The government's labeling of the beheading of an Oklahoma woman as a case of "workplace violence" is political correctness run amok, according to former CIA director James Woolsey.
"It's really a bad idea. Political correctness is just stupid. Anybody who thinks it works ought to read the old '50s science fiction novel by Ray Bradbury called 'Fahrenheit 451,'" Woolsey said Thursday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
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"It's essentially a commentary on political correctness. It blinds you to reality. You've got to call it straight.
"You may be wrong, everybody makes mistakes, but you can't assume anything that is violent ought to be labeled the same way a psychiatric case who goes out and just starts shooting randomly around."
The victim was beheaded last week by a coworker who had converted to Islam during a stay in prison and was reportedly trying to convert others.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Alton Nolen, 30, who is accused of killing Colleen Hufford, 54, and then attacking Traci Johnson, 43, during a rampage at Vaughan Foods in Moore, Okla.
Woolsey, a Democrat who served as CIA director from 1993-1995, also pointed to the massacre at Fort Hood, which was also called workplace violence, despite the shooters ties to Islamic extremism.
In that 2009 case, Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army major and psychiatrist, was found guilty 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder.
Hasan had been communicating with Middle East imam Anwar al-Awlaki, who was eyed by the National Security Agency as a security threat.
"He was shouting allahu akbar as he murdered his fellow soldiers and … guards said that he was a jihadi and on and on — and yet they wrote up this report years ago that just said it was workplace violence," Woolsey said.
"[That] connotes something like just a crazed individual and that's really stupid because it makes it harder for people to understand what's going on. You can't deal with things very well unless you can talk about them."
Woolsey, chairman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said President Barack Obama has a "propensity for wanting everything to stick to what they sometimes call the narrative. Another word for narrative might be fib.
"The story is that terrorism was defeated when we killed [Osama] bin Laden, other terrorism when we were able to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan and it's largely over….
"That's the story and it gets less and less true and more and more difficult to fit it together with reality every day."
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