Excerpt:
It's both amusing and educational to observe a consensus when it suddenly starts to give way at all points without yielding an inch. A couple of weeks ago, the consoling view was that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was a man more to be pitied than feared, a full-blown officer in the U.S. armed forces who was too shaken up by the stories of returned veterans to be able to function properly, and a physician too stressed-out to bear in mind that there was such a thing as a Hippocratic oath. Why, even the FBI had interpreted his e-mails to Anwar al-Awlaki as quite "consistent with research being conducted by Maj. Hasan in his position as a psychiatrist at the Walter Reed Medical Center."
That latter finding does not stack up very well with the disclosure that the major was imploring Awlaki's spiritual advice some time before the online imam issued a finding of his own to the effect that bullets discharged at American soldiers were fired in a holy cause. The Washington Post and ABC News, which drew well ahead of the consensus in their reporting, also unearthed e-mails from Hasan to the Yemen-based preacher, asking when jihad tactics might be justified, what were the circumstances that would license the killing of innocent bystanders, and expressing the hope that the e-mailer and his respondent might one day be united in paradise. Since Awlaki was only in Yemen in the first place because he'd found the United States an inconvenient domicile (after having had direct contact with three of the 19 air pirates and mass murderers of Sept. 11, 2001, or "9/11 hijackers" as they are now euphemistically termed), we can apparently congratulate ourselves on paying for an FBI that lacks the nasty and suspicious mind that spoils so much police work in "the community."