"Trump cancels Hegseth’s plan to live-stream Fort Hood shooter’s execution/The decision is a rebuke of the defense secretary, who has remained in the president’s good graces through numerous controversies."

The headline at WaPo.

Good!

Here's Trump's Truth Social Post:

"If Hegseth were not a musclebound intellectual void, he would know this."

"He would know that the Fort Hood killer told the mental health panel that he wanted to die. He would know his standby lawyers told the judge he was not mounting a defence because he craved the death penalty. He would know that the Greek word for 'martyr' and the Arabic 'shahid' both mean 'witness.' Abdullah Azzam, the godfather of modern jihadism, wrote that nations were built by 'the martyr’s blood and scholar’s ink.' The late al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri — who converted to jihadism after the hanging of a martyr in Egypt in 1966 — wrote that 'more than half the battle is fought in the media.' The great anthropologist Joe Henrich has persuasively argued that martyrdom, and the publicity secured by it, was key to the spread of early religions...."

Writes London Times columnist Matthew Syed in "America’s livestreamed execution is the ultimate gift to jihadists/The Trump administration must meet the Fort Hood killer and all terror with muscular indifference, not this gruesome circus."

"Legal experts say that Mr. Hasan could challenge the government’s decision to livestream his execution, perhaps by asserting..."

"... that a public broadcast would violate prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution. Courts have rejected requests from private companies that sought to broadcast executions to the public. In 2001, a federal judge refused to allow an internet company to carry a live feed of the execution of the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, citing Federal Bureau of Prisons rules that forbid recording or broadcasting executions.... But the Supreme Court has not weighed in directly on the question of whether public executions are legal, particularly when requested by the government, experts said. Public executions have been seen, including by United Nations officials, as a violation of international human rights protections under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights...."

From "Fort Hood Shooter’s Execution Could Face Challenge in Federal Courts/Legal experts say the former Army officer convicted in a 2009 mass shooting could face a narrow, rushed path to appeal a public execution by firing squad" (NYT).

"We'll make sure that people are able to watch it — that it's public — because people need to understand that there are serious consequences for these types of things."

Said Pete Hegseth, promising a public execution.

Holy shit…

SecWar Hegseth just confirmed the Fort Hood terrorist execution will be made public for The People to see.

Not just that, but he infers we are in times similar to WW2, and that this mindset of executing traitors is here to stay.

The noticing will continue. I am…

— Clandestine (@WarClandestine) October 8, 2026

So we are called to contemplate something that we have long believed to have been abandoned. There is some excitement — I see it in Hegseth's body language — over the return of the spectacle of imposing the death penalty.

There are serious writings to be read. I will begin with the letter Charles Dickens published in the London Times on November 13, 1849:

"The F.B.I.’s admission that it did not act on a tip that Mr. Cruz had a 'desire to kill people, erratic behavior, and disturbing social media posts,' could open up a new avenue of attack for political opponents seeking to discredit the bureau’s work...."

"After the shooting, conservative news media said that the F.B.I. could have prevented the attack if it had not been spending so much time looking into Russian election interference.... This is not the first time that the F.B.I. has come under fire for being aware of a threat and failing to stop an attack. Congress criticized the bureau for failing to stop the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas, where the shooter was known to the F.B.I. The F.B.I. also knew of one of the brothers who carried out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, but did not stop that attack. After those fumbles, F.B.I. investigators compared themselves to hockey goalies, who are fielding a relentless barrage of pucks. Sometimes, they said, they cannot keep things from making the net."

From "F.B.I. Was Warned of Florida Suspect’s Desire to Kill but Did Not Act" (NYT).

ADDED: Here's the FBI's statement. Excerpt:

The caller provided information about Cruz’s gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior, and disturbing social media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting. Under established protocols, the information provided by the caller should have been assessed as a potential threat to life. The information then should have been forwarded to the FBI Miami Field Office, where appropriate investigative steps would have been taken. We have determined that these protocols were not followed for the information received by the PAL on January 5. The information was not provided to the Miami Field Office, and no further investigation was conducted at that time.

The jury grants Nidal Malik Hasan's request for martyrdom.

Or: The jury agrees with the prosecutor's argument that to give Hasan the death penalty would not be to make him a martyr.

“Do not be fooled,” Colonel Mulligan said. “He is not giving his life. We are taking his life. This is not his gift to God. This is his debt to society.”

Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, tries to explain.

He objected to his own "complicity... on behalf of a government that openly acknowledges that it would hate for the law of Almighty Allah to be the supreme law of the land." He apologized to "the Mujahideen, the believers, and the innocent" and "ask[s] for their forgiveness for participating in the illegal and immoral aggression against Muslims, their religion and their lands." He wanted to be able to argue "defense of others" at trial, but the judge has denied that.

At a hearing earlier this month, Hasan, who is paralyzed from the abdomen down after being shot by police the day of the Fort Hood shooting, said he wanted jurors to know that he was being forced to wear a camouflage uniform that he believes represents 'an enemy of Islam.'

Is there some crazy notion about camouflage that he objects to or is this simply the main idea that he felt like a traitor to his religion by serving in the U.S. Army? When I first read this, I thought, is there some misreading of the camouflage pattern that is troubling some people? I looked around on line but found nothing, and I'm ready to assume that I was the one doing the misreading.

"The military judge supervising the trial of accused Ft. Hood shooter Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was removed from the case Monday..."

"... with the military's highest appeals court ruling that his 'duel of wills' with Hasan over the defendant's beard gave the appearance of bias."

"Although the military judge here stated that [Hasan's] beard was a 'disruption,' there was insufficient evidence on this record to demonstrate that [Hasan's] beard materially interfered with the proceedings," the unsigned ruling said.

"Taken together.... the decision to remove [Hasan] from the courtroom, the contempt citations and the decision to order [Hasan's] forcible shaving in the absence of any command action to do the same could leave an objective observer to conclude that the military judge was not impartial."

The appeals court did not specifically rule on Hasan's claim that his beard was protected under freedom of religion.

"He appears to be part of the new generation of Islamic terrorists who act alone..."

"... abetted by jihadi Web sites and their own anger."

Compare to:

"Don’t worry, folks, he’s just a lone wolf like Major Hasan and Faisal Shahzad and all the other card-carrying members of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves. All jihad is local."

"I wanna, like, be the world's known terrorist."

"A lot of people need to get killed, bro, swear to God. My soul cannot rest until I shed blood.... Freaking Major Nidal, shaved-face-Palestinian-crazy-guy. He's not better than me. I'll do twice what he did... I'm going to get a gun. I'm the type of person to use it at any time.... I'll have more bodies on it than the hairs on my beard."

It's nice to be able to laugh at this idiocy.

"The Faculty has serious concerns about CPT Hasan's professionalism and work ethic. ... He demonstrates a pattern of poor judgment and a lack of professionalism."

A 2007 memo:

Two years ago, a top psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was so concerned about what he saw as Nidal Hasan's incompetence and reckless behavior that he put those concerns in writing....

Officials at Walter Reed sent that memo to Fort Hood this year when Hasan was transferred there.

Nevertheless, commanders still assigned Hasan — accused of killing 13 people in a mass shooting at Fort Hood on Nov. 5 — to work with some of the Army's most troubled and vulnerable soldiers.

Shocking, willful blindness. Even if the murders had never occurred, it was wrong to allow Hasan to serve as a psychiatrist.

The memo ticks off numerous problems over the course of Hasan's training, including proselytizing to his patients. It says he mistreated a homicidal patient and allowed her to escape from the emergency room, and that he blew off an important exam.

According to the memo, Hasan hardly did any work: He saw only 30 patients in 38 weeks. Sources at Walter Reed say most psychiatrists see at least 10 times that many patients. When Hasan was supposed to be on call for emergencies, he didn't even answer the phone.

IN THE COMMENTS: Pogo — who is a doctor — wites:

The memo was from during his psychiatry residency (PGY = post-graduate year).

MadisonMan is quite right. [MM said: "I think this shows how hard it is to get rid of someone in a bureaucracy. Much easier to move them somewhere else so they are someone else's problem.] Bureaucracy alone would have kept him in gummint employ; no need to invoke PC issues.

Just imagine rolling out this sort of bureaucracy on a national scale.

We could call it the National Health Service.

Christopher Hitchens on Nidal Malik Hasan.

"[T]he three most salient characteristics of the Muslim death-squad type [are] self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred. Surrounded as he was by fellow shrinks who were often very distressed by his menacing manner, Maj. Hasan managed to personify all three traits—with the theocratic rhetoric openly thrown in for good measure—and yet be treated even now as if the real word for him was troubled. Prepare to keep on meeting those three symptoms again, along with official attempts to oppose them only with therapy, if that. At least the holy warriors know they are committing suicide."

Read the whole thing.

Nidal Hassan had business cards identifying him as: "soldier of Allah."

"It doesn't say he's about to go out and shoot a bunch of people, but there's something not quite right for an Army major to self-identify that way."

Obama at Fort Hood: "It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy."

"But this much we do know — no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor.  For what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice — in this world, and the next."

A fine speech. Read the whole thing. Based on this quote, I'll raise one question. Did Obama purport to know what God thinks?

On first reading, my answer was yes. He was saying that God disapproves of the massacre — which means, implicitly, that Hasan's (apparent) religious beliefs are false — and that God will punish Hasan in the afterlife.

On second reading, I saw the room to deny that Obama purports to know what God thinks. If "no just and loving God looks upon [the massacre] with favor," it is still possible that God is not just and loving. Perhaps Hasan's (apparent) idea about what God likes is correct, in which case Obama is critical of God. And "the killer will be met with justice" in "the next" world, but what is "justice"? Hasan presumably believed that God would be pleased, in which case, God's justice would be a reward.

Now, I am not saying this because I think Obama secretly shares Hasan's evil beliefs about God. I'm saying it because I appreciate the subtle way in which the speech avoids claiming to know the mind of God. That is elegant and beautiful. Good religion.

"The FBI knew for nearly a year before his murderous Fort Hood rampage that psycho Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had repeatedly contacted al Qaeda..."

"... but the blundering agency last night admitted it dismissed the lead."

For nearly a year? Then it's Bush's FBI too.  Disgraceful.

The FBI said Hasan -- who faces a court-martial -- first turned up on its radar in December 2008.

That's when he sent 10 to 20 e-mails to several terror-related Islamic figures, including Anwar Aulaqi, a radical imam from Virginia who has been openly propagandizing for al Qaeda in Yemen and who had ties to several of the 9/11 hijackers...

But no alarm bells went off because the communications were consistent with Hasan's research into how US combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan affect civilians, officials insisted. The e-mails never made explicit threats or discussed plots, they added....

Federal sources admitted that Hasan was so off their radar by that point that they hadn't even been aware of his gun purchases in Texas in August.

Investigators say they were still operating on the theory that Hasan, 39, acted alone.

Yeah? And what are they missing now?

"Packed into cubicles with 5-foot-high dividers, the 300 unarmed soldiers were sitting ducks."

Details of the Fort Hood massacre.

Around 1:30 p.m., witnesses say a man later identified as Hasan jumped up on a desk and shouted the words "Allahu Akbar!"—Arabic for "God is great!" He was armed with two pistols, one a semiautomatic capable of firing up to 20 rounds without reloading....

Those who weren't hit by direct fire were struck by rounds ricocheting off the desks and tile floor.

I've been trying to understand why all those soldiers — I know they were unarmed — were not able to stop Hasan, how minutes passed, and it took the arrival of the civilian police to end the carnage. I thought that after the Virginia Tech shooting, it was well-known that the shooting would go on and on and that waiting was not a good strategy. Police Sgt. Kimberly Munley, the police officer who did take Hasan down, "had trained on 'active shooter' scenarios after the April 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech University." Why weren't the 300 soldiers also able to respond? How could our soldiers be set up as "sitting ducks" — arrayed and accessible to a man who had made it known that he wanted to kill them?

***

The headline of the story is "But for heroes, bloodbath could have been worse."

Pfc. Amber Bahr, 19, of Random Lake, Wis., tore up her blouse and used it as a tourniquet on a wounded comrade. It was only later that she realized she'd been shot in the back, the bullet exiting her abdomen.

Great. I'm impressed. But I'm not distracted. The bloodbath could have been worse. Noted. But couldn't it also have been less bad?

"I just can't believe that he's the one who killed all those people."

"You know, he tipped every girl as she came off the stage after her dance. He was a really good tipper."

So Nidal Malik Hasan liked to pass time in a strip club. Are we supposed to be surprised? I don't think it's surprising. He didn't know what to do with women:

He steered clear of female colleagues, co-workers said, and despite devout religious practices, listed himself in Army records as having no religious preference....

"He came to mosque one or two times to see if there were any suitable girls to marry," Khan said. "I don't think he ever had a match, because he had too many conditions. He wanted a girl who was very religious, prays five times a day."...

A co-worker at Walter Reed said Hasan would not allow his photo to be taken with female co-workers, which became an issue during Christmas season when employees often took group photos. Co-workers would find a solo photo of Hasan and post it on the bulletin board without his permission.

Men who don't know what to do about women.... we should be more suspicious of them than we are. And by the way, why was an Army officer allowed to be openly discriminatory toward women in the workplace? Some inane idea about diversity and celebrating difference?

"U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda..."

ABC reports:

It is not known whether the intelligence agencies informed the Army that one of its officers was seeking to connect with suspected al Qaeda figures....

One senior lawmaker said the CIA had, so far, refused to brief the intelligence committees on what, if any, knowledge they had about Hasan's efforts....

On Sunday, Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) called for an investigation into whether the Army missed signs as to whether Hasan was an Islamic extremist.

We are lucky it is Joe Lieberman who is in the position to force this investigation.

Investigators want to know if Hasan maintained contact with a radical mosque leader from Virginia, Anwar al Awlaki, who now lives in Yemen and runs a web site that promotes jihad around the world against the U.S.

In a blog posting early Monday titled "Nidal Hassan Did the Right Thing," Awlaki calls Hassan a "hero" and a "man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people."

In war, traitors are heroes to the other side.  But it is a challenge for us to remember that we are at war. Of those now in power for us, Joe Lieberman manages to remember. Who else? Leon Panetta? Have we heard a peep from him in the past week? Apparently, not.

Hasan "should have been gone," says Joe Lieberman, chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security.

Lieberman promises to ask the hard questions about why Nidal Malik Hasan was tolerated despite warning signs. And let no one be in denial: The warning signs were beyond clear.

Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the gunman who killed 13 at America's Fort Hood military base, once gave a lecture to other doctors in which he said non-believers should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats.

He also told colleagues at America's top military hospital that non-Muslims were infidels condemned to hell who should be set on fire. The outburst came during an hour-long talk Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, gave on the Koran in front of dozens of other doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington DC, where he worked for six years before arriving at Fort Hood in July.

Colleagues had expected a discussion on a medical issue but were instead given an extremist interpretation of the Koran, which Hasan appeared to believe....

Fellow doctors have recounted how they were repeatedly harangued by Hasan about religion and that he openly claimed to be a "Muslim first and American second."

One Army doctor who knew him said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim soldier had stopped fellow officers from filing formal complaints.

Another, Dr Val Finnell, who took a course with him in 2007 at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Maryland, did complain about Hasan's "anti-American rants." He said: "The system is not doing what it's supposed to do. He at least should have been confronted about these beliefs, told to cease and desist, and to shape up or ship out. I really questioned his loyalty."

It is pathetic not to be able to distinguish between discrimination again Muslims and seeing that something is wrong with a particular individual who is a Muslim. It is thoroughly inept to think you have to choose between fighting terrorism and avoiding invidious discrimination.

It would seem that the Army was vulnerable to Rule 4 of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals":

Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian Church can live up to Christianity.

Of course, we should live up to our own rules. The key is to have good rules and not to distort your own rules out of fear of erring in one direction when there are multiple interests at stake. I imagine that Hasan thought his colleagues were complete idiots to let him get away with the outrageous things that he — a psychiatrist! — said.

The Fort Hood massacre was rhetorical flourish as Obama urged House Democrats to vote for health care.

His idea was: Soldiers make sacrifices for the good of the country, so congressional Democrats should put their concerns about the next election aside for the good of the country.

“He was absolutely inspiring. In a very moving way, he reminded us what sacrifice really is,” said New Jersey Rep. Rob Andrews, estimating the persuader-in-chief turned several votes.

“Sacrifice is not casting a vote that might lose an election for you; it is the sacrifice that someone makes when they wear the uniform of this country and that unfortunately a number of people made this week,” said Andrews.

“It made a lot of people feel a little less sorry for themselves about their political problems,” he added. “This is an emotional time for a lot of our folks politically, but this is politics and I think he correctly pointed out what’s a heck of a lot more important.”

I'm trying to imagine the political environment that Washington Democrats occupy. A President glibly lays out that analogy, and it is received — without any wincing or taint of disgust — as awesome inspiration. These are the minds that will be making decisions for us for quite a while.