Sixteen years after his deadly rampage at Fort Hood, the United States Army is preparing to formally recommend the execution of Islamist terrorist Nidal Hasan — at last.
President Donald Trump, when he receives that request, should swiftly order Hasan’s death: That would be necessary justice.
But it will not absolve our government for its years-long policy of lies and euphemisms surrounding Islamic radicalism that empowered Hasan to kill 13 service members — a policy that began under President George W. Bush and continued through the Obama and Biden administrations.
Fort Hood was not an unexpected “tragedy.”
It was a preventable act of jihad, made possible by institutions that treated the truth about Islamist violence as more dangerous than the violence itself.
Hasan, an Army major who was given preferential treatment solely because of his Muslim religion and Arab ethnicity, murdered 13 Americans and wounded 33 others at Fort Hood, Tex., on Nov. 5, 2009.
Hasan screamed “Allahu Akbar” as he emptied his pistols into unarmed soldiers — then walked up and down the abattoir, shooting the wounded.
I had the honor of representing Hasan’s victims and their families in a lawsuit filed against the Army and the FBI in 2012.
We sued because the government knew Hasan was an incompetent doctor and a terror threat, but chose not to act.
Hasan’s hatred for Americans was well-known.
During his Army medical training he spouted justifications for suicide bombing, defended Osama bin Laden and said his religion trumped the Constitution.
His business card read “Soldier of Allah.”
Two different Army officers, an instructor and a colleague, separately called him a “ticking time bomb.”
Yet his official officer evaluation reports “sanitized his obsession with violent Islamist extremism into praiseworthy research on counterterrorism,” a 2011 Senate investigation found.
He was promoted to major despite manifestly poor performance — and credible evidence that he called PTSD-afflicted Americans “war criminals” in treatment sessions, urging them to convert to Islam to avoid damnation.
From December 2008 through June 2009, Hasan exchanged 18 messages with Anwar al-Awlaki, the al Qaeda cleric later killed by a US drone.
Hasan asked Awlaki whether service in the American military was compatible with Islam, martyrdom and suicide operations.
The San Diego Joint Terrorism Task Force, which was investigating Awlaki, flagged that traffic and sent it to FBI superiors in Washington.
But those superiors didn’t interview Hasan, or notify his chain of command.
A San Diego field office official was told the matter was “politically sensitive.”
The lying continued as the dead were buried.
In his memorial speech on Nov. 10, 2009, President Obama did not use the words “terrorism,” “terrorist” or “terror.”
Two days later Gen. George W. Casey Jr., then Army Chief of Staff, told ABC News: “What happened at Fort Hood is a tragedy, and I believe it would be a greater tragedy if diversity became a casualty here.”
Thereafter the Pentagon, in one of the most shameful episodes in its history, classified the attack as “workplace violence” — contradicting the evidence, including Hasan’s own admissions.
The terrorist’s motive and beliefs were bureaucratically and politically taboo.
One officer told investigators that fear of discrimination complaints and “political correctness” stopped people from challenging Hasan.
This fear had a purpose — and a price.
Labeling the attack an incident of workplace violence allowed officials to deny the victims Purple Hearts and combat-related care, while protecting the Army’s vaunted “diversity.”
From the beginning, the terrorist’s religion and ethnicity mattered more to the Pentagon than the safety of our soldiers.
In 2015, Congress passed a bill that forced the Obama administration to award Hasan’s victims Purple Hearts and proper benefits.
That was well-deserved compensation — but medals do not repair the doctrine that resulted in death.
“Political correctness,” the term we used in court, was not a culture-war slogan.
It was a decision to exempt an unfit officer from the rules applied to everyone else because of his ethnicity and religion — and, after he spilled Americans’ blood, to recast a terrorist attack as an HR incident so that no one had to say the words “violent Islamist extremism.”
The larger unfinished business is honesty.
Under President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the policy of lies that empowered the terrorist Hasan is being purged from our government, our military and our immigration policy.
But those same lies are still told today in academia and medical systems, in city and state bureaucracies from Dearborn to New York City, and in Western European, Australian and Canadian government and military circles.
And Fort Hood teaches us that lying about the nature, the sources and the political purposes of Islamist terrorism inevitably carries a heartbreaking body count.
Reed D. Rubinstein, senior vice president of America First Legal, sued the Army and FBI on behalf of Fort Hood victims and their families.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
