I’m going to do something I’m not accustomed to doing. I’m going to give kudos to the CBS Evening News.
Specifically, I’m going to do it for their story this evening that puts today’s Fort Hood shootings into a larger context by mentioning three similar incidents that have occurred there within the past eighteen years — including one that happened this May:
October 16, 1991: A 35-year-old civilian drives a pickup truck into a Fort Hood cafeteria and fatally shoots 23 people wounding 20 more before killing himself. [PW notes: Technically, it was in Killeen, a military town that calls itself "the home of Ft. Hood" and is frequented by military personnel from the base, which surrounds it on three sides.] It was the deadliest shooting rampage in American history until the Virginia Tech Massacre.
July 18, 2009: Thirty-year-old soldier from Wisconsin is shot and killed by a bullet fired during a party at Fort Hood. A fellow soldier is charged with the murder.
Sept. 8, 2008; A 1st Lieutenant goes looking for missing military equipment at an apartment near Fort Hood is shot and killed by a solider from Alabama, who then turns the gun on himself.
Furthermore, as this CBS News video story notes, Fort Hood’s not the only US military base to have a history of violence, especially in recent years.
And guess what? Most of these killings have been done by guys who weren’t named "Malik". However, this inconvenient truth won’t stop people like Atlas Shrugs’ Pamela Oshry Geller from urging the US versions of pogroms against Muslims.



3 Comments




I happened to drive past Ft. Hood this PM–around 4 PM. It was locked down and cops were everywhere. Wondering what was happening, I turned on radio and scanned to find some news. Hard to find up there, due to the high density of religious stations. One such station, as I scanned past, was a station on the Catholic Broadcasting network. The host asked his guest “Have muslims infiltrated our american military?”. wondering ‘wtf’, I scanned on to find the news and finally heard the story.
Regardless of where this story goes, it is going to provoke absolutely crazy lines of “thought” among pundits and public.
Phoenix, Arizona’s Violent History
thanks, PW!!! I fear more incidents are going to start popping like popcorn sadly. The statistics on desertions, suicides, homicides, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse are staggering, as well as the colossal nerve of the number of re-deployments going on.
I wrote a diary about reasons not to escalate Afghanistan and list some tragic statistics.
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/11560
Thanks for your larger context view. How cruel to cherry pick this admittedly horrifying event and use it to ramp up even more anti-Muslim desensitization. This guy was supposed to be a therapy shock absorber for burned out soldiers, and I am sure had his own “compassion” fatigue … and then to find out he is being deployed for the first time.
I read Scott Peck’s People of the Life book and in one chapter he addresses the MyLai massacre of what stress can do to the so-called functional.