The New York times describes the tragedy at Fort Hood, Texas. Nidal Malik Hasan is the suspect who shot and killed thirteen soldiers at the Fort Hood Military Base. All of the soldiers that Hasan killed were about to be deployed to Afghanistan. Hasan was a military psychiatrist that had a Muslim upbringing and background. Before the shootings he reached out and sent twenty messages to Anwar al-Awlaki, who use to be a spiritual leader at a mosque in suburban Virginia. Anwar al-Awlaki has extreme Muslim views where he believes in killing all infidels which are people who are not Muslim. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had knowledge of Hasan reaching out Muslim extremists before the shootings occurred. The Federal Bureau of Investigation dropped its case against Hasan because he had a good excuse on why he was reaching out to Awlaki. Hasan said that he was conducting a research project at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. On Monday following the attack Mr. Awlaki praised Nidal Malik Hasan on his website by saying, “Hasan did the right thing in attacking soldiers preparing to deploy for Afghanistan and Iraq.”
The Authors David Johnston and Scott Shane are portraying this article as a terrible thing that happened. In the article they focus a lot on how the Federal Bureau of Investigation handled everything before and after the shootings. The authors seem confused on how the FBI knew Hasan had contact with a radical Muslim overseas, but they did not do anything about it. Hopefully the FBI will learn from this mistake and do more investigation in the future to prevent future radical Muslims from attacking innocent Americans.

http://cnn.mv/2009/US/11/05/fort.hood.suspect/index.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/us/10inquire.html?scp=5&sq=muslim%20violence&st=cse