Major Hasan’s complicated life

Craig Nelson, Associate Editor

• Last Updated: November 15. 2009 9:37PM UAE / November 15. 2009 5:37PM GMT

One door opens and another closes: Alice Thompson, the manager of Major Nidal Hassan's apartment building in Killeen, Texas, at the entrance. Jerry Larson / AP

When the US army Major Nidal Hasan walked out of his apartment on November 5 with two loaded handguns, he left behind hints of a complicated life, apparently deeply at odds with itself.

According to reporters allowed to survey the one-room rental flat last week, there was a pair of desert camouflage trousers tossed across a storage bin. There were Jordanian and Israeli coins. There was a book called Dreams and Interpretations, by Dr Allamah Muhammed bin Sireen.

Amid the shards of a broken life, there was, perhaps, the most suggestive hint of all: a box of new business cards.

On the card Major Hasan’s medical credentials are listed but his military rank is not. Instead, next to “Psychiatrist,” are the abbreviations, “SoA (SWT).” SoA refers to “soldier of Allah” or “slave of Allah”, and “SWT” to the Arabic phrase meaning “glory to him, the exalted”.

Whose soldier was Major Hasan? Whose soldier did he want to be? These questions, with their undertones of dual loyalty, lay at the heart of investigation into why, according to scores of witnesses, the 39-year-old psychiatrist shot dead 13 people in a waiting room at Fort Hood army base in Texas, and wounded scores of others.

The questions also are percolating on the airwaves, the internet and in Congress, threatening to spill over into a public inquisition about the ultimate loyalties of America’s estimated 2.5 million Muslims.

The scare-mongering is likely to increase, when Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, goes on trial in a Manhattan courtroom, just blocks away from where the twin towers once stood.

In an attempt to score political points against the Obama administration, right-wing talking heads last week sought to magnify or caricature Major Hasan’s religious beliefs at the expense of a more complex portrayal.

Chris Plante, a radio talk-show host in the US capital, declared that liberals are “trying desperately to convince America” that Major Hasan was “just a crazy guy who spent too much time around deployed soldiers and caught [post-traumatic stress disorder] and ‘Oh, he happened to be a Muslim, but we should ignore that’.”

Aware that the question of Major Hasan’s allegiances is both toxic and contagious, the US president, Barack Obama, implored Congress on Saturday to “resist the temptation to turn this tragic event into the political theatre”. The stakes, he warned, “are far too high”.

That plea, however, showed no signs of dampening the eagerness of some politicians for holding public hearings on the shootings, starting on Thursday with a Senate session entitled “The Fort Hood Attack: A Preliminary Assessment.”

As investigators await a chance to question Major Hasan, his case has brought into sharp relief the issue of dual loyalty, a long-running phenomenon in US political life.

Historically, the accusation has been used to demonise non-English-speaking immigrants. The Second World War saw Japanese-Americans sent to internment camps; in California’s San Joaquin Valley, residents swore that Japanese growers were placing white caps over their vegetables not to protect them from frost but to guide kamikaze pilots towards US military bases.

At various times, non-Protestant Christians have been suspected of divided loyalty, too. In 1960, the presidential candidate John Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, was forced to face down fears, whipped up by his opponents, that if elected president, he would become a puppet of the Vatican. He won.

Today, in post 9/11 America, Muslims are not the only target of dual-loyalty suspicions. Those keen to prevent what they see as the dilution of “anglo” culture raise the spectre of Latin immigrants more devoted to their native land than their adopted country.

Jewish-Americans are another butt of dual-loyalty allegations. American Jews bridle at suggestions that they are more loyal to Israel than America and believe they have been subjected to unfair legal scrutiny since the 1980s, when Jonathan Pollard, a government intelligence analyst, was arrested and convicted on charges of espionage for Israel.

What has compounded the potency of the dual-loyalty charge in recent years is a change in the nature of spying against the United States.

Last year, a study commissioned by the US defence department found the primary motive for espionage against the United States was divided loyalty, usually on the part of naturalised citizens with roots in a foreign land. In previous years, money or devotion to communism was the main reason.

For US Muslims, the web is all the more tangled, for even as first and second-generation Americans are viewed more warily, the country’s intelligence agencies are recruiting heavily from this segment of the population to meet their desperate need for more Arabic and Chinese speakers.

History suggests that the notion of dual loyalty is mostly a canard. Most citizens, no matter how new, have no intention of selling out their country.

Furthermore, each person has not one or two but many loyalties – to their family, their country, their religious faith, their employer – and throughout most of US history, people have been allowed to have those allegiances. In other words, dual loyalty is as American as apple pie, McDonald’s and Law & Order reruns.

It is only when someone attempts to manipulate those loyalties for political purposes, or that a person is forced to choose among deeply held convictions, that the potential for trouble arises.

Could it be that Major Hasan is a horribly and tragically misguided soul who felt forced to choose between his loyalty to the army and his loyalty to the Umma? Or is he a mass murderer, a lonely misfit of a man who snapped due to the pressures of tending to the emotional scars of soldiers returning from combat in Afghanistan and Iraq? Or is he a terrorist, driven by religious zeal to kill those he saw as oppressors of his fellow Muslims? Or is he all three?

cnelson@thenational.ae