The Belated Execution of Major Hasan

On November 5, 2009, Army Major Nidal Hasan walked into the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood, shouted "Allahu Akbar," and opened fire on unarmed soldiers preparing to deploy. He killed thirteen people and wounded thirty-two. One of the dead was Private Francheska Velez, who was pregnant. A court-martial in 2013 convicted Hassan of thirteen counts of premeditated murder and thirty-two counts of attempted murder and sentenced him to death. Then the country waited.

On Monday, the Pentagon announced that the wait is over. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recommended that Hasan be executed by firing squad. President Trump approved it. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell put the right name on it: judgment day. It will be the first military execution since 1961, and the first by firing squad since WW II. Army rules put it no sooner than sixty days after approval and no later than one hundred fifty. The Secretary of the Army will set the time and place.

As a former Navy JAG officer and former military prosecutor, I have been warning, in print, for more than twenty years that radical Islamist infiltration of the armed forces was not a theoretical problem. My book Treason, published in 2005 by Zondervan, sounded the warning. So did follow-up books Hostage and Defiance. Other former officers, some of them high-ranking, have spoken out as well. Admiral James A. Lyons Jr., former commander of the Pacific Fleet, and Lieutenant General Jerry Boykin, former Delta Force commander, repeatedly warned about such infiltration. Hasan later told the court he was protecting Muslims and the Taliban in Afghanistan. In other words, committing treason against his country.

The harder problem is that once this ideology is treated as just another recruiting category, the chain-of-command cannot decipher the radical from the recruit. A beard, a prayer rug, and a clean record do not sort them. Hasan, a psychiatrist, an Army major, had already been flagged for troubling statements, including pre-massacre emails to high-ranking Al Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki, asking about “suicide bombings” and whether Muslims could serve in the military. The Obama Pentagon let him keep his commission anyway. The institution had decided that noticing the ideology was the offense.