Hegseth says Fort Hood mass shooter's firing squad execution will be 'public'

“We’ll make that sure people will be able to… to watch it, that its public, because people need to understand that this is uh… there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” said Secretary of War Pete Hegseth Thursday regarding the upcoming execution of Nidal Hasan on Dec. 3.

According Axios, details of how exactly the event will be “public” were still unclear as of Thursday and have brought up “questions.” Per the outlet, the Pentagon currently posts speeches and videos on X and YouTube.

“It’s unclear if Hegseth’s remarks mean the execution will be open to public spectators, broadcast on streaming or TV, or made available to select individuals,” Axios said.

Hasan, now 56, shot and killed 13 people and injured 32 others on the Fort Hood military base in Texas on Nov. 5, 2009. At that time, he had already served in the Army for 21 years and had rose to the rank of major, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Hasan was around three weeks away from being deployed to Afghanistan when he opened fire at the base.

He had also been working as a psychiatrist counseling soldiers with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), “which acquaintances and experts believed contributed to the deterioration of his mental state,” said the DPIC. It also said that Hasan “described his attack as retaliation for the U.S. military’s violence against Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

During the mass shooting, Hasan was shot and paralyzed from the waist down by responders. The U.S. military has its own legal system, the DPIC noted, and Hasan represented himself in his military court-martial “against the advice of his own counsel,” said the center.

Hegseth repeatedly described Hasan’s actions as a “radical Islamist” attack in a video shared by the DOW Rapid Response X account. He also said it was a “no brainer,” to schedule Hasan’s execution at Fort Hood itself, at 1 p.m., the same time as the shooting.

Soldiers with rifles will carry out the execution, said Hegseth, who noted that this is to be the first military execution by firing squad since 1945.

“It hadn’t been since World War II since we’ve done that. Well, I kind of like the mentality we had in World War II – which was win,” he said.

It will also be the first military execution at all since 1961, the DPIC said. That execution was a hanging.

“The President has sole authority to approve the sentence of death for a military prisoner,” said an Army press release issued this week. “On Oct. 2, 2026, President Donald J. Trump approved the death sentence in this case. The President acted following completion of a full appellate process which upheld the conviction and sentence to death.”

Firing squad executions may be rare in the U.S. (only five states authorize the method), the lethal injection method more common in modern executions came under scrutiny just last week when it failed to kill death row inmate Christa Pike. After days of being unconscious, Pike woke up this week. Still, that case didn’t stop Texas from executing a man via lethal injection on Wednesday.

Axios said South Carolina carried out the first firing squad execution in the U.S. in 15 years last year. It also said the last public execution in the U.S. was in 1936, “when Rainey Bethea, a Black man convicted of raping a white woman, was hanged in Kentucky.”