President Trump Approves Army Firing Squad for Fort Hood Shooter Nidal Hasan

President Trump Approves Army Firing Squad for Fort Hood Shooter Nidal Hasan

President Donald Trump has approved a U.S. Army firing squad for Nidal Malik Hasan, the former Army major convicted of the Nov. 5, 2009, mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, the Pentagon said Monday night.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recommended the method. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell posted the decision on X. “Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has recommended — and President Donald J. Trump has approved — death by U.S. Army firing squad for convicted terrorist Nidal Malik Hasan, the jihadist who opened fire on unarmed American soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009,” Parnell wrote. Hegseth replied with one word: “Justice.”

Hasan killed 12 unarmed active-duty soldiers and one retired serviceman and wounded 32 others, while shouting “Allahu Akbar,” Parnell said. The secretary of the Army will set the time and place. Parnell added, “Judgment day for Hasan has finally come.”

Hasan, now 56, was an Army psychiatrist weeks from a deployment to Afghanistan when he opened fire inside a processing center at the post. The installation was later renamed Fort Cavazos and is still widely called Fort Hood in accounts of the attack. Civilian police shot him during the arrest. He was left partially paralyzed and has been confined to a wheelchair.

A panel of 13 officers convicted him in July 2013 of 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder and unanimously recommended death. He told the court he had switched sides in what he called a U.S. war against Islam and had acted to protect Taliban leaders in Afghanistan. Appeals have kept the sentence from being carried out for 13 years.

If the sentence is carried out, Hasan would be the first person executed after a U.S. armed-forces court-martial since 1961, when Army Pvt. John Bennett was hanged at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for the rape and attempted murder of a girl in Austria. CNN reported it would also be the Army’s first firing-squad execution of a soldier since World War II.

The Pentagon statement did not set a date. It also did not say whether Hasan would be moved from the facility where he has been held since the court-martial. Military capital cases remain rare. The armed forces have not carried out a death sentence in more than six decades, even as Hasan’s case sat on the books.

The Fort Hood case has stayed in the argument over how the government labels jihadist attacks on U.S. soil. The Obama administration initially described the shooting as workplace violence. Hasan’s statements at trial, and the religious declaration he shouted during the shooting, are what the Pentagon cited Monday.

Death Penalty Action, a group that opposes capital punishment, responded that “there is nothing Donald Trump loves more than the power to kill.” Parnell’s post is the operative public record of the approval. Reuters, reporting from Washington on Oct. 5, confirmed that Trump ordered the firing squad on Hegseth’s recommendation and that Hasan had described the attack as retaliation for U.S. wars in the Muslim world.