A failure to act

The last two months have seen two terrorist incidents in the US. In one case, the father of the terrorists had alerted US officials to the dangers posed by his son. In the other, the perpetrator had made his extremist views known to a roomful of army physicians. It is a remarkable social and, as John Stokes says, system failure that nothing was done with the information in either case.   There is a detailed piece in today’s Washington Post on the various clues offered up by Nidal Hasan, the man who opened fire on his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood. I was aware that Hasan had given a presentation in which he argued that Muslims in the US military should be able to opt out of wars against fellow Muslim, but I wasn’t aware that he a few months later he had publicly praised the heroism of suicide bombers.