--- title: "Seventeen Years After Fort Hood, a Firing Squad Is Named for Nidal Hasan" description: "Trump approved the Pentagon’s plan to execute the former Army psychiatrist by firing squad, a method the U.S. military has not used since 1945" author: "Jan Sokol" published: 2026-10-06T07:30:05Z modified: 2026-10-06T10:21:43Z url: https://rews.cc/a/seventeen-years-after-fort-hood-the-army-is-told-to-ready-a--da3d51 language: en tags: ["military", "trump", "law", "security", "death-penalty", "us"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Seventeen Years After Fort Hood, a Firing Squad Is Named for Nidal Hasan *Trump approved the Pentagon’s plan to execute the former Army psychiatrist by firing squad, a method the U.S. military has not used since 1945* By Jan Sokol · October 6, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/seventeen-years-after-fort-hood-the-army-is-told-to-ready-a--da3d51 ## In brief - Trump approved Pete Hegseth’s recommendation that Nidal Hasan be executed by Army firing squad, the Pentagon announced Monday - Hasan killed 13 people and wounded 32 at Fort Hood on Nov. 5, 2009; he was sentenced to death at a 2013 court-martial - It would be the first U.S. military execution since 1961 and the first military firing squad since WWII, when Pvt. Eddie Slovik was shot in 1945 - Acting Army Secretary Adam R. Telle will set the time and place; Army policy calls for 60 to 150 days after approval - The decision follows Tennessee’s botched lethal injection of Christa Pike; the Pentagon has not linked the choice of method to that case The announcement came, as announcements now do, in the evening, on a social platform. Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, wrote on X on Monday that “Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has recommended — and President Donald J. Trump has approved — death by U.S. Army firing squad for convicted terrorist Nidal Malik Hasan, the jihadist who opened fire on unarmed American soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009.” Hegseth reposted the message and added a single word: “Justice.” Seventeen years have passed since that November morning in Texas. Hasan is 56 now, partially paralyzed, confined to a wheelchair since police bullets stopped him outside the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood — the base now called Fort Cavazos. He has spent those years on death row at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, one of just four men awaiting a death that only a president’s signature can deliver. On Monday the signature arrived. ## The Secretary of the Army will set the time and place Under military law, no service member sentenced to death at court-martial can be executed until the president approves. Acting Army Secretary Adam R. Telle will now set the date and the site, Parnell said, adding: “Judgement day for Hasan has finally come.” CBS News said it had sought comment from Hasan’s attorney; the White House did not immediately answer CNBC’s request for comment. Hegseth had sought this moment openly. In September 2025 he told The Hill: “I am 100 percent committed to ensuring the death penalty is carried out for Nidal Hasan. This savage terrorist deserves the harshest lawful punishment for his 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood. The victims and survivors deserve justice without delays.” ## The fifth of November, 2009 Hasan was an Army major, a psychiatrist schooled at military expense, weeks from deploying to Afghanistan, when he walked into the processing center where soldiers were being readied for war and opened fire with a laser-sighted semi-automatic handgun. Witnesses said he shouted “Allahu Akbar” — God is great. Thirteen people died, twelve of them active-duty soldiers, one a retired serviceman; one of the dead was pregnant. Thirty-two more were wounded. An Army prosecutor, Col. Steve Henricks, later told the court-martial jury that Hasan had created a “personal kill zone” inside the base. Among the wounded was Staff Sgt. Patrick Zeigler, a two-time combat veteran shot four times. “He looked me straight in the eyes as he pointed the gun at me, and a split second later, I’m on the floor with a hole in my head,” he told the Killeen Daily Herald in 2023. He spent nearly a year in hospitals. Prosecutors argued Hasan was driven by dread of the Afghanistan deployment and by a sense of duty to jihad — a desire to kill as many American soldiers as possible in retaliation for America’s wars in Muslim lands. Yet, as NBC News notes, a Joint Terrorism Task Force determined he “was not involved in terrorist activities or terrorist planning,” and authorities said he acted alone. ## The man who defended himself At his 2013 court-martial, Hasan dismissed his lawyers and spoke for himself. “The evidence will clearly show that I am the shooter,” he said in his opening statement, adding later that it would show “that we are imperfect Muslims trying to establish the perfect religion … I apologize for any mistakes I made in this endeavor.” His court-appointed standby attorneys worried, in an unusual rupture, that their client was seeking his own death sentence. When the presiding judge, Col. Tara Osborn, asked whom he had meant to defend by his attack, he answered: “The leadership of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the Taliban.” The military jury convicted him in August 2013 of 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder, and recommended death. The Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces affirmed the sentence in March 2024; the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal on March 31, 2025. His last petition had argued the judge violated his right to a public trial by clearing the courtroom before discussing his disputes with the standby lawyers. ## A short history of shooting soldiers If the sentence is carried out, Hasan will be the first person executed by the American military since 1961, when Army Pvt. John Bennett was hanged at Fort Leavenworth for the rape and attempted murder of an 11-year-old girl in Austria. And he will be the first to face a military firing squad since the Second World War — since Pvt. Eddie Slovik, shot in France on Jan. 31, 1945, for desertion. The Death Penalty Information Center says the last known military firing squad was probably carried out “by musketry” in November 1945. After that, eighty years of silence. The firing squad is rare in America’s civilian chambers too. It returned last year in South Carolina, which used it three times — Brad Sigmon in March 2025 was the first in the country in 15 years, after the state’s supreme court ruled the method was not cruel because a prisoner would not suffer longer than 15 seconds. At least six people have been executed by firing squad since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977. The Associated Press counts at least 144 civilians shot to death by the state since 1608 — the Independent reports the tally as 145 — nearly all of them in Utah. ## The machinery, and its discontents Trump, who reinstated the federal death penalty on his first day back in office in January 2025, has already widened the federal arsenal: earlier this year the Justice Department said officials should consider firing squads, electrocution and lethal gas alongside lethal injection, in part because the drugs for injections have grown hard to obtain and hard to administer. The approval came days after that difficulty was made flesh in Tennessee, where prison personnel failed to kill Christa Pike with two doses of pentobarbital on Sept. 30; she survived, unconscious and on a ventilator, and [Tennessee suspended its remaining executions](https://rews.cc/a/christa-pike-survives-lethal-injection-and-tennessee-weighs--fc5504) pending an outside review. The Pentagon has not said the Tennessee failure influenced the choice of bullets over needles. The campaign group Death Penalty Action saw a colder arithmetic: “There’s nothing Donald Trump loves more than the power to kill,” it said, noting he oversaw more executions in his first term than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Truly, this is just another distraction and a ploy to stem his record-low approval ratings.” What remains is procedure. Army policy calls for an execution no sooner than 60 days and no later than 150 days after presidential approval — though Hasan may still seek habeas corpus review in civilian federal court, a path lawyers say could delay the firing squad for years. At Fort Leavenworth, in the cells of the disciplinary barracks, four men wait on the pleasure of the calendar. One of them now knows how, if not yet when. ## Sources - [Pentagon: Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan to be executed by firing squad](https://cbsnews.com/news/nidal-hasan-firing-squad-trump/) — cbsnews.com - [Nidal Hasan: Trump orders military base mass shooter to be executed by firing squad](https://independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/nidal-hasan-execution-firing-squad-trump-b3061906.html) — independent.co.uk - [Pentagon says Trump approves firing-squad execution of Fort Hood killer Nidal Hasan](https://cnbc.com/2026/10/06/trump-execution-nidal-hasan-firing-squad-fort-hood.html) — cnbc.com - [Fort Hood mass shooter Nidal Malik Hasan to die by US Army firing squad](https://yahoo.com/news/us/articles/fort-hood-mass-shooter-nidal-010114676.html) — yahoo.com - [Trump approves death by firing squad for convicted terrorist](https://thehill.com/homenews/6130802-nidal-hasan-death-firing-squad/) — thehill.com - [Who Is Nidal Hasan? Trump Greenlights Firing Squad for Fort Hood Mass Shooter](https://newsweek.com/who-is-nidal-hasan-trump-green-lights-firing-squad-for-fort-hood-shooter-12527579) — newsweek.com - [Ex-Army major who killed 13 at Fort Hood set to be executed by firing squad](https://nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ex-army-major-fort-hood-shooting-execution-firing-squad-rcna601791) — nbcnews.com