SDJA staff report
U.S. Vice President JD Vance said Friday in Hebron, Kentucky, that he doesn’t know if the Pentagon ultimately will approve the Dec. 3 execution by firing squad for Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan who in 2009 killed 13 people and wounded 32 others.
On Thursday, the day before, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed that Hasan’s execution would be live streamed, but on Friday Vance said, “I don’t know that that’s going to actually happen.” If it is live streamed, he added, “I’m not going to be watching it.
Hebron, Kentucky, is named for the biblical Hebron, site of the Cave of the Patriarchs, where, according to tradition, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, and Leah are buried, making it one of the holiest sites in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
“So whatever the controversy is about the method of the execution, I hope that people don’t forget that this is a guy who brutally murdered a lot of innocent people,” Vice President Vance said.
Hasan was a uniformed major in the medical corps — a psychiatrist — when he opened fire in a medical center on Nov. 5, 2009, saying after his own wounding and capture that he did it to stop U.S. soldiers from killing his fellow Muslims in Afghanistan. He subsequently represented himself at his trial, confessing that he was the killer. That led observers to speculate that Hasan wanted to be classified by his co-religionists as a martyr.
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