Good DMN story trying to piece together who this guy is. Seems like it’s going to emerge as we learn more about him that Hasan’s actions were, unfortunately, intricately tied up in his conflicts about the war and his ideas about his faith. Rep. McCaul certainly thinks so:

U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul of Austin, a senior Republican on the Homeland Security Committee briefed Friday by investigators and military officials, said a picture emerged of a man torn.

“He has this internal conflict between his religious convictions and his opposition to the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and his official capacity in the U.S. military,” McCaul said. “His deployment to Afghanistan was the final straw that made him snap.”

Reihan Salam has a good piece in the Daily Beast about the “collateral damage” of Hasan’s actions for Muslim Americans, and, in turn, for the country at large. How far will the fear that Hasan has sown go? Tidbits like this  one from the DMN story won’t help: “Hasan described himself as ‘a Muslim first and an American second,’” according to a classmate of his at the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda. Salam notes that:

Back in 2004, a survey sponsored by Cornell University found that 29 percent of Americans believed that “all Muslim Americans should be required to register their whereabouts with the federal government,” a policy that would be a massive propaganda coup for America’s rivals.  And it should go without saying that opinions about Muslims aren’t evenly distributed across the country. Muslims living in regions and neighborhoods where high levels of mistrust prevail are likely to feel alienated from the American mainstream, which could then lead them to live narrow, impoverished lives—or, worse still, turn to the kind of nihilistic violence we’ve occasionally seen from the Muslim youth of France and Holland and Britain, where riots and gang violence with a militant edge have grown too common.