Hasan's Supervisor Warned The Army Back In 2007

[Gordon Ray Kissinger]

From: Daniel Zwerdling

National Public Radio

November 18, 2009

Two years ago, a top psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was so concerned about what he saw as Nidal Hasan's incompetence and reckless behavior that he put those concerns in writing. National Public Radio (NPR) has obtained a copy of that memo, the first evaluation that has surfaced from Hasan's file.

Officials at Walter Reed sent that memo to Fort Hood early this year when Hasan was transferred there.

Nevertheless, commanders still assigned Hasan — accused of killing 13 people in a mass shooting at Fort Hood on Nov. 5 — to work with some of the Army's most troubled and vulnerable soldiers and saw fit to actually promote him.

The Damning Memo

On May 17, 2007, Hasan's supervisor at Walter Reed sent the following memo to the Walter Reed credentials committee. It reads, "Memorandum for: Credentials Committee. Subject: CPT Nidal Hasan." More than a page long, the document warns that: "The Faculty has very serious concerns about CPT Hasan's professionalism and work ethic. ... He demonstrates a pattern of very poor judgment and a total lack of professionalism." It is signed by the chief of psychiatric residents at Walter Reed, Maj. Scott Moran.

When shown the memo, two leading psychiatrists said it was so damning, it might have sunk Hasan's career if he had applied for a job outside of the Army.

"Even if we were totally desperate for a psychiatrist, we would not even get him to the point where we would have invited him for an interview," says Dr. Steven Sharfstein, who runs Sheppard Pratt's psychiatric medical center, based just outside Baltimore.

Sharfstein says it's a little hard to read the evaluation now and pretend that he doesn't know that Hasan is accused of shooting dozens of people. But he says if he had seen a memo like this about an applicant, Sharfstein said he would have avoided him like the plague. "I believe I would have had to recommend he be discharged from his duties immediately."

The memo ticks off numerous problems over the course of Hasan's training, including proselytizing to his patients. It says he mistreated a homicidal patient and allowed her to escape from the emergency room, and that he just blew off several important exams.

According to the memo, Hasan hardly did any work at all: He saw only 30 patients in 38 weeks. Sources at Walter Reed say most psychiatrists see at least 10 times that many patients. When Hasan was supposed to be on call for emergencies, he didn't even answer his phone. Nobody was ever able to contact him when we needed him to come in.

An undated handout photo of Maj. Nidal Hasan,

who is accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood,

Texas, earlier this month.

Warning Signs

Sharfstein says the memo doesn't suggest that Hasan would end up shooting people, but it warns that Hasan was "somebody who could potentially put patients in danger simply because he was not doing the job he was there to do."

"There are all kinds of warning signs, flashing red lights, that, in terms of just this paragraph alone, you'd say, 'Oh, no, this is not somebody that we would take a chance on having work with our patients here.' "

Sharfstein says that in the 25 years he has been supervising and hiring psychiatrists, he has seen perhaps less than a half-dozen evaluations this bad.

Officials at Walter Reed told NPR that statements about Hasan were very carefully worded. What they convey is that when Hasan's supervisors read him the riot act — when they gave him intensive supervision — he would improve just enough so that they had to tell their commanders: "Hasan is now capable of doing better."

But officials say nobody has the time to supervise a doctor that closely all the time. The first red flag that was raised about this guy should have triggered a serious investigation right away. Why that was not done remains to be revealed.

Alerting Fort Hood

"I would never, ever hire a physician with this kind of a record," says Judith Broder, who runs the Soldiers Project, an award-winning private therapy program for troops in Southern California.

Broder says that "soldiers seeking therapy may be completely falling apart, filled with rage and a distrust of authority. What those soldiers need, she says, is a psychiatrist they can trust completely — not a therapist who fails to show up and abandons his patients, or tries to convert them to a religion of people whom they have just returned from fighting in theater. Why this slipped through the cracks is beyond my comprehension. Heads should role over this."

"This kind of behavior could, in fact, set off a stress reaction" in a patient, she says. "It could be a trigger to a post-traumatic stress reaction."


Moran and Pentagon spokesmen declined NPR's requests for interviews for this story. Officials at Fort Hood would not comment, either.

But sources say that when the Army sent Hasan to Fort Hood earlier this year, Walter Reed sent the damning evaluation there, too. So commanders at Fort Hood would know exactly what they were getting and how to deal with him. Unfortunately that was not taken seriously. The question is, why was he transferred at all and why was such a man promoted to major instead of being given his walking papers?


Thanks to Preston Miller, for sharing the above information.