At least seven killed in shooting at Fort Hood, Tex.

But no, the fact that he's a Muslim has no bearing on this tragedy. It was pre-post traumatic distress disorder or projected PTTD.

War creates people like Hasan ....

...By the end of last summer, the Army was reporting the highest tallies of soldier suicides since accurate record-keeping began. We’re getting saturation media coverage of Thursday’s outburst of horror at Fort Hood, but we haven’t heard a lot about the scores of suicides at that same base " the highest of any U.S. military installation " since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

If we’re going to fight wars as a nation, then we need to draw our warriors from a wider swath of the population and give them the full and complete support that they need and deserve. We’ll no doubt be analyzing the twisted psychological state of Nidal Malik Hasan every which way from sundown. But we’ll continue to give short shrift to the daily struggles and frequent horrors of the honorable men and women who have taken on the thankless task of fighting our wars.

This is not just shameful, it’s unsustainable.

the scores of suicides

...But there are some who say Fort Hood has always had a dark side. They say that something like last week's tragedy was bound to happen in the heart of a military machine that is sending tens of thousands of soldiers to and from two separate, bloody and seemingly never-ending wars.

In fact, death has never been a stranger here. When most soldiers are veterans, serving one, two or more terms in combat, no one has been untouched by conflict. They have all lost friends, loved ones and comrades already. The spectre of PTSD haunts the darker corners of Fort Hood. Though the army insists it is combating PTSD and publicly urges its soldiers to admit their problems, the issue is not straightforward. Army culture is still gung-ho and militant, weakness is looked down upon and teasing is part of everyday life. Hasan had reportedly suffered anti-Muslim bullying on the base from soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. But the US military is stretched by its combat commitments and every soldier discharged with PTSD is another one who cannot return to fight. No wonder that some say the issue is still being pushed under the carpet, denied and hidden away.

For every suicide that can be directly attributed to service, there are many times the number that are badly damaged due to service and try to soldier on, only to fall at a later date, sometimes years after leaving the Army, having never been able to fit back into their own lives again.

Well, the arms industry must be doing very nicely indeed out of constant warfare.

The alleged gunman, Major Hasan, had warned fellow officers of the threat posed by Muslim troops in the US military who did not want to fight wars in Muslim countries.

In a paper he presented to senior military doctors two years ago, he warned in order to avoid adverse events, Muslim troops should be discharged as conscientious objectors rather than forced to fight wars in Muslim countries.

His only value to us bwfore we exact our revenge based justice, is to use him as a study subject to try to understand what goes on in the minds of these people who kill for their religion.