Hasan Correctness Psychology
by Donald Devine
Issue 144 - November 25, 2009

Everyone is so reasonable and correct these days. When President Barack Obama held his first Rose Garden news conference following the horrendous killing of 13 and wounding of 40 other Americans by Maj. Nadal Malik Hasan the previous day at Ft. Hood Texas, he announced:

This morning I met with FBI Director Mueller and the relevant agencies to discuss their ongoing investigation into what caused one individual to turn his gun on fellow servicemen and women. We don't know all of the answers yet, and I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all of the facts.

That was pretty cool and balanced considering the horrific events.

President Obama had earlier tried to convince Cardinal Francis George of Chicago that they deep-down agreed on abortion in the face of the president’s support of a bill the Catholic official had just said was “wrong.” Liberal columnist Richard Cohen was amazed President Obama could say Afghanistan was a “war of necessity” and then hesitate sending the troops his appointee said were necessary. Stolid centrist David Broder was flabbergasted at Mr. Obama on healthcare: both assuring those already covered by insurance and Medicare seniors that nothing would change but telling the public at large and his base there would be “change we need not fear.” NPR could not ignore that the president both praised free trade in South Korea and was not pressing Congress to approve the deal signed two years before.

President Obama was by no means alone in having it all ways, trying to be correct with everyone. Army Chief Gen. George Casey, while promising action against terrorists, warned his subordinates not to infer anything from the fact Maj. Hasan had yelled the Islamic Jihad war cry “ Allahu Akbar" (Allah is Great) before opening fire. The widespread reluctance of the mainstream media to state the obvious was only exceeded by Time's Joe Klein who considered any mention of Hasan’s religion as akin to "odious attempts by Jewish extremists . . . to argue that the massacre perpetrated by Nidal Hasan was somehow a direct consequence of his Islamic beliefs." But it is the Army psychiatrists who really take the prize for correctness.

In a marvelous exception to the general obscuration (rightists take note), National Public Radio’s Daniel Zwerlding went to Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Washington where Maj. Hasan was previously stationed and asked the right questions. He found that “Hasan spent six years as a psychiatrist at Walter Reed, beginning in 2003, and he had a fellowship at USUHS until shortly before he went to Fort Hood in the summer of 2009. A committee of officials from both places regularly meets once a month to discuss pressing topics surrounding the psychiatrists and other mental health professionals who train and work at the institutions.” He continued,

When a group of key officials gathered in the spring of 2008 for their monthly meeting in a Bethesda, Md. office, one of the leading — and most perplexing — items on their agenda was: What should we do about Hasan? Hasan had been a trouble spot on officials' radar since he started training at Walter Reed, six years earlier. Several officials confirm that supervisors had repeatedly given him poor evaluations and warned him that he was doing substandard work. Both fellow students and faculty were deeply troubled by Hasan's behavior — which they variously called disconnected, aloof, paranoid, belligerent, and schizoid. The officials say he antagonized some students and faculty by espousing what they perceived to be extremist Islamic views. His supervisors at Walter Reed had even reprimanded him for telling at least one patient that "Islam can save your soul." [By Spring 2009] One official involved in the conversations had reportedly told colleagues that he worried that if Hasan deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, he might leak secret military information to Islamic extremists. Another official reportedly wondered aloud to colleagues whether Hasan might be capable of committing fratricide, like the Muslim U.S. Army sergeant who, in 2003, killed two fellow soldiers and injured 14 others by setting off grenades at a base in Kuwait.

So, why did they not do something? They did. After six years of “trouble” and “repeatedly” bad evaluations, he was promoted from captain to major in May 2009. Why? As Zwerlding explained, the psychiatric staff did not want to appear judgmental and wanted to demonstrate to Hasan that they were understanding. The psychiatric officials “worried they might be ‘discriminating’ against Hasan because of his seemingly extremist Islamic beliefs.” A member of the medical staff told the Washington Post that Hasan’s teachings on Islam were suspicious but “ You don't want to close him down just because it's different.”

The more Hasan failed, the more the psychiatric staff felt they had to prove compassion and pass him. But they did do something more. As good bureaucrats, they knew that “Walter Reed and most medical institutions have a cumbersome and lengthy process for expelling doctors, involving hearings and potential legal battles. As a result, sources say, key decision-makers decided it would be too difficult, if not unfeasible, to put Hasan on probation and possibly expel him from the program.” So what did these government officials do? They transferred him to Ft. Hood. Why? Zwerlding explained to an interviewer it was because they knew Ft. Hood had the largest contingent of psychiatrists in the Army and that the good ones could pick up the slack of the poor performer Hasan. There was some thought too that with so many other psychiatrists maybe someone would decide to help him.

But no one would put anything on the record because they did not want to punish “a member of the team.” So Hassan was sent to perform soldier readiness evaluations. We now know the deadly consequences at Ft. Hood of playing this bureaucratic game. Moreover, even with the largest team of psychiatrists , a “resiliency center” and a much-ballyhooed free cookies and soft music approach, there have been 75 suicides at Ft. Hood since the Iraq war began, one of the highest rates in the Army. Separately, the Army has just reported that it only has 43 psychiatrists in Afghanistan and could use 60 more to assure the soldiers there have ready access to help. To the degree it relies upon psychotherapy, here is the kind of “help” they might expect according to a new two-year study of U.S. clinical psychologists by three of their own, Timothy Baker, Richard McFall and Varda Shoham:

Many psychotherapists openly state that scientific research is largely irrelevant to their practice. Most say that their clinical techniques largely reflect their own insights and experience; they tend not to use the most effective types of treatments available; and they admit to little in the way of scientific training. For instance, very few clinical psychologists -- about 15 percent -- use what's called exposure therapy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. This is an intervention in which individuals with PTSD are trained to imagine or experience feared situations and stimuli (such as memories of a traumatic event) until their fear subsides. There is strong evidence that this treatment is highly effective, but seven in 10 clinicians, according to a recent report in the journal Behaviour Research & Therapy, have not been trained to use it. This sort of disconnect exists in other areas of treatment as well: for depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and alcoholism. Clinicians continue to use treatments that have less research support. We believe that graduate education is largely to blame for this dismal situation. Graduate programs in psychology do not select science-oriented students to begin with and do not train students to understand and use science once they are enrolled.

The good doctors think the situation is redeemable but it will take years at best. A more objective view is that reform is unlikely. Psychiatry has some different tools than psychology but to the extent it utilizes psychoanalysis rather than medicine or surgery, similar limits apply. Analysis and counseling remain subjective – relying on “their own instincts and experience.” Psychoanalysis was once thought to be a secular replacement for religion but it has turned to be neither effective nor scientific nor even the main tool of advanced psychiatry today.

Assuming psychiatry can do what it cannot do is dangerous for institutions, as was discovered by the Catholic Church when it allowed sexual abusers to return to duty after psychoanalysts had pronounced them ready – before they decided to return to a religious orientation. The Hassan affair should be a similar wake-up call to the U.S. military. It is worse than normal correctness among the population. Relying on a profession that has no objective standards inevitably turns to calling evil “ seemingly extremist” or labeling true madness merely “different” and turning to political correctness to mask the confusion.

While conceding that political correctness might be part of the problem, The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger says there is nothing that can be done about it. He is most concerned that investigators now fear prosecution after the president authorized Attorney General Eric Holder to decide whether to pursue CIA interrogators for possible torture. Henninger instead wants to enforce the Patriot Act. But the “key” Army psychiatrists did not fear prosecution but only being considered unreasonable or intolerant. No matter the guarantees against prosecution of or additional training for the FBI, CIA, NSA or military: if political correctness is not confronted, officials will not act. Indeed, as the facts emerge, they will undoubtedly show that political and bureaucratic correctness was also the cause for FBI inaction in the face of Hasan’s known communications with radical clerics.

There is good reason to wish that a president would be subtle enough to know that things are not always black and white and that balance, tolerance, synthesis and harmony are positive attributes of leaders and even components of basic human intelligence. It is likewise proper to be considerate of others’ beliefs. But there are some limits as to how many contradictory themes can be held simultaneously and to which problems can be correctly overlooked and which safely cannot.

At some point, clarity becomes imperative. Truth must ultimately trump compassion and open-mindedness. Political correctness cannot of course be eliminated by legal decree but rational people can unite in agreeing that what people think has consequences, whether denied by pseudo-scientific psychiatric bureaucrats, an over-protective media, or smooth-talking presidents of the United States.

Donald Devine, the editor of Conservative Battleline Online, was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 under Ronald Reagan and is Senior Scholar at Bellevue University’s Center for American Vision and Values.

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