The man who attacked a Wisconsin Sikh temple Sunday has been identified as Wade Michael Page. He is a former Army vet who was less than honorably discharged from the service in 1998. The military has three classifications of discharge; honorable, less than honorable, and dishonorable. The vast majority of discharges are honorable. A less than honorable discharge is a strong indication that Page was a troublemaker who had built up a long record of not being a very good soldier, and that his discharge was not voluntary. He was ejected from the military in 1998.
That record is relevant to establishing that Page, who was killed by police after he murdered several innocent people inside the temple, was a very troubled man. That won’t stop the left from blaming Rep. Michele Bachmann, because she has been questioning whether the US State Department has come under undue influence by the Muslim Brotherhood, but then again that’s what the left does. When tragedy strikes, many on the left strike out at the latest boogeyman or woman on the right, never letting facts get in the way. Never mind that Sikhs have almost nothing in common with the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood, and have not been singled out by Bachmann or anyone else looking into the Brotherhood.
I’m more curious about another aspect of the case. The FBI was pretty quick to throw around the phrase “domestic terrorism” in the wake of the temple shooting.
Police have said they are investigating the shootings as a “domestic terrorism type incident” but have not spoken publicly about the shooter’s motives, amid reports that he had white supremacist tattoos.
“While the FBI is investigating whether this matter might be an act of domestic terrorism, no motive has been determined at this time,” Special Agent in Charge Teresa Carlson said in a statement.
So far, there is nothing to suggest that anyone else was involved in Page’s fatal rampage. Like the Tucson shooter, he seems to have been an unbalanced man acting on his own delusions. It may turn out otherwise as we learn more, but that’s how things look right now.
In the wake of the Fort Hood shooting, however, the one word that the feds would not utter was “terrorism.” Of any kind, domestic or imported. That was despite evidence that Maj. Nidal Hasan went about murdering his fellow soldiers and the surrounding civilians because of his Islamic beliefs. He was said to have shouted the terrorist-friendly phrase “Allahu Ackbar!” as he fired round after round. He was in touch with a known international terrorist imam, who was later himself killed in a US drone strike. These days, Hasan has grown an Islamic beard to mess with the court and possibly create an appeal of some sort.
Yet we’ve never heard the feds characterize Hassan’s actions as terrorism. The FBI even failed to interview Hasan about his email contact with the late Anwar al-Awlaki, the terrorist imam who was holed up (until he was blown up) in Yemen last year. It’s as if the feds were doing their best not to find any terrorism link in the Hasan case.
But within hours of the Wisconsin killings, terrorism was already the operating theory.
Curious, that.
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