Nidal Hasan’s execution was always meant to be a spectacle

• Nidal Hasan, 56, is due to be executed by Army firing squad at Fort Hood on 3 December 2026. It would be the first US military execution in more than 60 years.
• On 5 November 2009, Hasan opened fire at the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood, Texas, where soldiers were preparing to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan. 
• He killed 13 people (12 soldiers and one civilian) and wounded more than 30. He was convicted by court martial in 2013 and sentenced to death.He has been paralysed from the waist down since 2009, when police shot him in the back during the attack, and he uses a wheelchair.
• Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the execution would be public, and Trump said he “absolutely” approved the livestream plan.
• On 15 October Trump cancelled the livestream, reportedly after learning Hasan was paralysed. The execution itself goes ahead.
• A number of soldiers are reported to be preparing religious exemption requests to avoid being selected for the firing squad.
• The Army decided not to charge Hasan with terrorism.

London — For a week, the most powerful government in the world openly planned to broadcast the shooting of Nidal Hasan a paralysed 56-year-old man in a wheelchair as a public lesson. The plan was not dropped on principle, but by the President’s own account, it was dropped because people “would rather not watch him die”. Nothing about the plan should come as a surprise. The War on Terror for the last 25 years has involved the use of inhumane imagery from the kneeling, hooded men of Guantánamo to the photographs from Abu Ghraib. Brutality, savagery and torture were hardwired into the DNA of Pax Americana.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin dismissed every objection with “no one has to watch it”. Congressman Andy Ogles backed it, and the President “absolutely” approved it until the optics turned. Most of the Republicans who objected still support the killing. The unease runs deepest among those who would carry it out. Soldiers are already preparing religious exemption requests so they are not chosen to pull the trigger, and the Catholic archbishop for the US military has told Catholic troops to refuse outright.

On 5 November 2009, Hasan, an Army major and psychiatrist weeks away from his own deployment to Afghanistan, opened fire inside the processing centre at Fort Hood where soldiers were preparing to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan. Thirteen people were killed, twelve of them soldiers. By his own account at trial, he turned against the institution he served because of what its wars were doing to Muslims. By his own beliefs he dies a shahīd, and a badge of shame to add to the countless other US atrocities.

The US Army never charged Hasan with terrorism. He was tried and convicted of murder under military law, and the “terrorist” label was a political and deceitful afterthought. An attack on soldiers on their way to war is terrorism. But the deliberate mass slaughter kill tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza is only and call it collateral damage. Britain has seen this before, where Michael Adebolajo was tried for murder, not terrorism, after killing Lee Rigby in Woolwich. His defence that it was an act of war against a state fighting in Muslim lands was ruled inadmissible for a jury to consider no defence at all, yet his crime has been treated as terrorism ever since. The UK Supreme Court has confirmed that British law treats all insurgent attacks on armed forces as terrorism, and called the definition “concerningly wide”. In a world without the rule of law the identity of the victim or perpetrator defines whether any killing is a crime or terrorism, or just collateral damage.

Anas Mustapha, Head of Public Advocacy at CAGE International, said:

“A government that wanted to livestream the shooting of a man in a wheelchair has told us exactly what the War on Terror is for. Twenty-five years on, it still needs Muslim bodies on display to justify itself. Cancelling the broadcast does nothing for the man who will be wheeled out in front of a firing squad on 3 December.”