“This is going to get very dark,” reads the headline of a blog posting late Thursday by TalkingPointsMemo’s Josh Marshall.

Marshall was referring to news reports stating that the alleged primary shooter killed in today’s rampage at the army base in Fort Hood, Texas, has a “Muslim-sounding” name — and what that will mean for the political debate surrounding the shooting in post-911 America.

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“The fact that the primary assailant has an Arabic name and is presumably, though we don’t know this yet, of Muslim extraction if not a practicing Muslim, is going to be the focus of attention,” Marshall wrote.

And indeed, no sooner had Marshall made his prediction than Fox News made that prediction come true.

In an interview with US Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), Fox host Shepard Smith asked: “The names tells us a lot, does it not, senator?”

“It does,” Hutchison replied. “It does, Shepard.”

While Smith stressed he wasn’t releasing the alleged shooter’s name because Fox had not been able to corroborate it, ABC News is reporting that the person identified as the main shooter in the violent incident was Major Malik Nadal Hasan.

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Hasan, if that is indeed the correct name, is now the primary suspect in the rampage that took the lives of 12 people and injured 31 others in Fort Hood, Texas, on Thursday afternoon. MSNBC reported that Hasan was an army psychiatrist who had been promoted to the rank of major this past May.

Smith told Fox News viewers that the alleged shooter was “an officer in the US Army who was about to deploy to the war, was upset about the prospect of being deployed to war.”

Smith stated: “Can we connect the dot between that and what he did today? You can, but we don’t have the information to say that he was so upset that he went out and shot. When we can draw [those connections], we will.”

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This video is from Fox News, broadcast Nov. 5, 2009.





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