Time magazine: Nidal Hasan marks ‘a whole new terrorism war.’
Weekly news magazines like Time and Newsweek, which each have a circulation of between 3 and 4 million, can’t ‘break’ news stories because they are weekly, so their coverage tends to be more like what is called ’second-day coverage’ where they are offering analysis, predictions, repercussions, the ‘bigger picture,’ etc. Both Time and Newsweek have become much more conservative in orientation through the 1980s and 1990s.
For eight years, Americans have waged a Global War on Terrorism even as they argued about what that meant. The massacre at Fort Hood was, depending on whom you believed, yet another horrific workplace shooting by a nutcase who suddenly snapped, or it was an intimate act of war, a plot that can’t be foiled because it is hatched inside a fanatic’s head and leaves no trail until it is left in blood. In their first response, officials betrayed an eagerness to assume it was the first; the more we learn, the more we have cause to fear it was the second, a new battlefield where our old weapons don’t work very well and our values make us vulnerable: freedom, privacy, tolerance and the stubborn American certainty that people born and raised here will not reject the gifts we share.
Even as the President weighs how to fight the wars he inherited, he and the entire U.S. security apparatus will have to figure out how you fight a war against an enemy you can’t recognize, much less understand. In that sense, the war on terrorism has left the battlefield and moved to the realm of the mind.
This an excerpt to the main story in what appears to be “package coverage” with a number of sidebars and smaller stories linked off of it.
