SUSPECT KNEW WAR HORROR, AND HIS OWN FEAR

© 2009 New York Times News Service

WASHINGTON – Born and reared in Virginia, the son of immigrant parents from a small Palestinian town near Jerusalem, he joined the Army right out of high school, against his parents’ wishes. The Army, in turn, put him through college and then medical school, where he trained to be a psychiatrist. But Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the 39-year-old man accused of Thursday’s mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, started having second thoughts about his military career a few years ago after other soldiers harassed him for being a Muslim, he told relatives in Virginia.He had also more recently expressed deep concerns about being sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. Having counseled scores of returning soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, he knew all too well the terrifying realities of war, said a cousin, Nader Hasan."He was mortified by the idea of having to deploy," Nader Hasan said. "He had people telling him on a daily basis the horrors they saw over

there."The FBI had earlier become aware of Internet postings by a man who called himself Nidal Hasan, a law enforcement official said. The postings discussed suicide bombing in a favorable light, but the investigators were not clear whether the writer was Major Hasan. In one posting on the Web site Scribd, a man named Nidal Hasan compared the heroism of a soldier who throws himself on a grenade to protect fellow soldiers to suicide bombers who sacrifice themselves to protect Muslims.

"If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory," the man wrote. It could not be confirmed, however, that the writer was Nidal Hasan. Nader Hasan said his cousin never mentioned in recent phone calls to Virginia that he was going to be deployed, and he said the family was shocked when it heard the news on television on Thursday afternoon."He was doing everything he could to avoid that," Hasan said. "He wanted to do whatever he could within the rules to make sure he wouldn’t go over."Several years ago, that included retaining a lawyer and making inquiries about whether he could get out of the Army before his contract was up, because of the harassment he had received as a Muslim. But Nader Hasan said the lawyer had told his cousin that even if he paid ...