The Patriot Post® · Justice Finally Comes for Nidal Hasan

If ever a single case revealed the tragicomic flaws of our criminal “justice” system, it is that of Fort Hood terrorist Nidal Malik Hasan.

Yesterday, that mass-murdering Muslim dog — the dog who walked into Fort Hood’s Soldier Readiness Processing Center on Thursday, November 5, 2009, and opened fire, killing 13 unarmed soldiers and one unborn baby, and wounding 32 others — learned that he’d finally face a firing squad.

Finally, after having been sentenced to death by military tribunal 13 years ago.

CBS News notes that it’s been “a lengthy appeals process for Hasan.” You’re telling me. Hasan represented himself at trial, clashed with his own court-appointed attorneys, and finally asked the Supreme Court to review his case in 2024, claiming that he’d been denied the right to a public trial. Is this any way to run an effective criminal justice system?

As Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell posted, “Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has recommended — and President Donald J. Trump has approved — death by U.S. Army firing squad for convicted terrorist Nidal Malik Hasan, the jihadist who opened fire on unarmed American soldiers ... while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ during the attack. The Secretary of the Army will set the time and place of the execution. Judgement day for Hasan has finally come.”

Personally, I would’ve preferred decapitation with a rusty jackknife, and I’d have stood in line for the honor. (I realize the preceding sentence is deeply un-Christian, but it’s also deeply honest.) On the other hand, a firing squad seems somehow appropriate, if all too merciful. Moreover, the fact that it’ll take place there at the scene of the crime, right there on the hallowed ground of Fort Hood, is even more appropriate.

I also would’ve preferred that our legacy media honor and remember the life of PFC Francheska Velez’s unborn baby. The death toll was 14, not 13, as is lazily being reported by the mainstream media.

At the time, Idaho Republican Senator Jim Risch rightly urged Army prosecutors to add a 14th murder count against Hasan. “Both federal law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice allow for a murder charge when a person causes the death of an unborn child,” he argued. “It is important for this child to have justice and for recognition that this family suffered two deaths in this senseless rampage.”

Elections have consequences, though, and our commander-in-chief at the time was Barack Hussein Obama. And his Islam-apologist administration classified Hasan’s murderous rampage as “workplace violence” instead of what it clearly was: an act of jihadist terrorism.

That wrongful classification wasn’t merely a matter of political semantics, though. As Texas Republican Congressman Mike McCaul wrote at the time, “The result of this inexcusable [workplace violence] classification ... is that victims and their families have not received the same recognition or medical and financial benefits as those wounded or killed in war.” (Years later, in 2015, decency finally prevailed, when Congress passed a bill that forced Obama to award Purple Hearts and proper benefits to Hasan’s victims.)

Yesterday’s news from the Trump War Department is certainly welcome, but it doesn’t remove the stench of politically correct appeasement that plagued our federal government throughout the case. As Reed Rubinstein of America First Legal, which sued the Army and the FBI on behalf of the Fort Hood victims and their families, writes, “[Hasan’s sentence] 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.”

Remember: Prior to Hasan’s massacre, two different Army officers independently called him a “ticking time bomb.” And yet officials didn’t drum him out of the military. As Rubinstein continues:

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.

Injustice abounds with the Hasan case. Why on earth, for example, has it taken this long to serve justice upon Hasan and bring closure to all the families whose lives he wantonly and mercilessly wrecked? It’s not as if there were a shred of doubt as to his guilt or motive. Indeed, as CBS News reports, “Hasan acknowledged at trial that he was responsible for the shooting, claiming he opened fire on fellow members of the Army in an attempt to protect Islamic insurgents from U.S. military forces.” As he put it in a brief opening statement at the time, “Evidence will clearly show that I am the shooter and the dead bodies will show the war is an ugly thing.”

Here, Hasan is right: War is certainly an ugly thing. But war between armed combatants pales in comparison to the cold-blooded mass murder of unarmed innocents.

Here’s hoping each member of that Fort Hood firing squad is a poor aim. And here’s hoping that we can somehow correct our criminal justice system to ensure that punishment is not just severe but also, in clear-cut cases such as this, a lot more swift.