Lots of good buzzwords and quotes in this story on that ‘workplace violence’ incident by Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, who, now being paralyzed from the chest down, really wants to be on very long and growing list of Islamic martyrs:
Hasan left no doubt about his role, telling a panel of 13 officers during a brief opening statement: “The evidence will clearly show that I am the shooter.”
“The evidence presented with this trial will show one side. The evidence will also show that I was on the wrong side. I then switched sides,” he said.
He’s also left little question about why he did it, repeatedly saying before the trial started that he was acting to protect Taliban leaders in Afghanistan from the U.S. military.
“We mujahedeen are trying to establish the perfect religion,” he told the panel last week…
A U.S.-born citizen of Palestinian descent, Hasan was a licensed psychiatrist who joined the Army in 1997. But he had been telling his family since 2001 that he wanted to get out of the military, saying he had been taunted by people after the September 11 terror attacks.
Prosecutors hope to show that the devout Muslim had undergone a “progressive radicalization,” going so far as to give academic presentations in defense of suicide bombings.
Hasan, who was scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan, did not want to fight against other Muslims and believed “that he had a jihad duty to kill as many soldiers as possible,” said lead prosecutor Col. Michael Mulligan…
Army Staff Sgt. Alonzo Lunsford, the first survivor to take the stand, recounted how the gunman rose from a chair in the processing center, shouted “Allahu Akbar” — Arabic for God is great, pulled out a pistol and began shooting…
Of Hasan’s 13 victims (14 if you count the unborn below), we’ve heard very little specifics about who they were, what kinds of people they were:
… Then he heard Pvt. Francheska Velez screaming, “my baby, my baby” as she cradled her stomach. She crawled to the pregnant Velez and tried to comfort her, telling the 21-year-old private that it would be OK and that the training exercise would end soon.
Velez and her unborn baby died in the attack.
