Although it was the Obama administration that designated the act as “workplace violence” the Obama campaign does not want to talk about the Fort Hood shooting aftermath regarding survivors and their families who are demanding the president designate the incident as a terrorist act.
I spoke with Obama campaign manager Jim Messina after Monday’s debate in Boca Raton, and he said: “That’s a White House issue. What Americans saw during the debate was a strong and steady leader laying a clear vision as to where he wants to take this country.”
Messina appeared unaware of the Fort Hood shooting matter, but continued to declared that it was not a campaign issue.
Survivors and family members of the Fort Hood shooting released a video last week telling the U.S. government to designate the 2009 massacre on a Texas Army base a terrorist act. According to CNN:
Survivors and family members of the Fort Hood shootings released a video last week demanding the U.S. government designate the massacre as an act of terrorism rather than a case of a murderous rampage.
Such a designation would give the victims an enhanced series of benefits as if they were wounded in combat, according to the group.
The video includes victims and witnesses to the shootings on November 5, 2009. While much of the video uses victims to recount their experiences during the shooting, some complain that charging Maj. Nidal Hasan with murder does not reinforce what the actual incident turned out to be, an act of terrorism, they say.
One victim, who was shot in the chest, says, “They (Fort Hood victims) were killed and wounded by a domestic enemy, somebody who was there that day to kill soldiers, to prevent them from deploying,” according to Army Staff Sgt. Shawn Manning in the video. “If that’s not an act of war or an act of terrorism, I don’t know what is.”
Hasan is accused of opening fire at the post’s processing center, where soldiers were preparing to deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq. Thirteen people were killed and another 32 wounded. He is charged with multiple counts of murder.
He faces a possible death sentence if convicted. He was paralyzed from the waist down in the shooting, when police officers exchanged fire with him.
Investigations that followed the killings found he had been communicating via e-mail with Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American radical cleric killed by a U.S. drone attack in 2011.
An FBI report in July found that the communications between Hasan and al-Awlaki should have been given to the Pentagon, but the FBI saw no evidence of terrorist activities in his case, and believed the information in the e-mails was too sensitive to share. It noted that visiting extremist websites is not grounds for taking action.
