The Army’s pig-headed failure to accommodate Maj. Hasan was, for a time, the most important — and most damaging — detail for understanding his shooting rampage. Because if Maj. Hasan tried to get out of his deployment, and if he telegraphed every warning signal possible (emailing terrorists, cruising 7-11s in his Al Qaeda costume) to bolster his case to reverse his deployment orders, and all the while the Army bureaucracy ignored him despite his 20 years’ service — then that means the massacre can’t be blamed just on one crazy Islamofascist’s inner evil.

The “Secret Jihadist” narrative surrounding Maj. Nidal Hasan and the Ft. Hood shootings is disturbing enough. But what if it was really Hasan’s scheme to get the Army to take him and his requests for a release or an exemption seriously? Consider:

We’d also have to examine the link between Hasan’s rampage and the Army’s record number of suicides this year — which so far nearly equals the total number of US combat deaths in Iraq. A lot of this year’s suicides involve Army personnel which hadn’t yet shipped out to the war zones, like Maj. Hasan — a grim statistic that belies the chickenhawks’ screeching attacks denying the existence of pre-combat stress syndrome.

Yes. As of November 2009, there were 140 confirmed suicides among the active-duty Army alone. Add another 71 for Army Reserves and the National Guard. There were 42 more among Marines. Of 18 suicides at Ft. Campbell in Kentucky, seven were soldiers who never deployed.

So is the act Hasan’s is alleged to have committed the result of religious terrorism — violence fueled by a political motive — or the sheer desperation of a man who was about to be deployed in a war he didn’t agree with and tried to get out of fighting? Ames outlines several initial reports about the Ft. Hood Massacre that suggest the latter. Because Hasan was shot and injured mid-rampage, we don’t know whether he would have ended his own life as 140 other soldiers have done.

But is this shooting an anomaly, or more frequent and predictable than we’d like to admit? This is the fourth such attack at an Army base in 15 years, the third since 2003, and the second this year. (I’m not counting incidents such as the Fort Bragg wife murders.)

You may have missed the story of Sgt. John M. Russell who is accused of opening fire at a combat stress clinic Monday, killing five U.S. soldiers in May 2009.

Also recall the 1995 case of Sgt. William J. Kreutzer Jr. Kreutzer was sentenced to life imprisonment earlier this year after being found guilty again of murder and attempted murder in the 1995 shooting spree of 19 Soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division. Kreutzer, 38, was convicted and sentenced to death in 1996 for the crime which killed one officer and wounded 18 other Soldiers; but in March 2004, a three-judge panel set aside his sentence on appeal.

Remember that terrorist Timothy McVeigh served in the Army. He was a Gulf War veteran.

Perhaps by painting Hasan as a lone wolf — an exception rather than a potential Every Soldier — the Army is trying to sidestep its responsibility to make sure incidents like this don’t happen.