December 3 execution would be first U.S. military execution in over 60 years
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the scheduled December 3 execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, will be a public event. Officials later clarified the firing-squad execution will be livestreamed, according to the Associated Press. The execution, set for 1 p.m. at Fort Hood, Texas, would be the first U.S. military execution in more than 60 years and the first carried out by firing squad since 1945.
Hegseth said the firing squad would carry out the sentence at Fort Hood, Texas, at 1 p.m. on December 3. It would be the first U.S. military execution in more than 60 years. The last known case of a military firing squad in the United States was in November 1945.
“It was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks, and so he’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be, and we’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said in an interview with Real America’s Voice.
Hasan opened fire at a medical processing center on the Texas base on November 5, 2009, killing 13 people and wounding dozens more. A military jury sentenced him to death in 2013, and he has been held at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, since then. He exhausted his appeals last year, which cleared the way for President Donald Trump to approve the sentence this week on a recommendation from Hegseth.
Investigators found that Hasan exchanged 18 emails with Anwar al-Awlaki, described in the Guardian’s reporting as a radical cleric who was subsequently killed in a U.S. drone strike, in the months before the attack. At his court-martial, Hasan said he had acted to stop American soldiers from deploying to Afghanistan to kill fellow Muslims, before his own impending deployment. A review led by William Webster, a former FBI director, concluded that the FBI should have investigated Hasan’s correspondence more thoroughly.
In the interview, Hegseth said Barack Obama had called the attack “workplace violence.” The Pentagon initially treated the shooting as a workplace-violence incident rather than a terrorist attack, a classification that affected the victims’ eligibility for Purple Hearts and other combat-related benefits. But there is no record of Obama himself using the phrase. At a memorial days after the attack, Obama described the victims as Americans who had been unable to escape “the horror of war,” while calling the shooting a tragedy and saying the killer would face justice.
The Trump administration has sought to bring back military firing squads in his second term to expedite capital punishment cases, according to the Guardian’s reporting. Five U.S. states allow firing squads: Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Utah. Abroad, Amnesty International’s most recent annual review lists Afghanistan, China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen among the countries that still use firing squads.
Asked whether Hasan had made a final request or reached out to Trump, Hegseth replied: “Don’t care. We’ll see him on December 3.”