About Nidal Hasan 2009 Fort Hood Shooting

About Nidal Hasan 2009 Fort Hood Shooting ---
tags: timeline 2009, army base attack, insider attack, Taliban credit, workplace violence, terrorist attack, Islamist, Arab or Muslim suspect, Anwar al-Awlaki, Fort Hood, Texas, conviction, confession, traitor, Terrorism staged as crime or accident, Hidden Motive Terrorists

November 5, 2009: Nidal Hasan 2009 Fort Hood Shooting At Fort Hood near Kileen Texas, Major Nidal Malik Hasan who was an army psychiatrist fatally shot 13 people, mostly soldiers and injured more than 30 others. He was armed with a FN Five-sevenfitted with two laser sights: one red, and one green which was used in the shootings, and he also was found with a Smith and  Wesson .357 Magnum revolver which was not used and was probably a backup weapon. The shooting produced more casualties than any other on an American military base. Several individuals, including Senator Joe Lieberman, General Barry McCaffrey, and others have called the event a terrorist attack. The United States Department of Defense and federal law enforcement agencies have classified the shootings as an act of workplace violence.

References:

2009 Fort Hood shooting - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Fort_Hood_shooting‎
Wikipedia
On November 5, 2009, a mass murder took place at Fort Hood, near Killeen, Texas. Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army major and psychiatrist, fatally shot 13 people ...

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http://weaponsman.com/?p=9931

We haven’t said much on Nidal Hasan

The Mug of Evil. To steal a gag from the mighty Horwitz brothers (and Larry Feinberg): Hasan Ben Sober.

And here’s why: it’s hard to beat the Canadian-American verbal artist, Mark Steyn:

Major Hasan has never been in combat. He is not, in fact, a soldier. He is a shrink. The soldiers in this story are the victims, some 45 of them. And the only reason a doctor can gun down nearly four dozen trained warriors (he was eventually interrupted by a civilian police officer, Sergeant Kimberly Munley, with a 9mm Beretta) is that soldiers on base are forbidden from carrying weapons. That’s to say, under a 1993 directive a U.S. military base is effectively a gun-free zone, just like a Connecticut grade school. That’s a useful tip: If you’re mentally ill and looking to shoot up a movie theater at the next Batman premiere, try the local barracks — there’s less chance of anyone firing back.

Maybe this Clinton-era directive merits reconsideration in the wake of Fort Hood? Don’t be ridiculous. Instead, nine months after Major Hasan’s killing spree, the Department of Defense put into place “a series of procedural and policy changes that focus on identifying, responding to, and preventing potential workplace violence.”

Major Hasan says he’s a soldier for the Taliban. Maybe if the Pentagon were to reclassify the entire Afghan theater as an unusually prolonged outburst of “workplace violence,” we wouldn’t have to worry about obsolescent concepts such as “victory” and “defeat.” The important thing is that the U.S. Army’s “workplace violence” is diverse. After Major Hasan’s pre-post-traumatic workplace wobbly, General George W. Casey Jr., the Army’s chief of staff, was at pains to assure us that it could have been a whole lot worse: “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty.” And you can’t get much more diverse than letting your military personnel pick which side of the war they want to be on.

Like I said, we think he’s nuts; he thinks we’re nuts. Right now, there’s a petition on the Internet seeking to persuade the United States government to reclassify Hasan’s “workplace violence” as an act of terror. There are practical consequences to this: The victims, shot by an avowed enemy combatant in an act of war, are currently ineligible for Purple Hearts. The Pentagon insists the dead and wounded must be dishonored in death because to give them any awards for their sacrifice would prejudice Major Hasan’s trial and make it less likely that he could be convicted.

This is one where you’re better rewarded by going to  Read The Whole Thing™ than you are reading the rest of our wensite. Honestly.

The Herstal Icepick like Hasan’s. (FN photo via Wikipedia).

Steyn does make a few small errors. Munley was only one of two cops who engaged Hasan, and she engaged him ineffectively. She was down with wounds when the other, Mark Todd, shot and hit Hasan, kicked his FN FiveSeVeN out of his hand, and cuffed his bleeding carcass. (The media loves a woman hero — and Munley was all of that — that they have erased Todd’s more successful heroism from The Narrative™. Munley deserves praise for “riding to the sound of the guns” but it was the media-erased Mark Todd who ended Hasan’s rampage). Unfortunately, the medics saved Hasan, but the good news is they also saved most of the people he’d punctured with his Herstal icepick. (13 died, mostly killed instantly at close range, execution-style, by Hasan.

Hasan fired about 200-205 rounds and the responding police officers are thought to have fired four or five shots each. Munley’s shot count is not known, but all her shots were misses. She was hit three times, once by fragmentation or spalling from a miss, and twice by direct hits. Todd fired five shots and scored four hits, leaving Hasan a paraplegic.

Unarmed attempts to take on Hasan before the police arrived failed, despite desperate heroism. CPT John Gaffaney threw a chair at Hasan; Hasan shot him dead. Likewise, civilian physician’s assistant Michael Cahill rushed Hasan with a chair, only to be shot dead. Specialist JD Hunt used his body to shield nurses; he, too was shot dead. These people were awarded medals, but the awards were steeped in politics: non-combat medals only were awarded, and the fort Hood commander ensured that the Army graduated awards for courage according to rank, with Hunt receiving a low-level Meritorious Service Medal and Gaffaney getting the Soldier’s Medal.