Army to award Purple Heart to Fort Hood victims

Posted 2015-02-06 17:23 by Grunt Report with 0 comments

The U.S. Army has decided to award the Purple Heart to victims of the Fort Hood massacre, sources told Fox News on Friday.

Three sources confirmed the decision, to be announced by next week. Victims of the 2009 shooting and their families have been pressing the military to award the Purple Heart, and the benefits that come with it, for years.

They got a boost when Congress passed recent funding legislation requiring the Defense Department to reconsider whether the victims qualify for the honor. At the time, a lawyer for victims of the shooting and their families told Fox News that some victims are still so damaged physically and mentally they are unable to work five years after the massacre — and the benefits that come with the Purple Heart would be a lifeline.

“No one will be the same,” attorney Neal Sher told Fox News last month.

Fox News was first to report that the massacre — in which 13 were killed and more than 30 wounded when former Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan opened fire after shouting “Allahu Akbar” — was classified as “workplace violence.”

Further evidence has steadily emerged since the attack that Hasan was motivated by his extreme religious views and by the radical American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who, at the time, was a leader of Al Qaeda in Yemen. After his August 2013 conviction, Hasan told his lawyer, John Galligan, to release letters to Fox News in which Hasan pledged his allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, and also wrote to Pope Francis about the virtues of Islam.

Sher told Fox News in January that there was stiff resistance to the new congressional language requiring a review of Purple Heart consideration. “The administration and the Pentagon,” Sher explained, “they lobbied hard against it. But we worked very hard and we were successful in garnering bi-partisan support for this.”

Fox News’ Lucas Tomlinson and Catherine Herridge contributed to this report.