Nidal Hasan: Monster or Martyr?

Whenever we presume to be beyond shock at the depths to which the Trump administration will sink, they inevitably sink further still. Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, has announced that the Department of War will livestream the execution by firing squad of a mass shooter who attacked Fort Hood (Texas) on November 5, 2009. He killed thirteen people and injured fifty-two others. He was convicted in July 2013 of thirteen counts of premeditated murder. He was paralyzed from the waist down. His execution has just been scheduled for December 3 of this year, after he exhausted appeals and Trump approved the sentence. 

This will be the first public execution by the state since 1936, when it hanged a Black man convicted of raping and mudering a seventy-year-old woman. People sold sandwiches and Coca-Colas at the execution. Public executions were outlawed in 1938, following backlash against that event. This time, the state has moved on to executing a Palestinian Muslim American, Nidal Hasan. The racial implications of these executions bridge the gap of nearly one hundred years between the two barbaric incidents of state violence. Whatever these men’s crimes, their minority status in the United States, especially as members of marginalized and demonized communities, undoubtedly played a pivotal role in the determination of their sentences. People of color, and particularly men of color, have been policed to heightened extremes out of fear of violence that takes root in the collective guilt of the oppressor: the persistent fear that the oppressed will one day rise up and fight back. But there is more to Hasan’s story than meets the eye. 

Hasan served in the US military as a psychiatrist. He heard accounts from his patients, who were also members of the military, about war crimes they admitted to having committed while serving. Hasan’s repeated attempts to alert superiors to their admissions fell on the deaf ears characteristic of a military whose accountability motto has always been “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Hasan was apparently in contact with radical cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, and shouted Allahu Akbar during the shooting, both of which suggest that he was mentally unstable and radicalized by the United States’ War on Terror, which has proven to be a thinly veiled, often illegal war on Muslims. According to people who knew him, Hasan had grown disillusioned with the military and the US after being repeatedly ignored in his concerns. His superiors cited doctor-patient confidentiality and told him that they were only legally authorized to report imminent crimes. 

The last military execution by firing squad occurred in 1945 for deserting. The last military execution took place in 1961, for the rape and murder of an eleven-year-old girl in Austria. The Fort Hood shooting was undoubtedly tragic, but it was not a tragedy on one side alone. Hasan clearly struggled with what he was being asked to do as a member of the Armed Services. He objected in conscience to the slaughter of his fellow Muslims by the country to which he himself swore allegiance. He testified at his court martial that he had acted to prevent US soldiers from being deployed to Afghanistan to kill more Muslims, as he himself was also due to be deployed shortly thereafter. He also described the attack as an act of jihad. 

And there is a darker, more sinister story being swept under the rug, of the war crimes that Hasan allegedly unearthed in the course of treating his patients. War crimes by the United States and other eurocolonial countries have more often than not gone unpunished. The United States has a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, and European countries are reluctant to open the can of worms that would hold them all accountable for the war crimes they created before the term had been formally coined in international law through the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court. They would owe reparations, at the very least, which would decimate their global economic hegemony.  

The United States and Europe are more accustomed to intervening in the aggressions and violence of developing countries than they are to holding each other accountable. Sexual violence by US soldiers has been reported in both Afghanistan and Iraq, with considerably less public or media outcry than there would have been, had the roles of Muslim and American been reversed. In Israel, Palestinian prisoners unlawfully detained without charge are regularly subjected to various forms of sexual torture, sometimes even by trained dogs, yet the powers that be turn a blind eye to the crimes of their strongest ally in the Middle East. 

Hasan’s shooting, undoubtedly provoked by a psychotic break, was immediately condemned as an act of terrorism because he is Muslim and the bogeyman of murderous Muslims threatening innocent American lives has proven to be political gold for racial supremacists. But the stressors acting on this deeply unwell man are all the more tragic for this facile condemnation. Lest one forget, Aaron Bushnell, an American soldier of European descent, set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, to protest Israel and the US’ genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The psychological toll of racial violence does not only exact itself on the victims. Those commanded to enforce or cover up the violence also suffer the trauma of the suffering they indirectly support. 

Despite concerns about radicalizing extremists with the televised execution of a paralyzed Muslim man, the plan appears to be moving forward. According to Hegseth, “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public — because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.” But what about the people responsible for driving Hasan to that point of mental distress? What about George Bush and Dick Cheney, the architects of the War on Terror, Guantanamo Bay, and Abu Ghraib? What about the overwhelmingly European-origin men mentioned in the Epstein files, as having ties to the child sex-trafficking ring operated by a European Jew and possible Mossad agent? At what point do we stop applying a bandaid to the wound caused by European racism and continuing cultural and economic colonialism…and treat the infection at its root? How can we claim power to take a human life in such a barbaric way, when our sitting president was one of Jeffrey Epstein’s closest friends?