Within hours of the shooting spree at Fort Hood, America’s biggest military base in the US, the unashamedly racist [and Republican] Fox News aired its news-anchor Shepard Smith interviewing Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison:

"It does. It does, Shepard," nodded Hutchinson gravely before skipping from making assumptions about one man, to making assumptions about a whole religion.

She wasn’t alone. Several right-wing websites responded to the mere release of the suspect’s name - and no other details - with wild speculation about a ‘Jihad at Fort Hood?’ and a ‘Terrorist Incident in Texas’. Other politicians implied that the murderous rampage by Major Malik Nidal Hasan, a psychiatrist-counsellor, was an act of Islamic devotion. The toll: 13 killed, 29 wounded.

Hasan, 39, joined the army just out of high school. He had been counselling wounded war veterans at Walter Reed Hospital from June 2003 to July 2009. It was in July that Staff Sgt. Justin Lee Garza, 28, under stress from two deployments, killed himself in a friend’s apartment outside Fort Hood. Two weeks later, Fort Hood’s base commander Lt. Gen. Rick Lynch, told Congress of his "biggest frustration": his need for far more mental health professionals. "I’m short about 44 of what I am convinced I need at Fort Hood that I just don’t have."

Among the medical personnel brought to Fort Hood to help deal with the growing mental health issues was Maj. Hasan. He recently received orders to deploy to Afghanistan, a move he strongly resisted.

John Nichols writing in The Nation noted: "No one knew whether stress, fear, anger over mistreatment, mental illness or a warped understanding of his religion might have motivated Major Hasan. The point here is not to defend the soldier or his alleged actions - the evidence at hand suggests that he was, at the least, a deeply troubled man whose statements and actions should have raised concerns among his superiors long before Thursday’s incident. By Friday, there were news reports that he had shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ (‘God is great’) before opening fire. There was clearly something wrong with this imperfect follower of Islam. But that does not mean that there is something wrong with Islam."

Fort Hood, with more than 53,000 soldiers, is a major military embarkation point for America’s wars-without-end. Understandably, it is experiencing the after-effects of eight years of war and repeated tours of duty. Fort Hood soldiers have accounted for more suicides than any other army post since the Iraq invasion in 2003, averaging over 10 suicides each month. Divorce rates, mental health problems, drug and alcohol use and domestic abuse are all up steeply, and so are murders among war-zone returnees. Even violent crime in Killeen, the town that houses the base, is up 22%.

The psychological toll of warmongering on the all-volunteer force is unprecedented. Army officials say privately they do not know how much the Army can sustain before it breaks. The Washington Post’s Staff Writer Ann Scott Tyson said of Hasan, "It’s clear he had worked in settings where the effects of combat stress were pervasive. A small but increasing number of soldiers undergoing the mental strain of repeated combat deployments are taking lives - often their own."

Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist reporting from Iraq, wrote in Asia Times of a strikingly similar incident on May 11, 2009, when a US soldier gunned down five fellow soldiers at a stress-counselling center at a US base in Baghdad. Admiral Mike Mullen, then chairman of the US military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, commenting on the fact that the shootings had occurred in a place where individuals were seeking help, added: "It does speak to me, though, about the need for us to redouble our efforts, the concern in terms of dealing with the stress . . . It also speaks to the issue of multiple deployments." [No press speculation in such instances of a white attacker going on a Christian ‘crusade’.]

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates too said the Pentagon needed to redouble its efforts to relieve stress caused by repeated deployments in war zones that was further exacerbated by limited time at home in between deployments. The condition described by Mullen and Gates is what veteran health experts often refer to as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

Wrote Jamail: "To many, the shocking story of a soldier killing five of his comrades did not come as a surprise considering that the military has, for years now, been sending troops with untreated PTSD back into the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan."

According to an Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center analysis, reported in the Denver Post in August 2008, more than 43,000 service members - two-thirds of them in the army or army reserve - were classified as "non-deployable for medical reasons" three months before they were actually deployed to Iraq. [Ah, ‘Men Behaving Badly’ explained!]

Eugene Robinson, the Post’s Associate Editor wrote, "There’s a difference between sensitivity and stupidity. If there were indeed signs that Maj. Nidal Hasan was becoming radicalized in his opposition to the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army had a duty to act - before he did."

Had Hasan’s superior officers investigated, Robinson noted, they might have realised he was behaving erratically, that his faith apparently had become increasingly political, that he desperately wanted out of the military and that he was distraught about being ordered to the war zone.

On General George Casey’s claim of concern "that this increased speculation about Hasan’s evolving political and religious views could cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers", Robinson said Casey was right "to worry about the lunatics and bigots who now will think of all Muslims in the military as potential enemies. But it only feeds such paranoia to ignore alarm bells that an unstable individual, Muslim or not, is about to blow."

Reports relate how Hasan told people of his serious doubts about the US military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. There can be little doubt that Hasan himself became increasingly affected by the horrible effects of war he was attempting to alleviate in his colleagues. He made no secret of his reluctance to serve in the Afghan theater, where he was to be sent within weeks. According to ABC News, fellow Army doctors told superiors of their concern that Hasan felt divided allegiance - both to the Muslims whom he felt were under attack and the country he had volunteered to serve.

Wrote Robinson: "All this should have been enough to prompt an urgent intervention by Army brass, regardless of Hasan’s religion. That it did not is unfair to the thousands of Muslims who have served in the military, and continue to do so, with honour and distinction."

Muslims in the service have complained of taunts and harassment from fellow soldiers, he noted. "For both moral and practical reasons, the Army must eliminate such discrimination." Robinson recalled George W. Bush’s claim that his ‘war on terror’ was not a war against Islam, and added "That disclaimer rings hollow if Muslims serving in the armed forces are blamed for the crimes of Islamic terrorists and treated as potential traitors to the American cause."