Trump approves a firing squad for the Fort Hood gunman Nidal Hasan

President Donald Trump has approved a firing squad for former Army major Nidal Malik Hasan, the psychiatrist convicted of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, on 5 November 2009. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said on Monday that Trump accepted a recommendation from Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth. The secretary of the Army will set the time and place.

Hasan, then an Army psychiatrist, opened fire with a laser-sighted handgun inside a medical processing building on the central Texas base. He killed 12 unarmed soldiers and a retired serviceman, and wounded 32 others. Witnesses said he shouted "Allahu Akbar" during the attack. He later described the shooting as retaliation for American wars in Muslim countries. A military jury in August 2013 found him guilty of 45 counts of premeditated murder and attempted premeditated murder and sentenced him to death. He acted as his own lawyer and admitted the shooting.

The method is the new fact. A military death sentence has sat on Hasan since 2013 without an execution. The Trump administration has, in recent months, added firing squad, electrocution and gas asphyxiation to the methods allowed for the most serious federal cases. Parnell said the Army would carry out the sentence by firing squad. If it happens, it would be the first United States military execution since 1961, and the first Army firing-squad execution since Private Eddie Slovik was shot for desertion in 1945. Newsweek, citing the procedure, said Army policy calls for an execution no sooner than 60 days and no later than 150 days after presidential approval, unless further litigation moves the date.

That litigation is the likely next chapter. Hasan has been on military death row at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. Military capital cases go through a service appeals court, then the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, and can still reach the civilian federal courts on constitutional claims. Presidential approval is a required step. It is not the last one. Hegseth's recommendation and Trump's signature move the file from a sentence that existed on paper to a date the Army is allowed to propose. They do not, by themselves, answer a habeas petition.

The base has changed names around the case. It was Fort Hood in 2009. It was later renamed Fort Cavazos. Coverage this week has used both, with some outlets noting the earlier name because that is the name in the trial record. The killings are tied to the place as it was: a processing centre where soldiers were completing papers before deployment. Hasan was himself an officer in that medical system, which is why the attack was tried as a military offence rather than handed to a Texas civilian court.

Parnell's note on X said judgment day for Hasan had finally come. That is a political sentence from a spokesman, not a court order. The legal sentence is the 2013 verdict and the presidential approval of a method. The gap between them is thirteen years, which is long even for American capital litigation and longer than most military death sentences have been allowed to sit since the 1980s, when the armed forces restored capital punishment and then almost never used it. The 1961 execution, of Army private John Bennett, was by hanging. Slovik remains the reference for a firing squad because no American soldier has faced one since.

What happens next is administrative and then judicial. The Army secretary names a time and a place inside the 60-to-150-day band, or a court stops the clock. Hasan's lawyers, or lawyers appointed for him if he does not act, can file before that band closes. The victims' families have waited since 2009 for a final disposition. The approval gives them a method and a window. It does not yet give them a morning.