November 5: On This Day in World History … briefly
Days before he opened fire at Fort Hood in 2009, Major Hasan asked his supervisors and Army legal advisers how to handle reports of soldier's deeds in Afghanistan and Iraq that disturbed him.
2009: US Army Major murders 13 and wounds 32
Nidal Malik Hasan is a former American Army Major convicted of killing 13 people and injuring more than 30 others in the Fort Hood mass shooting on November 5, 2009. Hasan was a United States Army Medical Corps psychiatrist who admitted to the shootings at his court-martial in August 2013. A jury panel of 13 officers convicted him of 13 counts of premeditated murder, 32 counts of attempted murder, and unanimously recommended he be dismissed from the service and sentenced to death. Hasan is incarcerated at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas awaiting execution.
During the six years that Hasan was an intern and resident at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, colleagues and superiors were concerned about his job performance and comments. Hasan was not married at the time and was being described as socially isolated, stressed by his work with soldiers, and upset about their accounts of warfare. Two days before the shooting, which occurred less than a month before he was due to deploy to Afghanistan, Hasan gave away many of his belongings to a neighbour.
Prior to the shooting, Hasan had expressed critical views described by colleagues as ‘anti-American’. An investigation conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) concluded that his e-mails with the late Imam Anwar al-Awlaki were related to his authorised professional research and that he was not a threat. The FBI, Department of Defense (DoD) and US Senate all conducted investigations after the shootings. The DoD classified the events as ‘workplace violence’, pending prosecution of Hasan in a court-martial.‘ The Senate released a report describing the mass shooting as ‘the worst terrorist attack on US soil since September 11, 2001’.
The decision by the Army not to charge Hasan with terrorism was controversial.
Most notable historic snippets or facts extracted from the book ‘On This Day’ first published in 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London, as well as additional supplementary information extracted from Wikipedia.
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