By Nathan Bernier, KUT News
AUSTIN – It’s been more than three years since a gunman walked into a military processing center at Fort Hood, about an hour north of Austin, and began shooting people at point blank range. Thirteen people were killed and more than thirty were wounded. After years of delays, the trial of Nidal Hasan begins today.
The shooting happened on November 5th, 2009. It was a Thursday. Around 1:30 in the afternoon, soldiers at Fort Hood were in a readiness center, doing paperwork, receiving health assessments, and getting ready to leave their families for war. But then someone walked into the room and brought the war to them. Private first class Marquest Smith was sitting in a cubicle nearby going over some medical paperwork.
MARQUEST SMITH: “When I heard the gunshots, it didn’t sound like gunshots. It sounded like popcorn being popped in the microwave.”
In a few minutes, the shooter fired more than two-hundred rounds from an FN Five-Seven Pistol equipped with two laser sights, according to witness testimony. He wasn’t stopped until he left the solider readiness center and engaged in a firefight with two police officers. At first, Kimberly Munley was credited with stopping the shooter. But then another police officer, Mark Todd said he fired the shots that stopped him. The final version of that story remains unclear. And for several hours afterward, military officials said the suspect, Nidal Hasan, was dead. Then, the commanding general of Fort Hood, Robert Cone, stepped in front of a group of reporters and said this:
ROBERT CONE: “He was not killed as previously reported. He is currently in custody and in stable condition. I say again, the shooter is not dead but in custody and in stable condition.”
Meanwhile, guards stood outside a hospital room at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. Inside Hasan lay in a bed paralyzed, on a ventilator. A few days after he came to, Hasan was charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That makes him eligible to receive the death penalty if convicted – a punishment that hasn’t been meted out by a military court since 1961.
President Obama went to Fort Hood for a memorial, and tried to provide some emotional relief for the family members of the people killed.
BARAK OBAMA: “Their lives speak to the strength, the dignity, the decency of those who served. And that’s how they will be remembered.”
The family members of the victims had their owns ways of trying to understand the tragedy. Mike Cahill was the only civilian killed in the shooting. At the family home in Cameron, Texas, his adult daughter Kerry found comfort in an Irish folk ballad her dad used to play when she was kid.
KERRY CAHILL: “There’s a great chorus line and it says, ‘And the tears of the people ran together,’ and so I think that when you have so much tragedy and so much grief, the people who are affected by it are often the people who do not control what happens.”
Nidal Hasan was born and raised in Virginia to Palestinian parents who emigrated from the West Bank. He joined the Army right out of high school in 1988. He served for eight years as an enlisted soldier while completing his undergraduate degree from Virginia Tech. He went on to earn a medical degree and work as a psychiatrist at Walter Reed Medical Center. But even then there were warning signs about Hasan. An investigation by NPR after the shootings found there were a series of worried meetings and conversations about Hasan starting in 2007. Officials wondered what they should do about Hasan and if he could harm someone. NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling spoke to sources who wished to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to discuss the matter with reporters.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: “When I ask people to describe Hasan, they keep using the same words. It’s interesting. Disconnected. Aloof. A loner. Beligerant. And sometimes, super polite. Then in January 2008, Hasan turned in a paper that really got people worried. Because they thought it was a disjointed religious diatribe. And some key officials sat around wondering, ‘Could he be descending into psychosis?’”
So why wasn’t Hasan relieved of his duties? Officials told Zwerdling it was a long and cumbersome bureaucratic process, and some of his superiors were worried they might be discriminating against Hasan on the basis of his seemingly extreme religious beliefs. Plus, they didn’t actually have any hard evidence against him.
But those reasons were insufficient for United States Senator Joe Lieberman, who helped lead an investigation after the shooting. His report found that the Department of Defense and the FBI has no information to anticipate that specific attack. But together, he said, they had enough information to have detected Hasan’s radicalization to violent Islamist extremism. However, they failed to act on it.
JOE LIEBERMAN: “The FBI actually had information that a member of the United States military was in communication with a target of their own terrorist investigation and did not pursue its investigation of that lead or notify the Defense Department.”
The criticisms raised were similar to those leveled after the 9/11 attacks: ineffective communication among government agencies. The FBI says it has implemented changes since then to address the problems raised in the report.
DIANE BATTAGALIA: “Good morning, I am Colonol Dian Battaglia. I am the Third Corps spokeswoman.”
Back at Fort Hood, in June 2010, Nidal Hasan made his first courtroom appearance after the shooting. Battaglia was briefing reporters on the Article 32 hearing which was supposed to determine if there was enough evidence to proceed with a court martial.
BATTAGALIA: “This morning at Fort Hood, Colonol James Poll, the Article 32 investigating officer for the Major Nidal Hasan hearings granted the defense motion to delay the Article 32 proceedings until 4 October.”
Hasan’s then-attorney John Galligan said he did not have enough documents to mount a proper defense. Those included Hasan’s military records, FBI files on Hasan’s alleged contact with a radical Yemeni cleric, and some government reviews of the shooting.
JOHN GALLIGAN: “We are at a point in time where we are trying to get relevant material evidence for purposes of trying to prepare for this case. And I’ll be honest with you, if sometimes that evidence isn’t provided when its deemed relevant and material, the trial isn’t going to happen.”
But now the trial is going to happen, even as the delays have been excruciating for family members of the victims and people who lived on post on the day of the massacre. Yes, Hasan will be able to keep his beard in violation of Army grooming regulations. That legal question delayed the trial for months. And No, Hasan will not be allowed to use a so-called “Defense of others” argument – that he was acting to defend the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan. The first important step in the trial happens later today. Jury selection is scheduled to begin at 2:30 this afternoon.
Loading ...