President Obama is quick to pen executive orders that violate the Constitution, such as issuing millions of work permits to illegal aliens. But instead of issuing a lawful order so that military victims of the Fort Hood terrorist attack in 2009 would receive the Purple Heart, Congress had to lead the way.

Soldiers in the Fort Hood Readiness Processing Center were preparing for deployment to a battlefield in Afghanistan on Nov. 5, 2009 when the battlefield came to them. Obama went all commander in chief at the memorial service on Nov. 10, 2009:

“This is a time of war. Yet these Americans did not die on a foreign field of battle. They were killed here, on American soil, in the heart of this great state and the heart of this great American community. This is the fact that makes the tragedy even more painful, even more incomprehensible.

Here, at Fort Hood, we pay tribute to 13 men and women who were not able to escape the horror of war, even in the comfort of home.”

The DOD deepened the pain while proving once again that they can’t find a link to terrorism even when they fly it to Fort Hood. According to Andrew McCarthy’s post on NRO’s “Corner” on Dec. 3, 2009:

It’s been brought to my attention by several reliable sources that the Defense Department has brought Louay Safi to Fort Hood as an instructor, and that he has been lecturing on Islam to our troops in Fort Hood who are about to deploy to Afghanistan. Safi is a top official of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and served as research director at the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT)… ISNA was identified by the Justice Department at the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing conspiracy trial as an unindicted co-conspirator. 

Despite repeated pleas from the victims, Obama refused to award the Purple Heart with its significant benefits to the soldiers wounded or killed by the self-professed “soldier of Allah,” Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan.

Since the Department of Defense had awarded the Purple Heart to the military victims of the 9/11 attacks at the Pentagon, the World Trade Center, and on Flight 93, the Obama administration needed an excuse for denying the award and its significant benefits to the Fort Hood military victims.

The 19 Islamist perpetrators of 9/11 were almost immediately identified with al Qaeda, a foreign terrorist organization. The Obama administration claimed that Hasan had no known ties to any foreign terrorist organization based primarily on a bungled FBI report.

On Feb. 3, 2011, then-Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) blamed members of the FBI and DOD for failing to prevent the “terrorist attack” on Fort Hood.

Mother Jones magazine published an extensive critique of the FBI investigation of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born imam, by Mariah Blake, a senior reporter on Aug. 27, 2013. It includes his numerous e-mail exchanges with Hasan, which took an “ominous turn” as early as May 2009.

Recall that Obama had proudly announced on Sept. 30, 2011, that Awlaki, “a leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” was pulverized by a drone attack in Yemen. Even so, the administration refused to connect the terror dots from Awlaki to Hasan to Fort Hood to the Purple Heart.

The Fort Hood attack officially became “workplace violence” on Dec. 7, 2011, earning outrage from members of Congress and most Americans.

The final blows to Obama’s house of cards came when Hasan admitted in his opening trial statement on Aug. 7, 2013:

“Evidence will show I was on the wrong side of America’s war and I later switched sides.”

And a unanimous military jury convicted Hasan on all 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premediated murder on August 23, 2013. Five days later the jury sentenced him to death.

Still, Obama did nothing to right his wrong at Fort Hood.

Finally, as a result of congressional legislation, the DOD announced on Feb. 6:

“Under a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2015, Congress expanded the eligibility for the Purple Heart by redefining what should be considered an attack by a ‘foreign terrorist organization’ for purposes of determining eligibility for the Purple Heart. The legislation states that an event should now be considered an attack by a foreign terrorist organization if the perpetrator of the attack ‘was in communication with the foreign terrorist organization before the attack’ and ‘the attack was inspired or motivated by the foreign terrorist organization.’”

The DOD announcement officially lays waste to Obama’s “workplace violence”:

“In a review of the Fort Hood incident and the new provisions of law, the Army determined that there was sufficient evidence to conclude Hasan ‘was in communication with the foreign terrorist organization before the attack,’ and that his radicalization and subsequent acts could reasonably be considered to have been ‘inspired or motivated by the foreign terrorist organization.’”

The Fort Hood victims will receive the Purple Heart. Obama will take a duck and cover.

Obama should have followed the example of previous presidents, including Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan, who issued executive orders concerning recipients of the Purple Heart.

The Purple Heart is to be awarded to those “wounded in action against an enemy of the United States, or as a result of an act of such enemy, provided such would necessitate treatment by a medical officer.”

Unlike the deserter that Obama gladly traded for five Taliban terrorists, Obama left behind the wounded and dead who couldn’t escape “the horrors of war” by an enemy at Fort Hood.

Painful and incomprehensible.

Jan LaRue is senior legal analyst with the American Civil Rights Union.