I am tired. I have spent my week fighting the good fight with My Colleagues, who are obsessed with finding reason to believe that Maj. Nidal Hasan had terrorist connections that led him to open fire on his fellow soldiers last week at Fort Hood.

It is not an easy battle. My colleagues are afflicted with a peculiar disease common to their kind: reporter’s ADHD. They are attracted to shiny objects, like mylar balloons and silicon breasts, and of course, scary Muslim terrorists. And they won’t take no for an answer.

It’s just not good enough for them that the Joint Terrorism Task Force read over Hasan’s e-mails with a radical cleric they were never able to pin anything on when he lived in the United States, reviewed his personnel files and checked out his background, only to determine there was no there there.

And it’s not good enough that Hasan’s supervisor at Fort Hood, Col. Kimberly Kesling, said that Hasan was doing an excellent job and was an asset to her team.

Some of my colleagues have even made great leaps, intimating that there is an al Qaeda connection when nothing of the sort has been mentioned by anyone.

And now there’s the hunt for people who knew Hasan, who can tell tales of what a radical he was, how extreme his views were, how ideologically driven he was. Anonymously, of course.

The Army has now asked those people to come forward and speak with investigators, something you’d think they would have done in the first place rather than run to the nearest salivating journalist. These people are all Army officers, mind you.

Interestingly, they’ve offered no specifics to back up their claims that Hasan justified suicide bombings or spouted other extremist views. A couple did say they asked the major if he were loyal to Sharia law or the Constitution first. Sharia law, he told them.

Wonder how many soldiers would say they are loyal to the bible ahead of the Constitution? A number of congresscritters, just as an example, have made that claim, but to my knowledge none of my colleagues have tried to paint them as Christian extremists.

Extremism, I tell my colleagues, is in the eye of the beholder. The right loves to claim that they have no problems with homosexuals, but don’t like us flaunting our sexuality. Ask them what they mean by flaunting, and they have a little trouble answering, because, it turns out, what they really mean is they don’t want to know that any homosexuals exist. Don’t hold hands with your partner in public or display a photograph of your partner on your desk, and for god’s sake don’t talk about how sweet your partner was on your birthday.

I was once tossed from a restaurant because I sat next to my girlfriend at our table instead of across from her. I’ve been screamed at for standing outside on the sidewalk. I want equal rights for all queer folk. I want gay men and lesbians to have the right to marry their partners and all the benefits that come with that. I want queer folk to be allowed to adopt children. I live in a state that is still angry over having its sodomy laws declared unconstitutional. I’ve communicated with the founders of ACTUP and Queer Nation, and members of the Socialist Workers’ Party, the Weatherman and the SDS too. So if I were to bring a legally purchased gun into my newsroom one day and start shooting, how many people would come forward, anonymously of course, and say afterward that I was a radical homosexual who hated straight people?

Maybe nobody, but then, I don’t have an Arabic name.

It’s not a stretch for me to believe that a profoundly devout Muslim, who reads the Quran forbidding him from killing other Muslims, to have problems with our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s not difficult for me to believe that such a man or woman, serving in the U.S. military, would be conflicted over his or her role as a soldier and a Muslim, worried about being deployed to the war theaters.

Hell, the non-Muslim soldiers worry about that, even the medical personnel who won’t actually be fighting, because the insurgents see no difference between a doctor in a uniform and a regular soldier in a uniform. They are both U.S. military.

And I know that listening to the horrors of war day in and day out can wear on you. If you’re a psychiatrist, you don’t have the option of deadening yourself to the pain of those soldiers. You can only be so far removed from it and still be able to help.

Nidal Hasan may well be a very conservative Muslim. Sounds like it to me. I no more agree with the views he appears to have than I do with the Christians who hold equally conservative views.

Like the American Legion troop that used to give out scholarships during a special ceremony to students at a particular school, but took away the scholarships when the school asked them not to insert religion into their ceremony.

But I don’t for one minute think that the U.S. Army would have promoted Hasan and kept him on if they believed he espoused the views of the people they’re currently fighting. My colleagues are deluding themselves. No surprise there.

So what if he shouted “Allahu akbar” during his rampage? He’s Muslim. I somehow don’t think he would have shouted “Jesus Christ” or “In the name of Zeus.”

A criminal profiler noted on CNN the other night that Hasan fits the profile of a loner mass murderer more than a terrorist, the kind of guy who loses it one day and goes shooting at the workplace. I wish my colleagues would give that as much credence as they do their anonymous sources who may or may not have an agenda of their own.

Worse still are the commentators who lack the scruples of my ADHD colleagues. There are more than a few folks who dare to call themselves journalists who are tossing out their opinions that Hasan is a terrorist and labeling them as fact. And it’s not limited to Faux News.

I could be completely wrong here, of course. The Army investigation could turn up that Hasan spends his vacations at an al Qaeda training camp in Pakistan. I doubt it, but it’s possible. But my colleagues would serve a better purpose if they stepped back and let the investigators do their jobs. We’ll know the truth soon enough.