It’s sad that no one seemed to notice Hasan’s deterioration even while he worked in a mental health setting. The consequences will make life tougher for other Muslims in the US.

“The group observed that Hasan repeatedly referred to his strong religious views in discussions with classmates, his superiors and his research work, the official said. But his behavior was not unlike the zeal of others with strong religious views.” (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/12/MNP71AIU27.DTL#ixzz0Wfmv1jXd)

This makes me wonder about your point above where you say: “While it may be necessary to regulate speech at fora such as Grand Rounds, which is intended for medical rather than religious presentations, it is important to protect religious speech in private conversations between government employees, regardless of their religious background. In fact, free and open religious discourse among employees can not only increase understanding, but may also make it easier to detect and counter extremist rhetoric…”

The military has changed greatly in the last decade or more, in that evangelical Christians have become extremely vocal, proselytizing in ways that totally blur the line between private and official speech. Their rhetoric has rarely been countered effectively. Here’s a piece I wrote about Mikey Weinstein who has been the primary whistleblower on this: http://newhumanist.org.uk/1681/backward-christian-soldiers. I agree with your point but only if religious moderates and progressives, plus atheists and agnostics, get the courage to speak up when religious extremists speak up: at the moment the moderates and atheists tend to keep a low profile and leave the field to the extremists, and it has become acceptable, at least in the case of Christian extremists, to give them way more room than they should be given. In this atmosphere, it seems that these doctors, maybe out of desire not to discriminate against Islam, let Hasan’s ranting go unchallenged. So the real challenge to Americans is engage with our religious extremists of all stripes, most of them Christian and only a few of them Muslims or others (there are some fascistic Hindus out there too as Murli Natrajan’s posts here have shown, and I don’t know who else).