The man who murdered thirteen American soldiers while screaming "Allahu Akbar" at Fort Hood in 2009 has a date with a firing squad. December 3. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who carried out the deadliest terrorist attack on a U.S. military installation since 9/11, will be the first American service member executed by the military in over six decades.
And Secretary of War Pete Hegseth wants you to watch.
"It was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks, and so he's going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be," Hegseth told reporters. He didn't hedge. He didn't use the word "alleged." He called it exactly what the Obama administration spent years trying not to — a radical Islamist attack.
Hegseth went further. "And 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." Not behind closed doors. Not a quiet lethal injection at midnight with a press release the next morning. A firing squad. In public. The way the military used to handle enemies who killed Americans in uniform.
Watch Sec. Hegseth's interview for yourself
The last U.S. military execution was in 1961, when Private John Bennett was hanged at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The last time a soldier faced a firing squad was January 1945 — Private Eddie Slovik, executed for desertion during World War II. That's eighty-one years. Eighty-one years since the military looked a condemned man in the eye and pulled the trigger. Hasan's execution will end that drought.
The usual corners will object to the public nature of it. They'll call it spectacle. They'll say it's beneath us, that civilized nations don't do this. These are the same people who classified the Fort Hood massacre as "workplace violence" for years to avoid acknowledging what everyone on that base already knew. Thirteen families buried their dead while the government debated whether calling it terrorism might offend someone. The survivors waited years for Purple Hearts because the Pentagon refused to label the attack what it was.
Hasan opened fire in a Soldier Readiness Processing Center — the place where troops go to get final medical checkups before deploying overseas. He targeted people who couldn't fight back in a room designed for paperwork. He shouted "Allahu Akbar" as he pulled the trigger. Thirty-plus soldiers were wounded. Thirteen never came home. One of the soldiers was pregnant. Her baby died too. The youngest soldier was twenty-one.
The Obama administration's handling of the case became its own slow-motion scandal. "Workplace violence." Two words that denied families the benefits and recognition afforded to victims of combat and terrorism. It took until 2015 — six years — for Congress to pass legislation ensuring Fort Hood victims received Purple Hearts. Six years to acknowledge that a man screaming an Islamist battle cry while massacring soldiers on a military base had committed an act of terror.
Hegseth's framing strips away every layer of bureaucratic evasion that's surrounded this case for seventeen years. No euphemisms. No procedural fog. A radical Islamist murdered American soldiers, a military court convicted him, and now a firing squad of soldiers will carry out the sentence. The chain is unbroken and unambiguous.
The decision to make the execution public is the part that will generate the most noise, and it's also the part that matters most. For seventeen years, Hasan has existed as an abstraction — a legal case, an appeals file, a line item in the military justice backlog. December 3 ends that. The public doesn't just get to know that justice was done. They get to see it.
Private John Bennett, 1961. Private Eddie Slovik, 1945. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, December 3, 2026. Sixty-five years is a long time between sentences carried out. Thirteen families waited seventeen.