If hindsight is 20/20, then the case against alleged Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan seems crystal clear.
In an article published Tuesday, the New York Times highlighted a few of the many red flags that were either unnoticed or ignored before the 2009 shooting attack. Remind me again how all of this amounts to "workplace violence"...?
Days before he opened fire inside a medical processing building at Fort Hood here in 2009, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan sent two e-mails to his Army superiors expressing concern about the actions of some of the soldiers he was evaluating as a military psychiatrist.In the e-mails, one sent 13 days before the attack and the second three days prior, Major Hasan asked his supervisors and Army legal advisers how to handle three cases that disturbed him. In one case, a soldier reported to him that American troops had poured 50 gallons of fuel into the Iraqi water supply as revenge; the second case involved another soldier who told him about a mercy killing of a severely injured insurgent by medics; and in the third, a soldier spoke of killing an Iraqi woman because he was following orders to shoot anything that approached a specific site.
“I think I need a lot of reassurance for the first few times I come across these,” Hasan wrote about the cases. Below his e-mail signature, he included a quote from the Koran – “All praises and thanks go to Allah, the Cherisher and Sustainer of all the worlds.”
Before these emails were sent out, Hasan had already "publicly embraced violent Islamic extremism and justified suicide bombings and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks," the Times notes. In addition, Hasan had previously warned in an academic presentation that "a risk of having Muslim Americans in the military was the possibility that they would murder their fellow troops."
Hasan had also reportedly told classmates during a fellowship that his religion took precedence over the U.S. Constitution and defended al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in an academic paper. He exchanged emails with Anwar al-Awlaki, a militant American-born cleric in Yemen, and an expert witness from the FBI testified that Hasan's laptop accessed a number of jihad- and Taliban-related internet content in the days and hours before the deadly attack.
All of this and yet the federal government still declines to call this mass murder an act of terrorism...
