Uppgifter: Avrättningsbeslut chockade Hegseths kollegor

On November 5, 2009, a mass shooting took place at Fort Hood near Killeen, Texas, United States. Nidal Hasan, a U.S. Army major and psychiatrist, fatally shot 13 people and injured more than 30 others. Hasan was shot and as a result paralyzed from the waist down. He was arraigned by a military court in 2011 and was charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. At his court-martial in 2013, Hasan was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to death. Days after the shooting, reports in the media revealed that a Joint Terrorism Task Force had been aware of a series of e-mails between Hasan and the Yemen-based Imam Anwar al-Awlaki, who had been monitored by the NSA as a security threat, and that Hasan's colleagues had been aware of his increasing Islamic radicalization for several years. The failure to prevent the shooting led the Defense Department and the FBI to commission investigations, and Congress to hold hearings. The U.S. government declined requests from survivors and family members of the slain to categorize the Fort Hood shooting as an act of terrorism, or having been motivated by militant Islamist religious convictions. In November 2011, a group of survivors and family members sued the government for negligence for not preventing the attack, also seeking to force the government to classify the shooting as terrorism. The Pentagon argued that charging Hasan with terrorism was not possible within the military justice system and that such action could harm military prosecutors' ability to sustain a guilty verdict against Hasan. Hasan is incarcerated at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, awaiting execution by firing squad, which was approved by President Trump in October 2026. That same month, the acting Secretary of the Army Adam Telle set Hasan's execution to be carried out at Fort Hood on December 3, 2026, at 1 pm CST. If Hasan is executed, he will be the first member of the US Armed Forces to be executed since John A. Bennett was hanged for rape and attempted murder in 1961. Pete Hegseth, United States Secretary of Defense, said that the execution would be livestreamed for public viewing; this was later cancelled by President Trump, who said that only the immediate families of the victims would watch the execution in-person.