Nov. 13, 2009

Military prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty for alleged Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who was formally charged Thursday with 13 counts of premeditated murder, according to a senior Army officer familiar with the matter.

The last execution of an active-duty serviceman took place in 1961.

Associated Press

Nidal Malik Hasan in 2007

Despite evidence that Maj. Hasan had contact with a radical Muslim cleric, the decision to file the murder charges against him in military court, rather than in a civilian one, reflects the Army's belief that the suspect acted alone and without any assistance from foreign or domestic terror groups.

Christopher Grey, a spokesman for the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, said military investigators believe Maj. Hasan was the sole gunman in the assault, which killed 13 people and wounded 43.

After interviewing hundreds of witnesses and examining material, including a computer taken from his apartment, investigators believe that he acted without the knowledge or guidance of any terror groups, Army officials and others familiar with the probe said.

An Army official said in a separate interview that military prosecutors will seek to have Maj. Hasan put to death by lethal injection. "Given the magnitude of this crime, it's the only punishment that should even be considered," the officer said.

The murder charges against Maj. Hasan come as investigators ramp up their efforts to determine if warning signs were missed that could have helped prevent the shootings.

President Barack Obama ordered a governmentwide investigation into whether federal agencies, including the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community, properly shared the information about Maj. Hasan collected before last week's shooting.

Mr. Obama asked the heads of the Defense Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and U.S. intelligence agencies to conduct the inquiry during a White House meeting the day after the shooting, according to an administration official. Mr. Obama formalized the directive in a presidential memorandum Thursday.

The White House official wouldn't say whether Maj. Hasan's links to a radical imam in Yemen prompted the review. But the day after the shooting, Mr. Obama was shown copies of some of the emails the alleged shooter sent to the imam, Anwar al-Awlaki, and ordered the review the following morning.

The National Security Agency intercepted 10 to 20 communications over the past year between Maj. Hasan and Mr. Awlaki, who knew three of the Sept. 11 hijackers and hailed Maj. Hasan as a "hero" after the shootings.

The emails between Maj. Hasan and Mr. Awlaki were intercepted in a separate sweep that didn't target Maj. Hasan. Terrorism investigators assigned to an FBI joint terrorism task force, which included a Defense Department investigator, reviewed the communications but concluded the contacts didn't merit further investigation.

A person familiar with the investigation said Mr. Awlaki's responses to Mr. Hasan appeared restrained and perhaps indicated the imam was suspicious about why an Army officer was reaching out to him.

The terrorism investigators concluded that Maj. Hasan's research work as an Army psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and his work toward a master's degree explained why he was communicating with Mr. Awlaki.

The Pentagon wasn't informed about the emails until after Maj. Hasan's alleged shootings at Fort Hood, a senior defense official said earlier this week.

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European Pressphoto Agency

Firefighters salute the body of Army Pfc. Michael Pearson, one of 13 people killed in last week's attack, on arrival in Chicago Thursday. He will be buried Saturday at Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery in Elwood, Ill.

John P. Galligan, the retired colonel hired to defend Maj. Hasan, said he believed an officer delivered a charge sheet to the major Thursday at Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, where he is being held under guard. But Mr Galligan couldn't provide details, saying he wasn't there, hadn't been notified in advance and still hadn't seen the charges as of late Thursday afternoon. He learned about the charges from a news conference the Army held Thursday that was broadcast on TV.

"I feel blindsided," Mr. Galligan said. "Had I known, I certainly would have been down there."

The Senate Homeland Security Committee will be conducting its own investigation into the government's handling of Maj. Hasan in the run-up to the attacks. The first Senate hearings will take place Wednesday.

The sprawling Walter Reed medical center in suburban Washington is emerging as a main focus of the investigation, with some officials questioning whether hospital authorities should have done more to alert law-enforcement personnel that some of Maj. Hasan's colleagues there harbored deep suspicions about him and wondered about his mental state.

Maj. Hasan did his psychiatric residency at Walter Reed and spent more than six years there. In the days since the shootings, some of his former colleagues have said that Maj. Hasan performed substandard work and occasionally expressed Islamist views they found alarming.

Dr. S. Ward Casscells III, a retired Army colonel, supervised the military medical system as assistant secretary of defense for health affairs during the last years of the George W. Bush administration, when Maj. Hasan was a resident at Walter Reed.

After the Fort Hood shooting, Dr. Casscells spoke to two Walter Reed doctors about Maj. Hasan's tenure there.

"They said he was strange and not very happy as a psychiatrist -- not doing very well and not flagrantly failing either," said Dr. Casscells, who didn't know Maj. Hasan himself. "People weren't sending him patients and that must have made him feel bad professionally."

The physicians told Dr. Casscells that Maj. Hasan's personality was "that of a loner" and that the psychiatrist was "given to anger at times." They didn't mention any concerns about Maj. Hasan's religious views.

The Army's intent to seek the death penalty in the Hasan case will likely set off years of legal wrangling. No active-duty troops have been executed in nearly 50 years, and defendants in military death-penalty cases can appeal their convictions in a series of military and civilian courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.

Even if a ruling is fully upheld, the president has to personally approve an order to carry out the execution, further slowing the process, according to Eugene R. Fidell, an expert on the military justice system at Yale Law School.

In a notorious recent case, Army Sgt. Hasan Akbar was sentenced to death in a court-martial for rolling a grenade into a tent filled with U.S. soldiers in Kuwait in April 2003. Four years after he was sentenced to death, his case is still stalled at the first appellate level of the courts.

—Ben Casselman, Michael M. Phillips and Russell Gold contributed to this article.

Write to Yochi J. Dreazen at yochi.dreazen@wsj.com, Peter Spiegel at peter.spiegel@wsj.com and Evan Perez at evan.perez@wsj.com

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