Pete Hegseth has said the execution of Nidal Hasan, the former army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, will be a public event when the sentence is carried out later this year. A defense department official later confirmed the execution will be livestreamed.
In an interview with Real America’s Voice, the Pentagon secretary said the firing squad would carry out the sentence at Fort Hood, Texas, at 1pm on Thursday, 3 December. This would be the first US military execution in more than 60 years.
“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.
Hasan opened fire at a medical processing center on the Texas base on 5 November 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 in Kansas ever since. He exhausted his appeals last year, which cleared the way for Donald Trump to approve the sentence this week on a recommendation from Hegseth.
Investigators had found that Hasan had exchanged 18 emails with Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric who was subsequently killed in a US 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 bureau should have investigated his 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, he instead 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 last known case of a military firing squad in the US was in November 1945, but the Trump administration has sought to bring it back in his second term to expedite capital punishment cases. Five states in the United States allow for 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.”
