Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has announced that the firing squad execution of former Army Maj. Nidal Hasan will be open to the public.
Hasan, a former Army psychiatrist, opened fire at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, killing 13 people and injuring dozens more.
The execution is scheduled for Dec. 3 at 1 p.m. local time at the same military base where the shooting took place.
It would mark the first U.S. military execution in more than 60 years and the first by firing squad since World War II.
A Pentagon official told The Hill that the execution will also be livestreamed, extending the public nature of the planned event.
Hegseth made the announcement aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, speaking to Real America’s Voice about the deliberate timing and format of the execution.
“We’re going to do it on a Thursday, we’re going to do it at 1 o’clock, which is when he did it, and it’s going to be soldiers with rifles executing the firing squad,” Hegseth said.
He added, “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.”
Senator Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat and retired Navy Captain, pushed back sharply, writing on social media that a public execution is not consistent with American values.
“There is no doubt that Nidal Hasan is a murderer who took the lives of 13 people and injured dozens,” Kelly wrote, adding, “But a public execution? Here in the United States? It’s the kind of thing Iran and the Taliban do.”
Kelly went further, calling on Hegseth to be “removed immediately” over the decision to stage a public execution.
The plan drew fierce blowback from members of both parties, with critics calling the idea barbaric and beneath the country’s standards and dignity.
The U.S. military has never made an execution public in modern history, and the last public execution of any kind in the United States took place nearly a century ago in 1936.
