From a press release from NPR:
NPR NEWS REPORTS:
WALTER REED AND USUHS OFFICIALS DISCUSSED WHETHER NIDAL HASAN
WAS “PSYCHOTIC” DURING SERIES OF MEETINGS BEGINNING IN 2008
November 11, 2009; Washington, D.C. – NPR News has learned that key officials from Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) held a series of meetings and conversations between spring 2008 and spring 2009 to discuss Nidal Hasan, and at one point questioned whether he was psychotic and mentally fit to be an Army psychiatrist. NPR correspondent Daniel Zwerdling has spoken with several officials and military psychiatrists from both institutions who are familiar with the meetings; one official who worked closely with the committee tells Zwerdling: “Put it this way. Everybody felt that if you were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, you would not want Nidal Hasan in your fox hole.”
Excerpts of Zwerdling’s report are below; the complete story is available now at NPR.org [Here] Zwerdling will also have a report this evening on All Things Considered.
Zwerdling reports that a group of key officials from Walter Reed and USUHS met in spring 2008, as they do every month, to discuss issues surrounding the psychiatrists and other mental health professionals training at the institutions. One of the most perplexing items on their agenda: What should we do about Nidal Hasan? Participants in that meeting and subsequent conversations about Hasan reportedly included John Bradley, Chief of Psychiatry at Walter Reed; Robert Ursano, chairman of the psychiatry department at USUHS; Charles Engel, assistant chair of the psychiatry department and director of Hasan’s psychiatry fellowship; Dr. David Benedek, another assistant chair of psychiatry UHUHS; and Scott Moran, director of the psychiatric residency program at Walter Reed, according to colleagues and other sources who monitor the meetings.
Update: From a reader:
This quote from the NPR report sickened me: “Put it this way. Everybody felt that if you were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, you would not want Nidal Hasan in your fox hole.”
Isn’t that pretty much the numero-uno criterion for being a soldier?
These doctors didn’t want to serve alongside Hasan. But when they had the opportunity to stop him from serving with others, they chickened out. They should be dishonorably discharged and given the opposite of a Congressional Medal of Honor, whatever that is.
I’ll tell you what the real psychosis is: political correctness.