At Fort Hood, Wrestling With Label of Terrorism

In the hours and days after a deadly shooting at Fort Hood last week, Army officials have not shied away from talking about terrorism — to contrast it with the 2009 attack and to ease fears about the motive behind the second mass shooting on the base in nearly five years.

“We have not found any links to terrorism, or any international or domestic extremist groups at this time,” Chris Grey, a spokesman for the United States Army Criminal Investigation Command, told reporters.

That simple word has a complex and politically charged past at Fort Hood. Army officials have never called the first Fort Hood mass shooting in November 2009 — when Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan shot dozens of soldiers in what he said was an attempt to protect Taliban leaders in Afghanistan from American troops — an act of terrorism.

Major Hasan was prosecuted by the Army on murder charges, not terrorism-related charges. The Army’s lead prosecutor called it “the t-word.” Throughout Major Hasan’s trial in August at Fort Hood, terrorism was never uttered in the presence of the military jury, neither by prosecutors nor by the more than 100 witnesses they called. Major Hasan was found guilty and sentenced to death. Continue reading the main story The Victims of Fort Hood

The disconnect between how the Army mentioned the word terrorism in relation to one shooting and avoided it in the other underscores the still-unresolved debate over how to define the 2009 shooting and whether it should be considered an act of terror, a debate the attack last week has rekindled. When President Obama returns to Fort Hood on Wednesday for a memorial service, victims of the 2009 shooting will be listening closely.

What they want to avoid is the “M-word,” not the “T-word.” If it had been some Aryan Brotherhood type, it would have been terrorism from the start. But because the Fort Hood shooter (the first one) was a Muslim, we could never call it terrorism.

I’m still waiting to find out the Islamic name of the latest Fort Hood shooter. They’re definitely covering up something and have been handing out the flimsiest stories.

Now it’s that he had an “altercation” with some people at the office when he came in...since he was armed and ready to kill them, yes, I can imagine they were rather upset and there was an “altercation.” Or maybe it was when he screamed “Allah akhbar” at them...?

Terrorism is the use of violence to terrify in order to instill or promote an ideology. The nutcase teenage mass killers were just that, mass killers, but not terrorists. Hassan, on the other hand, was a terrorist, as was the guy who shot up the Norfolk Navy Yard (who was a Muslim convert who yelled the usual Allah stuff when he attacked) and as were several other attackers covered up by the US government.

Call them what they are. It’s not difficult at all, and there’s nothing to “wrestle with.”

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