{"id":18981,"date":"2009-11-07T11:43:30","date_gmt":"2009-11-07T16:43:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=18981"},"modified":"2009-11-07T17:46:43","modified_gmt":"2009-11-07T22:46:43","slug":"the-human-factor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/the-human-factor\/","title":{"rendered":"The Human Factor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear Friend and Reader:<\/p>\n

There stands a conceptual barrier between what happened at Fort Hood on Thursday, and classifying it as terrorism. This is a serious problem, and if confronted, it’s going to call into question all of our myths and delusions about who and what a terrorist is, why they act, and why the United States is supposedly at war against them.<\/p>\n

The futility of that war is quite apparent now, since an act of terrorism has come home to a US military base, perpetrated by someone who holds the status of officer in our own services; who was the product of our own training academies; and who was born and raised on our own home ground. If we’re paying attention, we will start to ask whether we’re training and using our own armed forces as terrorists in just the way we think of them as coming from other societies. On the most practical level, this is precisely what has happened. We still keep looking out there for the terrorist, with night vision goggles. Unless we classify Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan as an ‘outsider’ merely on the basis of his religious orientation, cultural background or genetic descent (rather than where he was born and bred, and what uniform he wore), we need to start looking for the enemy within ourselves. By all presumptions, this could never have happened. But borrowing from Gen. Turgidson of Dr. Strangelove<\/em>, we did not count on the human factor.<\/p>\n

My own instincts tell me this was all about the human factor. Such would include a sense of tribal injury associated with the war crimes being committed by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan; these wars are being fought under false pretenses, and nobody wants to say anything about that. It would include Hasan’s contact, working at Walter Reed, with many of the most severely injured, psychically damaged soldiers, Marines and officers returning from the fronts. These people are suffering mainly from having been put in the position to kill and risk their lives on the basis of a lie; of many lies. It would include the aspect of military life where people are put in that position, without being cut out for that kind of gruesome ‘work’.<\/p>\n

United States intelligence agencies have a security problem on their hands. They can’t be sure if this was not the work of a larger jihad movement, and they can make no assumptions. Imagine the terrifying prospect of an Islamist movement cropping up inside the US military, or already having been propagated. I think this is unlikely, but investigators and military strategists have their work cut out for them dealing with the implications of these possibilities. Even without an organized movement, more people who feel a similar way could be inspired to do what Hassan did.<\/p>\n

But what way would that be, exactly? Close to the edge, is what; feeling betrayed and deceived, but mostly, at one’s limit. We don’t readily admit how close to the edge how many people are; we don’t admit how close we often are. The line between sanity and madness is thinner than we admit. We still think of men, and soldiers in particular, as people capable of overriding or circumventing their emotions.\u00a0We are assuming that troops, that is, humans in uniform, can go through tour after tour of duty and not suffer any kind of breakdown of their sanity. We assume that, with the rest of society so close to the brink (i.e., the economic situations of many families of people serving in the military), that this will not take an emotional toll. Even scarier than the prospect of a jihad movement in the military is the prospect of many, many of its members being on the brink of their sanity; suffering horrendously but unable to say anything; and expected to go into battle zones and kill and die on the basis of a lie.<\/p>\n

\"Eric<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear Friend and Reader: There stands a conceptual barrier between what happened at Fort Hood on Thursday, and classifying it as terrorism. This is a serious problem, and if confronted, it’s going to call into question all of our myths and delusions about who and what a terrorist is, why they act, and why the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18981"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18981\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}