Ten years ago at Fort Hood

In American Greatness, Lloyd Billingsley reminds us,

On November 5, 2009, at Ford Hood, Texas, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, began gunning down unarmed U.S. soldiers, including Francheska Velez, a 21-year-old private from Chicago who pleaded for the life of her baby. Hasan shot her in the chest and her unborn child perished with the mother.

The Muslim major, a self-described “soldier of Allah” yelling “Allahu akbar” as he fired, killed two other women that day along with 10 men—more than twice as many victims as the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. The Fort Hood massacre was also the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil since September 11, 2001, but that was not how President Obama described it.

In his mind, the Fort Hood mass murder was not terrorism or even gun violence. For the president of the United States, it was “workplace violence,” an absurdity for the ages that rendered Hasan’s victims ineligible for the medical treatment and medals they deserved. Sgt. Alonzo Lunsford, who took seven bullets, sought just 10 minutes to tell President Obama how the government mistreated the Fort Hood victims but the White House declined his request.

In March 2010, the president urged Congress to hold off on any investigation of the Fort Hood “terrible tragedy” and even referred to “the alleged gunman.” Two years later, it emerged that the attack could have been prevented. As a 2012 congressional hearing revealed, Hasan openly communicated with terrorist mastermind Anwar al-Awlaki, telling him in an email “Please keep me in your Rolodex in case you find me useful, and please feel free to call me collect.” Under FBI Director Robert Mueller “the case was dropped until November 5, when the media began circulating reports of the massacre.”

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