bush, ramped A-76 up full blast under the newly-rebranded rubric of “competitive sourcing initiatives,” opening up federal jobs of all stripes to private contractors. Like IAP Worldwide Services.
IAP Worldwide Services is a private company owned by Cerberus Capital Management LP, an asset-management firm (a company that owns other companies) chaired by Bush-era Treasury Secretary John Snow. Former Kellogg Brown and Ruth operating officer Al Neffgen holds the chief executive post and ex-KBR VP Dave Swindle (couldn't make that name up if you tried) holds the company president's chair. IAP would go on to achieve infamy in 2005 for it's bungled, over-priced attempts to deliver ice to Hurricane Katrina victims.
But back to Waxman's story:
In September 2004, the Army determined that the in-house federal workforce at Walter Reed could perform support services at Walter Reed at a lower cost than the bid received from IAP Worldwide Services. IAP protested this determination. As a result of the protest, the Army Audit Agency was directed [by whom? Waxman doesn't say - D] to reevaluate the bid from the federal employees. It has been reported that the Army Audit Agency withdrew its certification of the employee bid and unilaterally raised the bid by $7 million, thereby making the employee bid higher than the contractor bid. The Army then reversed its determination and resolved the A-76 process in favor of IAP.
When the employees sought to appeal this ruling, they were not allowed to make their case. Alan King, the Deputy Garrison Commander at Walter Reed, filed a protest of the contract award with GAO, but under the A-76 rules in place at the time, federal employees had no standing to object to A-76 determinations. Consequently, there was no similar cost review of the IAP bid proposal.
By January, 2006, IAP received a five-year, $120 million contract from Walter Reed, with the transition from in-house to out-sourced scheduled to being in January of '07. That year must've seemed a year of absolute hell as skilled government employees, including “skilled maintenance personnel and workers with specific knowledge of Walter Reed's systems and infrastructure,” left Walter Reed in droves, rather than wait for the inevitable round of lay-offs and replacements. By January, 2007, a trickle of twos and threes – an early retirement here, a change in position there – had become a flood, leaving Walter Reed with one-sixth of its original support staff workforce – maybe 60 people, out of an original 300. IAP fired those sixty and replaced them with fifty of their own people on February 3 when it took over management of the facility, but that was a little more than a panacea. Not even too little, too late. These were Dark Times at Walter Reed, when already-stressed infrastructure crumbled under incompetent new management and someone began to shoot his or her mouth off to the Washington Post about the mold on walls, the roaches, and the injured soldiers pulling self-assigned “guard duty” shifts, chasing away the neighborhood drug dealers working nearby street corners.
And is that a brown-skinned, thirty-something Major in a smock we see, making his rounds through all this chaos? Visiting soldiers no longer physically capable of visiting his office (assuming he still has one): men and women with missing arms, legs and faces living in darkness their own filth because the people who fix the lights and change the bedsheets are AWOL this week. Or this month. Imagine you're a young doctor, hot out of med school, interning at a place with a famous name, and all you want is to help soldiers with minds and bodies ground up by the grist mill of war. It'd be like getting up and going to hell every morning. Reports that Hasan received a bad performance review at Walter Reed (if true) should come as no surprise at all. Could you spend years at Walter Reed listening to soldier's stories? Could you then pick up and move to Texas? How is Texas a “fresh” start?
As Mark Ames has already noted (in a much better article than this one) Ft. Hood is no Disneyland.
For one thing, it holds the record for most soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan — 685 so far — and though we don’t know the figures, it’s reasonable to assume that Fort Hood is responsible for a sizable percentage of the tens or hundreds of thousands killed in those countries since America invaded them. Over the same period, 75 soldiers have committed suicide at Fort Hood, ten in 2009 alone — the highest of any base. In just one weekend in 2005, two soldiers who’d returned from Iraq killed themselves in separate incidents. Last year, in something right out of Full Metal Jacket, Specialist Jody Michael Wirawan, 21, of the 1st Cavalry Division, shot and killed his lieutenant, then killed himself when police arrived. And life in Killeen isn’t much nicer: it has one of the nation’s lowest median incomes and highest crime rates. Earlier this year, a 20-year-old Fort Hood soldier was killed by a Killeen cop who claimed he killed the soldier after being dragged underneath his SUV; the dead soldier’s mother filed a lawsuit claiming that the cop was notoriously out-of-control and violent, and that he shot her son while the car was pulled over.
In 1991, George Hennard Jr. killed twenty-three people at a local diner after driving his pickup through the wall, the deadliest rampage in American history...until Seung-Hui Cho shot up Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007.
Our hearts go with the citizens of Killeen and the families of all the victims. We owe it to them to understand why these things happen, in the hope (infinitesimal as it may seem) of preventing them from ever happening again. Understanding will be impossible as long as we engage in the process of separating victim from villain with a hard, fast line, and tossing epithets like "crazy" and "terrorist" around...as if we all agreed on their meaning. There is a deep malaise eating at the heart of our country, our culture and (I would argue) our civilization itself. Maj. Hasan is neither the first nor the most violent mass murderer of our history. Not even in the year-to-date.
On March 10, Michael Kenneth McLendon, a former police officer (who, like Hasan, "didn't last"), killed his mother, set her house on fire, and cut a bloody swath of mayhem across two south Georgia counties, Coffee and Geneva. Mad Mike killing ten people before turning the gun on himself in the parking lot of Reliable Metal Products, a factory where he'd once worked.
March 24: Convicted felon, Lovelle Mixon kills four Oakland police officers: two with an SKS, two with an AK-47.
April 4: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania resident Richard Poplawski used a bullet-proof vest, a .22 rifle, a semiautomatic pistol and...an AK-47...to hold off the Pittsburgh police for four hours, killing three officers.
April 30: Jiverly Antares Wong (or Voong) killed thirteen people at a Binghamton, New York American Civic Association center before turning the gun on himself (beating out Hasan on the sociopathic scoreboard).
June 10: James Wenneker von Brunn walked into the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington and shoot a security guard.
August 4: George Sodini shoot three women at an LA Fitness in Collier Township, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh, before turning the gun on himself.
And, as Kurt Vonnegut would say, so it goes.
