Trump approves a firing squad for Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan

President Donald Trump has approved a firing squad for former Army major Nidal Malik Hasan, the psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, on 5 November 2009. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said on Monday that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recommended the method and that Trump signed off. The secretary of the Army will set the time and place. If the sentence is carried out, it will be the first US military execution since 1961 and the first military firing squad since the end of the Second World War.

Parnell wrote on X that "judgement day for Hasan has finally come." He noted that Hasan shouted "Allahu Akbar" during the attack. The shooting killed 12 unarmed active-duty soldiers and one retired serviceman, and wounded 32 others. Hasan, then an Army psychiatrist from Virginia, opened fire with a semi-automatic handgun inside a soldier readiness centre as troops prepared for deployments. A court-martial convicted him and condemned him to death in 2013. He later told the court he was the gunman. Reuters reported that he described the attack as retaliation for American wars in the Muslim world.

Why a firing squad, and why now

Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a death sentence from a court-martial cannot be carried out until the president approves it. Hasan is one of four inmates on the military's death row. Appellate review is also required before an execution proceeds. Parnell's statement did not give a date. Stars and Stripes reported that it is still unclear whether Hasan will try to delay the execution in federal court.

The Trump administration has, in recent months, added firing squad, electrocution and gas asphyxiation to the methods allowed for the gravest federal crimes. The Hasan order applies the firing-squad option to a military sentence that has sat unexecuted for 13 years. The US Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces held the military death penalty unconstitutional in 1983. President Ronald Reagan reinstated it the next year by executive order. No service member has been executed under that restored authority. The last military execution was in 1961.

The 2009 attack, in the record

Fort Hood, renamed Fort Cavazos for a period and still widely called Fort Hood in coverage of this case, was the largest active-duty armoured post in the United States at the time of the shooting. Hasan was scheduled to deploy. Investigators later documented emails between him and Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric killed in a US drone strike in Yemen in 2011. Those contacts became part of the argument, outside the courtroom, over whether the Army had missed warning signs. Inside the court-martial, the conviction rested on the shooting itself.

Hasan acted as his own lawyer for parts of the trial. He admitted the killings and argued that he had switched sides in a war. The panel of officers rejected that framing and sentenced him to death. He was shot by civilian police officers responding to the readiness centre and has used a wheelchair since. He has been held at the US Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

What the order does not settle

Approval is not the same as a date on a calendar. The secretary of the Army still has to fix the time and place, and any fresh court filing can freeze the process. Families of the dead have waited 17 years from the morning of the shooting to this authorisation. The Pentagon has not said whether the other three men on military death row will face similar method-of-execution orders.

The practical difference between a firing squad and lethal injection, in this case, is institutional as much as technical. The Army would carry out a sentence with its own weapons and its own detail, under a presidential order, for the first time in more than six decades. That is the change announced on Monday. The day it happens is still unset.