Then came two losses that by several accounts left a permanent mark. His father passed away in 1998 at just 51 years old. His mother, Nora, the woman who had fed strangers without asking anything in return, died in 2001 at 49. Both were gone before Hassan had completed his training. His mother’s funeral was held on May 31st, 2001 at the Dar Al-Hyra Islamic Center in Falls Church, Virginia.
It was there at that service that Nidal Hassan came back into contact with a figure who would in time play a significant role in the direction his life would take. That name and what followed belongs to a later part of this story. What is documented is this. His cousin, Virginia attorney Nater Hassan, later stated publicly that Nadal’s perspective began to shift after years of listening to soldiers in his care describe their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Session after session, account after account, the wars his country was fighting in Muslim majority nations were no longer something distant. They were sitting across from him every day in the form of the people he was supposed to be helping. The man the army had trained, funded, and trusted was beginning to see the institution differently.
And the institution, for its part, was not paying close enough attention to notice. Nadal Hassan arrived at Walter Reed Army Medical Center with credentials, government funding, and a clear path forward. What followed was something the army’s own records could not ignore. The psychiatry residency was designed to be completed in 4 years. Isan took six.
But the deeper concern was not the timeline. It was what the timeline concealed. Over 38 weeks, he saw approximately 30 patients. The expected standard was closer to 300. He was not answering emergency on call lines. He was failing basic shift duties. On one formally documented occasion, a patient classified as a danger to others was allowed to leave the emergency room without supervision on his watch.
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He was also reprimanded multiple times for introducing his personal religious beliefs into clinical sessions and directing patients toward Islam during treatment. In May 2007, Dr. Scott Moran, chief of psychiatric residence at Walter Reed, filed a formal memo to the hospital’s credentials committee. It documented poor judgment, lack of professionalism, and direct concerns about patient safety.
That same month, Lieutenant Colonel Ben Phillips graded Hassan’s performance as outstanding on his official evaluation. Two documents, two completely opposing conclusions filed at the same time within the same institution. One month later, Hassan delivered a required senior academic presentation. Instead of a clinical topic, he submitted 50 slides titled the Quranic worldview as it relates to Muslims in the US military.
He argued that Muslim soldiers should be exempt from deployment to Muslim majority countries and defined what he called adverse events that could result if they were not, listing espionage and targeting fellow soldiers among them. Dr. Val Finel, who was present, later testified that Hassan told the room Islamic law superseded the US Constitution.
The instructor interrupted the session. No disciplinary action followed. By spring 2008, a formal review was convened. Dr. John Bradley, Dr. Robert Hersano, Dr. Charles Engel, Dr. Carol Debold, and Dr. Scott Morren met specifically to assess Hassan’s fitness. The group discussed whether his behavior indicated psychosis. Their conclusion, insufficient grounds for removal.
In May 2009, Nidadal Hassan was promoted to major. His performance memo was forwarded to his next assignment. His new commanders received it and assigned him anyway. Every warning was on record. Not one of them stopped what was coming. On May 31st, 2001, the Hassan family gathered at the Dar Al-Hyra Islamic Center in Falls Church, Virginia to lay Nadal’s mother to rest.
The imam leading that congregation at the time was Anoir Alaki. That name would not mean much to most Americans in 2001. Within a decade, it would appear in the files of nearly every major terrorism investigation on United States soil. Alaki was a Yemeniame cleric, articulate English-speaking, and by all intelligence assessments, one of the most effective extremist recruiters operating anywhere in the world.
His ability to reach Western Muslim audiences in their own language made him uniquely dangerous. Federal investigators would later connect him to the 2009 Christmas Day underwear bomb attempt, the 2010 cargo plane bomb plots, and a list of radicalization cases that stretched across multiple countries.