What motivated US Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan to open fire on his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood’s Soldier Readiness Center on November 5, 2009? Is he a “terrorist”--mounting evidence suggests Hasan’s actions were premeditated and ideologically motivated--or is he just an Army medical officer who snapped under pressure? That’s the central issue investigators and military courts must ultimately determine.

There are obvious reasons, however, why many people, including the President of the United States, might prefer not to label Hasan a terrorist even if he is one, and why administration officials, who eliminated the term “war on terror,” may want the Army to steadfastly avoid the terrorist designation. What they call Hasan has far-reaching implications.

After all, those opposed to calling Hasan a terrorist will argue, what’s the need? If Hasan lives and recovers sufficiently to stand trial, a military court will try him for multiple murders in any event. If he’s convicted, calling him a terrorist won’t affect his punishment.

If, On the other hand, Hasan is a terrorist, properly identifying him as one acknowledges a terrorist threat within the US armed forces, raises questions about political correctness within the US Army, and helps the US military prevent similar attacks in the future.

An estimated 10,000 Muslims are now serving on active duty in the US military. Exact numbers are unknown because military personnel are not required to declare their religious preference. As with any other ethnic or religious group, the overwhelming majority of Muslim Americans in the US military are loyal, dedicated and hard-working people. Many of them are Arabic speakers whose language skills are essential to successful operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries where US forces operate.

In most respects, they’re no different than Japanese- and German-Americans in the US military during World War II. America is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society and it’s difficult for Americans to go to war with just about any national, ethnic, or religious entity without having members of that group fighting on the US side.  

In one respect, however, they are not like the Germans or the Japanese. Since 9/11 the United States as been at war not only with the Saddam Hussein and Taliban totalitarian regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. We’ve been fighting stateless Islamist-Jihadists organizations like al-Qaeda that base their ideology on the strict, fundamentalist interpretations of the Quran that justify attacking and killing “enemies” of Islam. Moreover, they aggressively seek to radicalize Muslims everywhere, including the United States, in mosques, among prison populations, over the internet, and in the US armed forces.

It makes no difference, however, whether Hasan acted alone or as part of an Islamic terrorist organization. If he set out to kill American soldiers because they were fighting Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, even if he was mentally unbalanced at the moment he pulled the trigger, he was a traitor to his country, a terrorist, and he committed the worst terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11.

If what we are learning about Hasan is true, there were ample warning signs that if properly recognized, interpreted, and acted upon may have prevented what happened at Fort Hood. Did political correctness prevent the Army from recognizing them?

We know Hasan objected to his pending deployment to Afghanistan where he would work with US soldiers engaged in operations against his fellow Muslims. According to Colonel Terry Lee, who knew and worked with Hasan, the major spoke out against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, made "outlandish" statements about US foreign policy, and exhibited religious objections to wars against the followers of Islam. The Associated Press reports that Hasan’s co-workers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center were concerned about his behavior but didn’t report him for fear of being accused of discrimination against a Muslim officer.

If true, the US Armed Forces must establish better policies and procedures for identifying Muslim personnel who profess views sympathetic to  Jihadists. Unfortunately, US leaders are loath to do anything that smacks of ethnic or religious profiling. They know if they do, representatives of various ethnic and religious organizations will accuse them of discrimination and attack them for their political incorrectness. The case of Nidal Malik Hasan, however, demonstrates why we can’t allow political correctness to get in the way of taking common sense measures to protect our troops.

If a Muslim US Army officer who openly opposes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and makes statements that raise doubts about his loyalty to the United States isn’t scrutinized, evaluated, and with appropriate due process discharged, we have to expect more of the same. Profiling is an important and essential part of law enforcement, counterterrorism, and counterintelligence. It’s not profiling but profiling abuse that should concern us.

Some will argue that what Hasan did at Fort Hood was an isolated criminal act, no different than what Cho Seung-Hui did on April 16, 2007, when he went on a shooting rampage that killed 32 students at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Virginia. But if Hasan’s actions were those of a terrorist, then they were different than those of a deranged, delusional college student who suffered mental illness since childhood and had little or nothing to do with his Korean ethnicity. Preventing acts of terrorism requires a different strategy than that necessary to prevent crimes by homicidal maniacs.

Nidal Malik Hasan’s actions are more appropriately compared to those of US Army Sgt. Hasan Akbar, who threw a grenade into a tent at Camp Pennsylvania, Kuwait, in April 2003, killing two US officers and wounding 14 others. Akbar, sentenced to death by a military court, committed the murders “because he believed the US military would kill Muslim civilians” during the invasion of Iraq. Akbar committed a terrorist act. Like Akbar, Hasan apparently preferred killing American soldiers to helping Americans kill Muslims at war with the United States.