Lee Smith: What Major Hasan can teach us about sponsors of terrorism - '...Let us imagine that Hasan was a field-grade officer not in the US Army, but in an Arab military, and that the domestic intelligence service that had discovered his communications with a radical cleric was not the FBI, but an Arab mukhabarat. Arab intelligence officers would either torture and kill him, or torture him and use him to penetrate an Islamist group to their own benefit, perhaps by subverting a regional rival, or the Americans. It is darkly comical to imagine the Americans turning Major Hasan against, say, the Syrian regime, as Damascus has directed its own Islamist problem against the Iraqis and Americans in Iraq, and the Lebanese, suggesting that in the Middle East, "non-state" actors are those whose actions are either shaped by the state or constrained by it. And so the genuine danger is not the pathology of someone like Mr. Hasan, but rather its manipulation by people who really know what they’re doing. And that is a problem that belongs not only to the Americans.'