Maj. Hasan Nidal has made a name for himself that will go down in American history along with the likes of John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, James Earl Ray, the Columbine killers, and etc and so on, ad nausea.
Already it is being batted about in the media that he suffered PRE-traumatic Stress Disorder, or that he was reacting to harassment for being Muslim. And we can be sure that there will be other explanations thrown around, too.
And we can already see that somehow, in some way not yet clear, he was indeed living some kind of wounded life-residing in a rundown $300 a month apartment while earning a salary of 90k a year. We already know as well that he was of the oft recognized in the annals of heinous crime 'loner' personality type, and that he'd been collapsing into the kind of religiosity that any trained mental health professional recognizes as the harbinger of a personality in full scale decline.
I for one am glad he survived his suicide/homicide mission, as that will be punishment at least a little adequate for his massive theft of life and the well being of his survivors. What I know not to expect is any kind of statement from him that will cast light onto his motives, or help us make sense of it all. At some point there will be a statement extracted from him, and I am willing to bet $5 right now that it will be inscrutable, hyper-religious gibberish full of paranoia and self fulfilling prophecy. Clearly, he had somehow worked himself around to a perceived state of victim-hood.
As I have discovered from my three decades in the practice of psychotherapy, when a person sees himself exclusively as a victim, he has freed himself to perpetrate. Hasan Nidal has given the most extreme example of this I've ever seen. This is also the same logic used by any of the fundamentalist and/or homicidal nuts we've seen over the last several decades as rationale for their idiotic solutions to the problems of how differing peoples can co-exist.
Each time a hyper-religious fundamentalist resorts to terrorist tactics, what he fails to see is that he places others of his faith in greater peril by arousing our suspicions about them. I think back to a plane flight I took just a couple days ago when a couple of olive skinned, black bearded young men boarded my flight a few rows ahead of me, and I felt my stomach lurch involuntarily.
The problem we face with Hasan Nidal is how to avoid reaching for explanations or rationales, as none of any worth will emerge, and instead treat his actions for what they were: expressions of human evil.
Those who are most certain that their actions are certified by Divinity are most certainly those who are committing evil....and Nidal should be dealt with as an evildoer. Nothing more, nothing less.
But how to deal with those who continued to certify him for service? When he gave his Grand Rounds lecture in 2008, and the topic was not mental illness but Islam and its current state of siege, how did his superiors not recognize someone who should not be allowed to treat the emotionally and psychologically wounded?
To me, that is the real brain twister.
