Trump approves a firing squad for the 2009 Fort Hood gunman

The Pentagon said on Monday that President Donald Trump has approved an Army firing squad for Nidal Malik Hasan, the former major convicted of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, on 5 November 2009. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recommended the method. Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell said the Secretary of the Army will set the time and place. Parnell added, in a statement carried by Stars and Stripes and Reuters, that judgement day for Hasan had finally come. No date has been fixed. Hasan can still go to federal court.

Hasan was an Army psychiatrist. On 5 November 2009 he walked into a soldier readiness centre at the Texas base, where troops were preparing for deployments, and opened fire with a semi-automatic handgun. Twelve of the dead were unarmed active-duty soldiers. The thirteenth was a retired serviceman. Thirty-two others were wounded. Parnell noted that Hasan shouted "Allahu Akbar" during the attack. Hasan later described the shooting as retaliation for US wars in the Muslim world. A court-martial convicted him in 2013 and sentenced him to death.

A military death sentence does not move on its own. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a death sentence imposed by court-martial may not be carried out until the president approves it. That approval is what the Pentagon said Trump has now given, with the method specified as a firing squad rather than lethal injection. Reuters reported that firing squad, electrocution and gas asphyxiation were added in recent months to the methods the administration treats as permissible for the gravest federal crimes. The military case is separate from a federal civilian prosecution, but the method choice is the administration's.

If the execution happens, it will be the first by the US military since 1961, and the first by an Army firing squad since the Second World War, Stars and Stripes reported. The 1961 execution is the last time the armed forces carried out a death sentence. The gap is the fact that makes Monday's order more than a restatement of a 2013 verdict. The verdict has sat, approved by the convening authority and through appeals, without a presidential order to proceed. Trump's approval is that order. It is not yet a date.

Parnell said the Secretary of the Army sets time and place. That is the next administrative step, and it is also the step an appeal would try to stop. Stars and Stripes noted that it remains unclear whether Hasan will seek a further delay in federal court. A filing would not undo the conviction. It would ask a court to hold the execution while some claim about the method, the long delay, or the original trial is heard. Until a court issues a stay, the Army is the authority on the calendar.

The base has since been renamed Fort Cavazos, then caught up in the wider argument over Confederate-linked names, and is widely still called Fort Hood in coverage of the 2009 attack. The shooting itself is not in dispute. The names of the dead, the number wounded, the weapon, and the courtroom outcome have been public since the trial. What moved on Monday is the method and the presidential approval.

The administration's line, through Parnell, is retributive and short. The legal position is narrower. A president has approved a method. The Army secretary has not published a time or a place. Hasan has not said, in the reports available on Tuesday, whether he will file. The last military execution was in 1961. The distance between an approval and a carried-out sentence is the court calendar, and that calendar is not set.