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But Hasan may be the new terrorist template that fuses psychological damage with jihadist ideology. The most obvious and ominous evidence points to a now familiar pattern: alienated individuals who don't have to graduate from al-Qaeda training camps to embrace their mission and means. When an Army officer is reported to proudly call himself a Muslim first, an American second; when he appears at a public-health seminar with the PowerPoint presentation "Why the War on Terror Is a War on Islam"; when he applauds the killing of a U.S. soldier by a Muslim convert at an Arkansas recruitment center; and when he is caught corresponding with a radical imam in Yemen who has called on all Muslims to kill American soldiers in Iraq, you wonder just how brightly the red lights had to flash before anyone was willing to stop and ask some questions.
Hasan's early life offers few clues to what came later. He was born in Virginia to Palestinian parents who had chased the American Dream from the West Bank to Roanoke. They opened a couple of restaurants and a convenience store and had great hopes for their three sons--which did not include their eldest joining the Army, even if just as a way to get a free education. Hasan graduated from Virginia Tech with honors in biochemistry, then went to medical school, where, an uncle told the Los Angeles Times, he decided to major in psychiatry after he fainted while watching a baby being born.
At that point, his fanaticism did not extend past cheering on his Washington Redskins. He did, however, regularly attend services at the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring, Md., helped at its homeless shelter and even applied to an annual matrimonial center that acts as a kind of matchmaking service. He described himself in his application as "quiet and reserved until more familiar with person. Funny, caring and personable."
"He wanted a woman who prayed five times a day and wears a hijab," the former imam Faizul Khan told the New York Times, "and maybe the women he met were not complying with those things." It was after his parents died that Hasan became more conspicuously devout. At Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he completed his psychiatric training, he was reportedly reprimanded for trying to convert patients to Islam, while castigating those with drug and alcohol issues for their "unholy" behavior. As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan unfolded, he asserted the right of Muslim Americans to conscientiously object to fighting; his relatives claimed he offered to repay the cost of his medical education in exchange for release from his obligations.