Nov. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Who’d think the U.S. Army could be seized with a sudden case of political correctness? And with regard to Muslims, no less.

Imagine this: If Major Nidal M. Hasan were gay and had revealed half as much about his state of mind as he did, he would have been expelled from the military long ago.

That doesn’t mean Muslims should be thrown into a Don’t- Ask, Don’t-Tell world of pain. Stopping Hasan before he went on his rampage in which he killed 13 people didn’t require discriminating against Muslims.

It required only seeing him for what he was: a military man conflicted into derangement by serving in an army that killed Muslims. According to Val Finnell, a classmate in graduate school with Hasan, he called the war on terrorism a “war on Islam” and was “very upfront about being a Muslim first and American second.” When anyone challenged him, Finnell said, Hasan would become “visibly upset, sweaty and nervous.”

There is some debate over whether Hasan is a terrorist or simply crazy. Why not both? Not all mentally unstable people are terrorists, but all terrorists are mentally unstable. Their virulent hatred and violence are the symptoms. In the same way that American terrorist Timothy McVeigh was a nutty white supremacist, Hasan is a crazed Muslim encouraged by a strain of Islamic hatred for Americans.

The signs of an unstable and violent temperament may be hidden even from those closest to the one about to erupt. Not so in the case of Hasan, who did everything imaginable to betray his condition, short of checking himself into a secure mental facility or announcing a fatwa in an ad in Stars and Stripes.

No Secret

Last summer, days after arriving at Fort Hood (a prelude to being deployed to Afghanistan), Hasan bought a high-powered gun. He made no secret about his opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or his belief that if you are killed in the military fighting against Muslims, you will go to hell.

As his own deployment drew closer, Hasan told relatives that he’d sought legal advice (possibly from an Army lawyer) about getting discharged.

U.S. authorities knew that Hasan visited radical jihadist Web sites and attended the Dar al Hijrah Islamic Center in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, where the imam, Anwar Al-Awlaki, was an extreme anti-American. According to the Associated Press, Al-Awlaki now lives in Yemen, where he is affiliated with an Islamic school run by Abdulmajid al-Zindani, often described as a religious mentor to Osama bin Laden. Hasan and Al-Awlaki stayed in touch.

It isn’t only in hindsight that you can see Hasan was a ticking time bomb. It was audible to anyone who cared to hear.

Holy War

Listen to him making the final presentation of his psychiatric residency at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in June 2007, as reported by the Washington Post. What should have been a speech on a relevant medical topic was instead a lecture on the Quran, holy war against the infidels and suicide bombers.

Perhaps in a cry for help, Hasan recommended that the military identify conflicted Muslims and release them as conscientious objectors to avoid “adverse events.” Written comments accompanying his PowerPoint presentation said that when Muslims fight for God against injustices of the infidel, they become potent adversaries capable of suicide bombing. One of his points read, “We love death more than you love life.”

This wasn’t a paper delivered quietly. The presentation, the culmination of Hasan’s training, took place before his senior supervisors and about 25 other mental-health professionals.

After receiving poor performance reviews at Walter Reed, Hasan was promoted to major. Look at us, the promotion board. See how unbiased we are.

No One Jumped

The problem of the Army is the problem shared by all of us who want to be fair. Most Muslims are not terrorists. They are peaceful, non-violent, upstanding citizens, thousands of them in uniform. At the same time, most terrorists, as we define the word in the developed West, are Muslims.

President Barack Obama asked Americans not to jump to conclusions, and we didn’t. There was no rush to label Hasan a terrorist or dwell on his religion. There was a rush to judge him as a loner living in a bleak room (despite making a good salary as an officer and doctor) afflicted by traumatic stress disorder he’d evidently developed not from battle but from counseling others who’d fought.

All kinds of caveats accompanied the reporting of one eyewitness account that Hasan had shouted in Arabic “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great”) as he opened fire. On ABC, one person interviewed wished Hasan’s “name was Smith.” Initially, CBS and NBC did not report his name at all.

Let’s not jump to conclusions. But we can walk to one.

‘Follow the Footsteps’

If the military doesn’t learn from this experience, it is bound to be repeated. Al-Awlaki, the imam, called Hasan “heroic” after his murderous spree and said the only way any Muslim could serve in the military would be “to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal.”

We don’t need a final diagnosis of what went wrong with Hasan. Rather, investigators need to diagnose what went wrong among the people around him.

If they hadn’t been so cautious, authorities could have pieced together the links between Hasan and radical Islam and possibly prevented Fort Hood. It wouldn’t have been an act of bigotry, just an act of sanity.

(Margaret Carlson, author of “Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House” and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

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To contact the writer of this column: Margaret Carlson in Washington at mcarlson3@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: November 11, 2009 21:00 EST