Pentagon says Trump has approved a firing squad for Nidal Hasan

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said on Monday that Secretary Pete Hegseth has recommended, and President Donald Trump has approved, death by US Army firing squad for Nidal Malik Hasan. Parnell wrote that the Secretary of the Army will set the time and place. Hegseth posted a single word, justice. No date has been announced.

Hasan, then an Army psychiatrist and a major, opened fire at Fort Hood, Texas, on 5 November 2009. A military court convicted him of killing 13 people and wounding 32 others. Parnell said Hasan shouted Allahu Akbar during the attack. The court sentenced him to death in 2013. He has been on military death row since. If the sentence is carried out, he would be the first US service member executed since 1961.

The new decision is about the manner, and about the president approving it. A military death sentence does not carry itself out. The convening authority, appellate courts, and the president sit between a 2013 verdict and an execution. Parnell's statement says Hegseth recommended a firing squad and Trump approved that method. It does not say a warrant has been signed for a named morning. The Army secretary's job, on the statement, is to set time and place. Until that order exists, the approval is a method and a political decision, not a completed execution.

Fort Hood, now Fort Cavazos on some official maps and still Fort Hood in the Pentagon's Monday wording, is the site of the attack. The victims were soldiers and one civilian. Hasan was shot and paralysed by civilian police who answered the call. His trial at Fort Hood was a military commission in form of a court-martial. He acted as his own lawyer for parts of it. The death sentence has sat through appeals for thirteen years. Monday's announcement is the first public presidential approval of a method in that case.

The last American service member executed was Army Private John Bennett, hanged in 1961. No one has been executed under the Uniform Code of Military Justice since. A firing squad, if used, would be a break in method as well as in time. The Pentagon statement does not compare the choice with lethal injection or with the 1961 hanging. It states the approval.

The political frame is Hegseth's. He recommended the method. Parnell called Hasan a convicted terrorist and a jihadist, and closed with the line that judgement day had come. Those are the spokesman's words. The court record is a conviction for premeditated murder of 13 people and attempted murder of others. The gap between a 2013 sentence and a 2026 method approval is the fact families of the dead have lived with. The statement does not say the families were consulted on the method.

What happens next is an Army order with a time and a place, or a further legal stay. Hasan's counsel can still go to a military appellate court or to a federal court if a date is set. The approval does not repeal that path. It tells the Army, in public, that the president has accepted a firing squad if the sentence is carried out. The open entry is the date the Secretary of the Army has not yet given.