Thirteen Americans died at Fort Hood terrorist attack, and their families waited nearly two decades for justice.
Now the jihadist who opened fire on them has a date with an Army firing squad.
But Pete Hegseth added one twist to that day that has the hand-wringing crowd reaching for smelling salts.
Pete Hegseth wants the whole country watching Fort Hood on December 3
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth sat down with Real America’s Voice recently and made a promise most Washington officials wouldn’t dare say out loud.
The government won’t carry out Nidal Hasan’s death sentence in some sealed-off room with a handful of witnesses and a press release afterward.
“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it. That it’s public. Because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said.
Serious consequences. For a long time, those two words didn’t seem to apply to the Fort Hood killer at all.
The Army scheduled the execution for December 3, 2026, at Fort Hood, the same Texas post where Hasan carried out his attack. And the clock matters too. The firing squad will do its work at 1:00 pm, matching the time of day Hasan’s rampage unfolded in 2009.
Hegseth didn’t spell out what “public” will look like in practice. He didn’t say whether that means a broadcast, a livestream, or a bigger gallery of witnesses. But he left zero doubt about the message he wants delivered.
Thirteen graves, one long wait, and a firing squad at the end of it
On November 5, 2009, Hasan walked into a medical processing building on the post, where soldiers were lining up for checkups before deploying overseas. Hasan, an Army psychiatrist holding the rank of major, shouted “Allahu Akbar” and started shooting with a laser-sighted handgun.
He killed 13 people.
And he wounded more than 30 others.
Hasan later admitted he wanted to stop those soldiers from shipping out to Afghanistan, where he claimed they would kill his fellow Muslims. He represented himself at trial and put up almost no defense, which tells you something about how proud he was of what he did.
A military jury convicted Hasan in 2013 on 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder, and that same jury handed him a death sentence. Then the appeals machine took over and ground on for more than a decade. Hasan finally ran out of appeals in 2025.
Hegseth recommended a firing squad. President Donald Trump approved it, according to chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell, and acting Secretary of the Army Adam Telle later announced the date and location. The Pentagon’s own statement didn’t mince words: “Hasan’s day of reckoning has finally arrived.”
If the Army follows through, Hasan becomes the first person the US military has executed since 1961.
And there’s still a catch. A May 2026 article in Army Lawyer noted that Hasan could freeze the whole process, potentially for years, by filing a habeas corpus petition in civilian federal court. So nobody should circle December 3 in permanent ink just yet.
The bureaucrats who couldn’t bring themselves to say “terrorism”
Here’s the part that makes Hegseth’s words land differently for a lot of veterans.
For years after the attack, the Department of Defense refused to call Fort Hood terrorism. The Pentagon classified the massacre as “workplace violence,” a label that blocked wounded soldiers and the families of the dead from receiving Purple Hearts and the combat-related benefits that come with them.
Workplace violence. A man screams “Allahu Akbar” and guns down soldiers preparing for a war zone, and the bureaucracy files it next to an office fistfight over a parking spot.
Survivors and their families had to claw their way to recognition. Congress rewrote the eligibility rules, and the Army finally awarded Purple Hearts to the Fort Hood victims in February 2015. Reed Rubinstein, an attorney for many of the victims, said Washington had “pushed the workplace violence line. And it’s a lie.”
But the failure started well before the first shot. Hasan traded emails with an anti-American cleric overseas, a man an American drone strike later killed in Yemen, and the FBI had those messages before November 2009. An independent review found the bureau never seriously dug into Hasan despite the warning signs sitting right in front of it.
Readers can draw their own conclusions about priorities. The same permanent national security apparatus that sat on Hasan’s emails later found plenty of time, money, and manpower to chase Donald Trump.
Why an open execution makes Washington squirm
Public executions aren’t some foreign idea in American history. Kentucky held the country’s last public hanging in 1936, and for much of the nation’s early life, justice played out where the whole town could see it.
And Hegseth’s argument boils down to deterrence. If the government wants the next would-be jihadist to understand exactly what waits at the end of the road, hiding the consequence behind a curtain kind of defeats the purpose.
Expect the usual chorus to object. Plenty of activists and commentators will probably call a viewable firing squad barbaric, and odds are they’ll say it before they ever mention the 13 Americans Hasan killed.
But the families who buried their loved ones have heard enough lectures from Washington already. They heard “workplace violence.” They heard appeal after appeal after appeal. Nearly two decades of it.
Hasan’s lawyers may still find one more courtroom to duck into before December 3. If they don’t, those families will finally see the sentence carried out, and so will anybody else who cares to watch.
That might be the point Hegseth wanted to make most of all. A government that names evil out loud and punishes it in the open sends a very different signal than one that once couldn’t call a terror attack by its own name.
Sources: Breitbart News, “Sec Hegseth: Public Will Get to Watch Nidal Hasan’s Execution”; Associated Press via WECT, “Firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan scheduled for December”; FOX Television Stations, “Trump approves firing squad execution for Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan”; Ynetnews, “Trump approves execution by firing squad for Fort Hood terrorist Nidal Hasan”; NBC DFW, “Fort Hood Attack Victims Closer to Purple Hearts”; FOX 4 News, “Victims in 2009 Fort Hood attack to receive Purple Hearts”; CBS News, “Tragedy at Fort Hood”
