Pete Hegseth said the execution of Nidal Hasan, the former military psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, will be a public event when the sentence is carried out later this year. A Defense Ministry official later confirmed that the execution would be broadcast live.
In an interview with Real America’s Voice, the Pentagon secretary said the firing squad will carry out the sentence at Fort Hood, Texas, on Thursday, December 3 at 1 p.m. It would be the first U.S. military execution in more than 60 years.
“This was a radical, uniformed Islamist attack from within the ranks, and so he’s going to have soldiers shot, as he should, and we’ll make sure that people can watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there are serious consequences for this kind of thing,” Hegseth said.
Hasan opened fire at a medical treatment 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 since been held at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He exhausted his appeals last year, allowing Donald Trump to approve the sentence this week on a recommendation from Hegseth.
Investigators had discovered that Hasan exchanged 18 emails with Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric who was later killed in a US drone strike, in the months before the attack. At his court-martial, Hasan testified that he acted to prevent American soldiers from deploying to Afghanistan to kill other Muslims, ahead of his own impending deployment. A study by William Webster, former director of the FBI, concluded that the bureau should have investigated his correspondence more thoroughly.
In the interview, Hegseth said Barack Obama called the attack “workplace violence.” The Pentagon initially treated the shooting as an incident of workplace violence rather than a terrorist attack, a classification that affected victims’ eligibility for Purple Hearts and other combat-related benefits.
But there is no record of Obama himself using the phrase. At a memorial service days after the attack, he instead described the victims as Americans who could not escape the “horror of war,” while calling the shooting a tragedy and saying the killer would be brought to justice.
The last known case of a military firing squad in the United States was in November 1945, but the Trump administration sought to reinstate it during Trump’s second term in order to expedite capital punishment cases. Five American states authorize firing squads: Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah.
Abroad, Amnesty International’s latest annual report lists Afghanistan, China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen among the countries that still use firing squads.
Asked if Hasan had made a final request or contacted Trump, Hegseth said: “Don’t worry. We’ll see him on December 3.”
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