Thirteen Expendable US Soldiers - Fort Hood Shooter Tried to Contact al Qaeda, U.S. intelligence knew...

Thirteen 'Government Issue' humans dead, so the U.S. intelligence community could stalk the now-mythical snipe al Qaeda.

H/t: The Gates of Hell

U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case told ABC News.

According to the officials, the Army was informed of Hasan’s contact, but it is unclear what, if anything, the Army did in response.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said that he requested the CIA and other intelligence agencies brief the committee on what was known, if anything, about Hasan by the U.S. intelligence community, only to be refused...

In Full with linkage to more

Also see this post at "Tremble The Devil" for a little forensic psychology and a comparison to another 'Joker' in the deck:

In one of the more pivotal scenes of The Dark Knight, Alfred descends into a strictly ordered halogen-lit Batcave as Bruce Wayne is doggedly patching himself up. After helping his employer with some stitching, Alfred realizes that Master Bruce doesn't fully comprehend this new halcyon violence that the Joker has brought to Gotham City:

Alfred: A long time ago, I was in Burma, my friends and I were working for the local government. They were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones. But their caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. So we went looking for the stones. But in six months, we never found anyone who traded with him. One day I saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing them away.

Bruce Wayne: Then why steal them?

Alfred: Because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

It's a fantastic scene from a cinematic standpoint, but a problem occurs when you pull the Joker out of the movie as one crazy-ass allegory for chaos and death. And especially when you make the leap of trying to fit terrorism into the framework provided by the Joker, to use the Joker's rubric on terrorists.

No one better proves this than the Ft. Hood shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan.

Because we lose any chance of gaining useful insight when we label Hasan a terrorist, stuffing him into a box of our choosing. Instead of trying to see the box that he saw himself in, and carefully crafted for himself...

Details at "Tremble the Devil" by... well... 'no name'... but impeccable 'creds'.

Anonymous received his undergraduate degree from Harvard, where he studied Comparative Middle Eastern Government under some of the university’s most renowned professors and minored in Arabic

He was employed by the Department of Defense for five-years, and worked in some of the DoD's most sensitive and salient missions.

He finished his career in Counterterrorism, where he produced analysis on some of the most ruthless and well-trained terrorists in the world.

He left to write Tremble the Devil, to help every American understand the true face of terrorism.