Excerpt:
On Saturday, President Obama urged Congress to hold off investigating the Fort Hood massacre in order to let law enforcement and military authorities do their work. Mr. Obama said the ongoing investigation "will look at the motives of the alleged gunman, including his views and contacts." But if Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan saw himself as a jihadist warrior, we may never hear about it at his trial. The defense, judge and even prosecution may have an interest in keeping the shooter's radical worldview under wraps. Maj. Hasan will be on trial, but jihadism will not.
Maj. Hasan has a clear interest in not raising the issue of his motives. There is no "jihad defense" in American law. His team will instead seek to demonstrate he lacked the mental capacity to understand his actions, that he was suffering a stress disorder transferred from patients at Walter Reed, or that he could not cope with his pending deployment to fight in what he saw as an unjust war against his co-religionists. They will make the trial about "Bush's Crusade" if they can.