At Fort Hood, Texas, on November 5, 2009, 13 American military men and women were killed and more than 30 wounded by a man who proudly regarded himself as a “Soldier of Allah” and shouted “Allahu Akbar!” as he pulled the trigger over and over.
The military trial of Major Nidal Malik Hasan finally began last week. As Mark Steyn has pointed out, it took the U.S. less time to defeat the Japanese following the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor than it has taken to bring Hasan to court following the surprise attack at Fort Hood.
“This has got to be torture,” the Times quotes law professor Geoffrey S. Corn as saying. He is not speaking about the victims or their families. He is not speaking about any emotion the attorneys might feel about defending an admitted and unrepentant mass murderer. He is speaking about how tough it is for lawyers who oppose capital punishment to have failed to persuade Hasan that it would be in his best interest to refrain from telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
“Any lawyer who’s dismissed by his client and ordered to stay on the case as a standby counsel, it is probably one of the hardest things imaginable for a lawyer to do,” Corn added. “You have to sit there and watch your client make what you know are potentially mortal mistakes, and that’s agonizing.”
Speaking of agonizing mortal mistakes: Hasan, the 42-year-old American-born son of Palestinian immigrants, was educated as a psychiatrist (at the expense of U.S. taxpayers) and rose steadily through Army ranks (he continues to draw a salary to this day). Early and ample evidence that he was embracing radical religious doctrines was ignored by his superior officers, evidently because they feared being accused of Islamophobia.
Army rules prohibit the judge from accepting a guilty plea to charges that carry the death penalty. Hasan, who has invoked his constitutional right to represent himself at trial, seems to understand that. On the first day of the trial, he told jurors that he was indeed responsible for the slaughter — “The evidence will clearly show that I am the shooter” — and that the semi-automatic displayed by prosecutors was his.
Wearing Army fatigues with an American-flag patch on the right sleeve, he explained that during the years he spent as an American soldier, he was “on the wrong side,” so he had “switched sides” and become one of the “mujahedeen” fighting America.
Witnesses testified that he had targeted men and women in uniform, rather than civilians, that he fired as fast as he could acquire those targets — dropping his magazines and reloading in a matter of seconds – and that he did not hesitate to shoot the wounded as they lay bleeding on the floor. One of his victims, Private Francheska Velez, 21, was pregnant. She pleaded: “Please don’t, please don’t, my baby, my baby.” Both she and her unborn child were among the dead.
Following all this, Lieutenant Colonel Kris R. Poppe, appointed as “standby counsel” after Hasan fired him as head defense lawyer, complained to the judge that his client wants to be sentenced to death, and that helping him reach that goal would violate Poppe’s “ethical obligations.” He found that goal “repugnant,” he added.
Allow me to be the first to accuse Poppe of insensitivity. He is clearly disparaging Hasan’s religious beliefs, his interpretation of his religious obligations — an interpretation not shared by most of the world’s Muslims but one certainly shared by a substantial minority including members of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood, whose motto includes the phrase: “Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” How insulting also for the Obama administration to characterize Hasan’s attack as “workplace violence,” suggesting he’s a nut job rather than a cool, collected, and dedicated jihadist.
Hasan clearly sees himself as he was seen by his spiritual guide, Anwar Al-Awlaki. The late American-born al-Qaeda commander, once the imam of a mosque in Virginia, called Hasan a “hero” and a “man of conscience” who “opened fire on soldiers who were on their way to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. How can there be any dispute about the virtue of what he has done?”
Hasan now wants what Awlaki achieved with the help of an American missile fired from a drone in Yemen: martyrdom — and not in the metaphorical sense. If you understand his fundamentalist reading of Islam, it is not difficult to see why he might prefer that fate to life in prison — and probably would even were he not in a wheelchair, paralyzed by gunshots fired by police officers. (The soldiers he shot had been prohibited from carrying weapons — out of concern for their safety.)
Poppe is hardly alone in being unable to imagine how people can see the world so differently from the way he does — despite the fact that history is replete with religious wars and religiously motivated warriors seeking rewards in the afterlife. Examples are found not only within the Muslim world but also in Christendom, now more commonly called the West, countries that in recent decades have adopted such lofty ideas as multiculturalism, diversity, tolerance, peaceful coexistence, and, of course, “conflict resolution.”
Because these ideas have been presented as “modern” rather than Western, Poppe and millions like him expected the rest of the world to quickly embrace them. That expectation turns out to have been mistaken. Mistakes have consequences. That is among the truths Hasan is communicating. Poppe and others in high office just don’t want to hear it.