There is still a lot of speculating going on, but the most reasonable sounding thing I have heard so far is this:

His cousin said Maj Hasan had been resisting such a deployment.

“He hired a military attorney to try to have the issue resolved, pay back the government, to get out of the military. He was at the end of trying everything,” Nader Hasan told Fox News.

He also said that Nidal Malik Hasan had been battling racial harassment because of his “Middle Eastern ethnicity”.

(emphasis added)

Even on The Today Show they were interviewing people who know Maj. Hasan and talked about how much he heard things like “sand nigger” or “terrorist” yelled at him.

While the right is trying to paint Hasan as some Islamic terrorist, just look at the guy. He was American born and just spent countless years going through school to become a Psychiatrist, MD. This wasn’t a man planning on doing something like this, this was a man who snapped.

So our question now is how to fix our relationship with Muslims. The military really needs to take a long, hard inner look at itself and come up with a way to limit incidents like this.

And the fix isn’t limited to the military alone – it also must include society. For example, look at this:

Here we have a guy who went on a rampage, and so far the one of the leading reasons is that he was constantly harassed about his ethnicity and religious beliefs, and then you add in a big voice of the right making wild claims like this. This isn’t a solution – it’s asking for more of the same.

Luckily Maj. Hasan is still alive. Now maybe we can get a better idea of what was going through his mind when he decided this was the route to take. Hopefully we can use that as a teaching moment also and try to instill a better sense of tolerance in both our military and society as a whole.

This could be a make or break moment for President Obama. How he takes the lead on this will really define him not only as our President, but also as a man. We can’t afford any cover-up of what really happened. We need full transparency here and for our Commander in Chief to insure the changes needed to help prevent future events like this from happening. The coming weeks and months should prove to be rather interesting as this story continues to unravel.