Allan C. Brownfeld

Allan C. Brownfeld is the author of five books, the latest of which is The Revolution Lobby (Council for Inter-American Security). He has been a staff aide to a U.S. vice president, members of Congress, and the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. He is associate editor of The Lincoln Review, and a contributing editor to Human Events, The St. Croix Review, and The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

Washington Is Dysfunctional - But Our Permanent Political Class Is Alive, Well, and Thriving

By any standard, Washington is increasingly dysfunctional. President Obama has not submitted a budget and Congress has not adopted a budget. Under our present sequester, government employees are losing one day of work a week, whether their roles are essential or not. Congress refuses to go to the trouble of differentiating. And now there are threats once again of closing the government if particular programs are not enacted. Congress left Washington for an August vacation, ignoring the country's vital business.

A new NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll shows that Congress' approval rating fell to an all-time low of 12 percent. If the government shuts down in the fall, it could go to zero. President Obama's approval rating is also in decline, now at 45 percent.

But in Washington itself, our permanent political class is alive and well. This summer's widely read book, This Town, by The New York Times' Mark Leibovich, helps to explain the reality - in which Democrats and Republicans, self-proclaimed "liberals" and "conservatives," work closely together - not to advance the public interest, but to promote their own.

In 1974, only 3 percent of retiring members of Congress became lobbyists. Today, that number is 42 percent for members of the House and 50 percent for Senators. There is widespread inter-connectedness at the top in Washington. Alleged spokesmen for the right and left may heatedly debate on cable television, but the reality on the ground is far different.

In 2010, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN), after writing in The New York Times about the "corrosive system of campaign financing," joined with Andrew Card, the former Bush chief of staff, in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to lobby against corporate regulatory reform. After BP's oil spill in the Gulf, it recruited what Leibovich calls a "bipartisan dream team" that included both a former top spokesman for Dick Cheney and the Democratic fund-raiser Tony Podesta.

Two of the top three political-action-committee donors to Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell are the same: Comcast and AT&T. The former Republican Senate leader Trent Lott and former Democratic House Leader Dick Gephardt are united in lobbying for GE. Increasingly typical is the bipartisan lobbying firm of Quinn, Gillespsie, & Associates. Jack Quinn, who had been Bill Clinton's White House counsel, joined with Ed Gillespsie, a principal drafter of Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, and a former aid to Dick Armey, the former House majority leader who recently received $8 million in severance from the tea-party group, Freedomworks, are now working together to advance a variety of special interests. Their idea, which many others share, is that administrations come and go, but they will be successful regardless.

Jack Quinn says:

We never lost a wink of sleep hypothesizing what the effect of the election outcome might be on the firm. We have a good group of Republicans and a fantastic group of Democrats.

Alex Pareene of Salon argues that while hyper-partisanship is one reason people have a negative view of Washington, there is a larger source of that contempt:

. . . the capital's permanent, unshakable, elite over-class, many of whom are involved in the process by which corporations and the rentier rich tighten their control over the levers of power and use that control to extract as much wealth from the nation's laborers and taxpayers and natural resources as possible.

Even many of the populist tea-party revolutionaries elected in 2010 quickly began raising funds from the very corporations and special interests they had been criticizing. They recruited lobbyists to staff their congressional offices. The tea-party backed senator from Wisconsin, Ron Johnson, hired an AT&T and Citigroup lobbyist as his chief of staff.

In 2008, Barack Obama declared that:

When I am president, I will start by closing the revolving door in the White House that's allowed people to use their administration job as a stepping-stone to further their lobbying careers.

It hasn't worked out that way. Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, is now at Citibank. Jake Stewart, the Treasury Department's counselor, is now a spokesman for Goldman Sachs. David Plouffe, the campaign manager and senior presidential adviser, went on to become a consultant for Boeing and GE. Or consider Anita Dunn, the former White House communications director who helped Michelle Obama set up her program to fight obesity in children. She is now a consultant with food manufacturers and media firms to block restrictions on commercials for sugary foods targeting children.

Writing in New York Magazine, Frank Rich notes that:

It's clear that the president himself has been either passive or ineffectual when it comes to exerting any moral authority over the White House Alumni who've been streaming through the revolving door.

In his book, Mark Leibovich describes a Washington inhabited by a "permanent feudal class" - a phrase he attributes to Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) - "It's not Democrats. It's not Republicans, it's just a class."

He describes it this way:

Journalists are part of it. Lobbyists are part of it. Hangers-on and wannabes are part of it. This class, like every other ruling class, has one primary aim toward which all efforts strive: staying in power by any means necessary.

Rather than devoting themselves to the political objectives they were elected to pursue, the only goals of the men and women described by Leibovich are fame, power, money, and being at the center of whatever is happening. In this view, today's partisan gridlock has become just another narrative playing out in the spectacle of politics - another way for the ruling class to generate fame and wealth through endless talk-show appearances and speaking engagements.

For Leibovich:

To cover Washington allows you to live in the very, very wide gap between what the actual truth is, and how people are trying to manipulate the truth. They speak in the language of spin, obsequiousness, obfuscation.

What surprised Leibovich most, he says, is that no one has challenged his underlying premise. Rather than taking him to task for exposing them, the players in the book love the publicity:

I've gotten e-mails from people who are not portrayed well in the book - former senators, former congressmen, people who have been here a long time, who are sending me far more humble e-mails, than I would have expected. I was hoping, or expecting, that someone would make some kind of argument for why it's not as bad as I say, or why there's more nobility than I describe, or why I'm not such a bad guy, not me personally, but why Senator X who's now Lobbyist X is now multi-zillionaire X. For all the noise there's been about the book, I've been much more stunned by the silence from the sectors that should have their backs up a little bit.

In the mid-1950s, there were 5,000 registered lobbyists in Washington. Now, there are more than 12,000 - and many thousands more who have reclassified themselves as "consultants." Untold numbers are former members of Congress, former congressional staff members, and White House officials. They spend as much as $3.5 billion annually. The amount they manage to divert from the government's $3.5 trillion annual budget makes their own expenditure seem trivial.

Terry McAuliffe, now the Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia, is now being investigated by the Department of Homeland Security, for using political influence to gain visas for foreign investors in a company with ties to both McAuliffe and Hillary Clinton's brother, Anthony Rodham. And Hillary Clinton's long-time aide Huma Abedin, wife of Anthony Weiner, was discovered by Politico in May to have taken on other clients, including Tenco, a "global advisory firm," founded by former Clinton aide Doug Brand, while she was being paid as a consultant at the State Department. This, it seems, is how our permanent, bipartisan political class conducts itself.

Perhaps someday, when more Americans come to understand how Washington's permanent political class really works, we can move beyond the partisan rhetoric of cable television and confront the real problems we face. That day, unfortunately, seems to be in the distant future. But Mark Leibovich has performed a notable service in pointing us in the right direction.

When Government Lies to the People, the Fabric of Representative Democracy Itself Is the Victim

Without trust in the truthfulness of government officials, it is impossible for the elected representatives of the people to conduct public business in a manner the public will consider honest.

Recent revelations about government surveillance programs, and the inaccurate statements made about them - some under oath - indicate that we have a serious problem.

In July, the top lawyer in the U.S. intelligence community made a rare public appearance and pointed out that much of the information being distributed about government surveillance programs was wrong. "A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on," said Robert Litt, citing a line attributed to Mark Twain. "Unfortunately, there's been a lot of misinformation that's come out about these programs."

Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, was talking about news organizations. But details have emerged from the exposure of hundreds of pages of previously classified NSA documents indicating that public statements about these programs by senior U.S. officials have often been misleading, erroneous, or simply false.

The same day that Litt spoke, the NSA removed from its web site a fact sheet about its collection activities because it contained inaccuracies discovered by lawmakers.

A week earlier, President Obama said, in a T.V. Interview, that oversight of the surveillance programs was "transparent" because of the involvement of a special court. "It is transparent," Obama said of the oversight process. "That's why we set up the FISA court."

A remark by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Jr. drew the most attention. During a congressional hearing in March, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) asked whether the NSA collected data on millions of Americans. Clapper, under oath, replied, "No, sir."

According to The Washington Post:

. . . an examination of public statements over a period of years suggests that officials have often relied on legalistic parsing and carefully hedged characterizations in discussing the NSA's collection of communications. Obama's assurances have hinged, for example, on a term - targeting - that has a specific meaning for U.S. spy agencies that would elude most ordinary citizens.

On PBS's "Charlie Rose Show," President Obama said:

What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls and the NSA cannot target your e-mails.

Still, the Post points out:

. . . even if it is not allowed to target U.S. citizens, the NSA has a significant latitude to collect and keep contents of e-mails and other communications of U.S. citizens that are swept up as part of the agency's court-approved monitoring of a target overseas. The law allows the NSA to examine such messages and share them with other agencies if it determines that the information contained evidence of a crime, conveys a serious threat, or is necessary to understand foreign intelligence.

President George W. Bush at times engaged in similarly careful phrasing to defend surveillance programs. In 2004, while calling for renewal of the Patriot Act, Bush sought to reassure critics by saying "the government can't move on wiretaps or roving wiretaps without getting a court order." At the time it had not been publicly disclosed that Bush had secretly authorized NSA surveillance of communications between U.S. residents and contacts overseas while bypassing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA).

When the wiretapping operation was exposed in the media two years later, Bush defended it as a program "that listens to a few numbers, called from outside the U.S. by al-Qaeda affiliates." Later revelations made clear that the scope was far greater than he suggested.

Members of Congress tasked with overseeing national security policy say that a pattern of misleading testimony by senior Obama administration officials has weakened the ability of Congress to properly oversee government surveillance. Officials, they report, have either denied the existence of a broad program that collects data on millions of Americans or, more often, made statements that gave them the impression that the government was conducting only narrow, targeted surveillance operations.

Two Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO) say that even in top-secret briefings officials "significantly exaggerated" the effectiveness of the program that collected data on Americans' e-mail usage.

At least two Republican lawmakers have called for the removal of intelligence chief James Clapper. A letter to Clapper sent in June from 26 senators from both parties complained about a series of statements from senior officials that "had the effect of misleading the public" and that "will undermine trust in government more broadly."

"The national security state has grown so that any administration is now not upfront with Congress," said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee. "It's an imbalance that's grown in our government, and one that we have to cleanse."

In Sen. Wyden's view, a number of administration statements have made it:

. . . impossible for the public or Congress to have a genuinely informed debate about government surveillance. These statements gave the public a false impression of how these authorities were actually being interpreted. . . . The secret body of law authorizing secret surveillance overseen by a largely secret court has infringed on Americans' civil liberties and privacy rights without offering the public the ability to judge for themselves whether these broad powers are appropriate or necessary.

Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr. (R-WI), an author of the Patriot Act, and former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said he thought he and his colleagues had created a sufficiently narrow standard for seeking information. The government is allowed to collect only data that is "relevant" to an authorized terrorism investigation, "The relevancy requirement was intended to be limited," says Sensenbrenner. "Instead, what we're hearing now is that 'relevant' was expanding."

Calling it a "stretch of the English language" for the administration to consider millions of Americans' phone records to be "relevant," he asked, "How can we do good oversight if we don't get truthful and non-misleading information?"

Telling less than the truth to the American people and their elected representatives is hardly new. We were led to war in Iraq because of alleged "weapons of mass destruction" which, we later discovered, did not exist. And, consider the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that led to the war in Vietnam.

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was put before Congress by President Lyndon Johnson on Aug. 5, 1964, purportedly in reaction to two allegedly "unprovoked" attacks by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on the destroyers Maddox and C. Turner Joy in the Gulf of Tonkin on Aug. 2 and 4. Its stated purpose was to approve and support the determination of the president in taking all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against U.S. forces.

Both houses of Congress approved the resolution, the House by 414-0 and the Senate by 88-2. The resolution served as the principal constitutional authorization for the subsequent escalation and the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

While the Aug. 2 attack was said to be "unprovoked," it later became known that the U.S. destroyer Maddox was actually engaged in aggressive intelligence-gathering maneuvers in sync with coordinated attacks on North Vietnam by the South Vietnamese Navy and the Laotian Air Force. In 1995, Vo Nguyen Giap, who had been North Vietnam's military commander during the Vietnam War, acknowledged the Aug. 2 attack but denied that the Vietnamese had launched another attack on Aug. 4 as the Johnson administration claimed.

A later investigation by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee revealed that the Maddox had been on an electronic intelligence mission and also learned that the U.S. Naval Command Center in the Philippines had questioned whether any second attack had actually occurred. In 2005, an internal NSA historical study was declassified. It concluded that the Maddox had engaged the North Vietnamese Navy on Aug. 2 but that there may not have been any North Vietnamese Naval vessels present on Aug. 4. The study concluded:

It is not simply that there is a different story of what happened. It is that no attack happened that night.

In 1965, President Johnson commented privately, "For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there." One of the Navy pilots flying overhead on Aug. 4 was Squadron Commander James Stockdale, who gained fame later as a POW and as Ross Perot's vice presidential candidate. He said:

I had the best seat in the house to watch the event, and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets - there were no PT boats there. There was nothing there but black water and American firepower.

As time went on, members of Congress saw the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution as giving the president a blank check to wage war and the resolution was repealed in 1970.

We have real enemies at the present time, as we have had in the past. There may indeed be a need for a variety of surveillance programs. But for democracy to work, the elected representatives of the people in the Congress must not be lied to by non-elected government officials. If Americans are to trust their government, that government must be trustworthy. We have been lied to before, and have paid a heavy price. Having a society in which citizens question the truthfulness of their own government weakens us. Only our enemies gain from such lack of trust.

Detroit's Bankruptcy Should Focus Attention on Unfunded Public Pensions Nationwide

Detroit is the largest American city ever to file for bankruptcy. Its long-term debts are estimated at $18.2 billion. Of this about $9.2 billion is in unfunded retirement benefits.

The causes of Detroit's financial collapse are largely the result of its own unfortunate history of corruption and financial excess, and only partly caused by global economic trends and their impact upon the auto industry.

Detroit has been a one-party city for many years, never a good thing. The last Republican mayor, Louis Miriani, was elected in 1957. Since 1970, only one Republican, Keith Butler, has been elected to the city council. When one political party - whether Democratic or Republican - keeps an iron grip on political power for decades, we can observe a recipe for disaster.

Racial politics has also played a part in Detroit's decline. In 1974, the city's newly elected black mayor, Coleman Young, declared of the local police:

It is time to leave Detroit. Hit Eight Mile Road. And I don't give a damn if they are black or white, if they wear Superfly suits or blue uniforms with silver badges. Hit the road.

Thus, the first African American mayor of Detroit equated the police with criminals. White flight, which began after the rioting of the late 1960s, accelerated. In 1970, Detroit's population was 1.5 million. Forty-four percent was black, 54 percent was white. By 1990, the city's population had fallen to slightly more than l million with African Americans accounting for 78 percent and whites only 20 percent.

Mayor Young rewarded his base. The police force became 50 percent minority and efforts to steer city business to black-owned companies resulted in two federal corruption probes in the early 1980s. While Young himself was never charged, his police chief, William Hart, was convicted of embezzling $2.4 million in police funds in 1992.

Young's successor, Kwame Kilpatrick, resigned in the midst of a "pay-to-play" and sex scandal in 2008. In March, he was convicted on 23 counts, including racketeering and bribery. The city rapidly deteriorated. Its homicide rate doubled from about 30 per 100,000 residents in 1970 to 60 per 100,000 by 1990. Today, according to FBI statistics, Detroit is the most dangerous big city in America, with a crime rate five times the national average.

Editorially, The Detroit Free Press laments:

Decades of mismanagement and bad practices, coupled with catastrophic market declines, have altered the pensions from a reliable way to assure retirees' futures into a massive financial burden.

Clearly, Detroit is in a state of collapse. Charlie LeDuff, a reporter at the TV station WHBK, and author of, Detroit: An American Autopsy, reports that:

I know of an 11-year-old boy who was shot, the bullet going clear through his arm. The cops stuffed him in the back of a squad car and rushed him to the hospital. That's how we do it. There was no ambulance available. About two-thirds of the city's fleet is broken on an average day. I know a cop who drives around in a squad car with holes in the floorboards. There is no computer, no air-conditioning, the odometer reading 147,000 miles. His bulletproof vest has expired. His pay has been cut 10 percent. I knew a firefighter who died in a fire, but not from the fire. He died when the roof of an abandoned house collapsed on him and his brethren could not find him because his homing alarm was broken and did not sound. He suffocated.

Recently, Detroit's 911 dispatch system went down for 15 hours, and no one seemed to care. When the system is running, the average wait for assistance is 58 minutes. Firefighters cannot use hydraulic ladders on fire trucks to do their jobs unless there is an "immediate threat to life." Charlie LeDuff urges his fellow Americans to:

. . . come visit Detroit. . . . Come take a look at your future. Come give the tires a kick. And if you want your money back, come strip copper pipes and wiring from the abandoned buildings - if you can find any copper. Chances are, someone beat you to it.

Year after year, politicians worked closely - not only in Detroit but in cities across the country - with powerful labor unions, especially public-sector unions, that give money to elect the politicians who negotiated their contracts with unsustainable health and pension benefits.

The Economist declares that Detroit's bankruptcy

. . . is a flashing warning light on America's fiscal dashboard. Though some of its woes are unique, a crucial one is not. Many other state and city governments across America have made impossible-to-keep promises to do with pensions and health care. Detroit shows what can happen when leaders put off reforming the public sector for too long.

Nearly half of Detroit's liabilities stem from promises of pensions and health care to its workers when they retire. According to The Economist:

American states and cities typically offer their employees defined benefit pensions based on years of service and final salary. These are supposed to be covered by funds set aside for the purpose. By the states' own estimates, their pension pots are only 73 percent funded. That is bad enough, but nearly all states apply an optimistic discount rate to their obligations, making the liabilities seem smaller than they are. If a more sober one is applied, the true ratio is a terrifying 48 percent. And many states are much worse. The hole in Illinois's pension pot is equivalent to 241 percent of its annual tax revenues; for Kentucky, 141 percent; for New Jersey, 137 percent.

By one recent estimate, the total pension gap for the states is $2.7 trillion, or 17 percent of GDP. This underestimates the problem because it omits both the unfunded pension figure for cities and the health-care promises made to government workers. Governors and mayors have long offered generous pensions to public employees -buying votes today and sending the bill to future taxpayers. Beyond this, some public employees are promoted just before retirement or allowed to pick up many hours of overtime, raising their final-salary pension for the rest of their lives. Some unions win cost-of-living adjustments far above inflation. A watchdog group in Rhode Island calculated that a retired local fire chief would be given $800,000 a year if he lived to 100. More than 20,000 public employees in California receive pensions of over $100,000.

The Center for Retirement Research (CRR) at Boston College reports that states' pensions are 27 percent underfunded. That adds up to a shortfall of $1 trillion. At the same time, they are paying only about four-fifths of their required annual contribution. On a more realistic discount rate of 5 percent, the CRR estimates the shortfall may be $2.7 trillion. A similar calculation by Moody's, a ratings agency, says that pension plans are 52 percent underfunded.

Banking analyst Meredith Whitney, who predicted the financial crisis of 2007, predicts a chain reaction of dozens of cities becoming insolvent. Even less pessimistic experts forecast further credit downgrades, which will raise borrowing costs for cities and drive them deeper into debt. Chicago was just downgraded and Fitch, a major ratings agency, is considering a broader re-evaluation of local government debt on the basis of the situation in Detroit.

The promises of Detroit's politicians have for some time outgrown the economy on which it rests. Since 2011, other cities - such as Stockton and San Bernardino, California - and Jefferson County, Alabama - have declared bankruptcy. Others are now waiting in the wings.

Opportunistic politicians and greedy unions are responsible for Detroit's total collapse, and the dire straits of other cities and states. Surely, those who brought about this economic collapse are hardly the ones to guide us in the future. Where the leaders we need to reverse course are to be found is difficult to imagine in our increasingly dysfunctional politics. Unless something changes - and quickly - the economic stability of our society does not appear to be promising. Today, the chickens of past policy excesses are coming home to roost, as they always do. What were these politicians and union leaders thinking?

Conviction of Major Hasan in Ft. Hood Killings Raises Many Questions - Most Important, Why the Americans He Murdered Are Not Considered Victims of "Terrorism"

A military jury has found Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a military psychiatrist, guilty of carrying out the largest mass murder at a military installation in U.S. history. He was found guilty of 13 charges of premeditated murder, and 32 of attempted murder.

Major Hasan was born in Arlington, Virginia to Palestinian parents. He attended Virginia Tech and began his military medical school training in 1997, two years after he began active duty. For months and even years before the attack at Ft. Hood, his views on Islam had turned extreme. In December 2008, ten months before the shooting, he sent the first of 16 messages and e-mails to Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical, American-born cleric who encouraged several terrorist plots. He asked Awlaki whether Muslim American troops who killed other American soldiers in the name of Islam would be considered "fighting jihad, and if they did die would you consider them shaheeds?" an Arabic word for martyrs.

Mr. Awlaki never replied to that message. But in 2010, in an interview with the mental health panel that evaluated him, Hasan appeared to answer his own question. He told the panel that if he died by lethal injection, "I would still be a martyr."

Shortly after 1 p.m. on Nov. 6, 2009, Hasan walked into Ft. Hood's Soldier Readiness Processing Center with two guns, shouted "Allahu Akbar!" (meaning "God is great!") and opened fire. Twelve people who were killed were soldiers waiting for medical tests; the other was a civilian who tried to tackle Hasan.

The shootings have raised a number of questions. A series of failings by the Defense Department were evident. A Pentagon report concluded that the Defense Department was unprepared for internal threats, as was the F.B.I. On one occasion, Hasan gave a presentation to senior Army doctors in which he discussed Islam and suicide bombers and warned that Muslims should be allowed to leave the armed forces as conscientious objectors to avoid "adverse events."

The F.B.I. was also aware that Hasan had exchanged the e-mails with Anwar al-Awlaki, a leading figure in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula before he was killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2011. The F.B.I. dismissed the e-mails as legitimate research and the Defense Department was never informed.

A more important question, perhaps, relates to the refusal by our government to call the shooting a terrorist attack and to categorize those killed and injured as victims of terrorism, which denies them important benefits. Instead, the Defense Department has categorized the shooting as an episode of "workplace violence."

One of those injured in the Ft. Hood attack, Shawn Manning, a retired Army staff sergeant and mental health counselor, described the attack:

I was waiting for a medical exam before what would have been my third deployment overseas. I was texting my wife when I heard the shout of "Allahu Akbar!" I looked up to see a man in Army fatigues firing a pistol. His fourth or fifth shot went into my chest. As screams broke out around me, I collapsed to the ground. The bullet had punctured my lung and I was gasping for breath. As I lay there, he shot me five more times in my back and legs.

During his recovery Manning learned:

. . . that the Army had classified the shooting as nonpolitical workplace violence instead of a terrorist attack. The language used to describe the attack may seem meaningless, but it is very meaningful to the victims and their families. Because the Army decided that our wounds were not "combat-related," a number of benefits are being denied to the victims and their families, including certain health and disability ones. In some instances, the designation even resulted in victims receiving smaller salaries than we would have received during our deployment. . . . I have watched other victims and their families be denied disability benefits and treated indifferently by the Army. . . . But it is a mistake to think that the terrorism designation is just about benefits. It is also about the government acknowledging its complicity in the attack. Before the shooting, the Army knew that the gunman was an Islamic religious extremist. After the attack, a bipartisan Senate report concluded that the Defense Department had evidence that Hasan "embraced views so extreme that it should have disciplined him or discharged him from the military, but DoD failed to take action against him."

Before, during and after his attack, Hasan made his jihadist goals clear. In May 2012, Congress placed a clause inside the Defense Appropriations Act requiring the Pentagon to award Purple Hearts to the Ft. Hood victims. Congress was told that President Obama would veto the appropriations bill and so leave the Pentagon without a budget unless the clause was removed. The administration was determined then - and is determined now - to describe what was clearly a terrorist act as "workplace violence."

On the first day of his trial, Hasan admitted that he perpetrated his murderous assault because he is a jihadist who "switched sides" in the war. He told the court that he conducted the attack as an act of war against the United States.

Why has President Obama and his administration attempted to obscure the real motives of the perpetrator in the Ft. Hood murders? There appears to be an effort by the administration to claim "victory" in the war on terrorism, a claim that would seem less persuasive if continued acts of terrorism were to occur. After the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, the administration initially referred to what we now know was a premeditated, pre-planned attack, as mob violence in response to an anti-Islamic video on YouTube.

Refusing to describe acts of terrorism as what they are is hardly a strategy designed to make Americans more secure or to cause Americans to believe what they are told by their government. Immediately after the Ft. Hood attack, Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, then commander of III Corps at Ft. Hood, said preliminary evidence didn't such suggest that the shooting was terrorism. Cone said this even though it was immediately known that before he started shooting, Hasan called out "Allahu Akbar!" He called himself a "Soldier of Islam" in his business cards. What was Gen. Cone thinking?

Retired Army Staff Sergeant Shawn Manning believes that Hasan's conviction is a step toward justice but is surely correct in concluding:

That journey won't be complete until the government tells the truth about the attack, provides proper support for the victims, and takes measures to ensure that these mistakes won't happen again. *