Pentagon officials said on Thursday that the Army officer convicted in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting would be executed in public, a practice that ended in the United States nearly a century ago and is most commonly carried out in a handful of countries including Iran, North Korea and the Taliban-led government in Afghanistan.
The Pentagon said in a statement that the military execution, scheduled for Dec. 3, would also be broadcast via livestream. Such a broadcast has little precedent and is most often associated with extremist militant groups like the Islamic State.
The announcement adds to the growing spectacle around the planned execution of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people and wounded 32 others when he brought a personal handgun onto the grounds of Fort Hood, Texas. The rampage was the deadliest shooting at an American military base and sent shock waves through the U.S. military.
There are few countries that hold public executions. The human rights group Amnesty International has highlighted some cases in which public executions in Iran and Saudi Arabia have been filmed by bystanders.
The practice of filming and broadcasting an execution is more common with terror groups like the Islamic State, which became infamous for videos of gruesome executions of prisoners who were not given due process or convicted of crimes. Mass shooters have in some cases broadcast their killing sprees on livestream sites.
In an interview with Real America’s Voice, a conservative outlet, aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said Thursday that the execution would be public and available to watch “because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.” The Pentagon later confirmed in a statement that the execution would be livestreamed.
The Army has said the public execution of Major Hasan will be conducted by firing squad at Fort Hood, the site of the shooting. If carried out, it would be a first in modern American history.
The last state-sanctioned public execution in the United States occurred more than 90 years ago in Owensboro, Kentucky. Some 20,000 people gathered to witness the August 1936 hanging of Rainey Bethea, a young Black man who had been convicted of raping an elderly white woman.
Major Hasan’s execution would be the first by the military justice system since 1961, and he would be the first soldier put to death by firing squad since World War II. The firing squad is a rare method of execution, but one that has been used by the military, particularly during wartime. The Trump administration has proposed expanding its use as a method of execution.
Mr. Hegseth said that the decision to shoot Major Hasan by a firing squad, as well as other details of the execution, were chosen for their symbolism.
“Of course we’re going to do it at Fort Hood,” Mr. Hegseth said. “And do it on a Thursday and we’re going to do it at 1 o’clock — which is when he did it — and it’s going to be soldiers with rifles executing the firing squad. It hadn’t been since World War II since we’ve done that.”
He continued, “Well I kind of like the mentality we had in World War II.”
On Nov. 5, 2009, Major Hasan, an Army psychiatrist stationed at Fort Hood, brought a personal handgun onto the base grounds and opened fire. Major Hasan said that he carried out the attack, which occurred at the height of the post-9/11 fight against terrorism, to wage jihad for what he called the illegal and immoral wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He admitted to the killings during his court-martial and was convicted in 2013 of 45 counts of premeditated murder and attempted premeditated murder.
Major Hasan, who was wounded in the shooting, is being held at the military death row prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kan. He expressed no remorse for his actions, and told a military mental health panel that he wished he had died in the attack so that he could have become a martyr.
Mr. Hegseth and other Pentagon officials emphasized Major Hasan’s motivations for the shooting in their public statements about the execution. Mr. Hegseth also criticized President Barack Obama for not describing the attack at the time as an act of terror.
Speaking at a rally in Texas on Wednesday, Mr. Trump, a vocal advocate of the death penalty, trumpeted his order to execute Major Hasan, telling the crowd in San Antonio that “we are going to deliver final justice to an evil killer.”
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