A proposal to livestream the killing of Nidal Hasan by firing squad opens a window ever wider to the Trump administration’s complete moral vacuity More fool me! Here I was thinking nothing that America’s Trump administration could do or say, no matter how politically and morally bankrupt, no matter how venal or violent, was capable of…
Page A208From§Eachthe evening edition — 9 October 2026
THE QUOTE
Hegseth justifies first public U.S. execution in 65 years with an Obama quote that doesn't exist.
As it ran on the front
I have a clipping in my coat pocket. I've had it since Thursday, folded four times, soft at the creases already. It says the Secretary of War — I'm sorry, is it still "Defense," or did I miss a memo — told a television audience that President Obama once called the 2009 shooting at Fort Hood "workplace violence." Thirteen people died that day. Thirty-two more were hurt. That's further down the same clipping, smaller type.
Same page, same clipping: the Pentagon is going to livestream the execution of the man who did that shooting, December 3rd, by firing squad, in public. The Secretary said he'd make sure of it — his word was "public," that people would be "able to watch it." A legal expert quoted two paragraphs later calls this "uncertain legal terrain." I underlined that part. I don't usually underline.…
…(cont) So I went looking for the Obama line. Not because I doubt a Secretary — who am I to doubt a Secretary — but I keep a box in my garage, by the workbench, where everything gets a year on the label: old insurance letters, the kids' report cards, that kind of thing. I thought, if a President said a sentence like that about thirteen dead soldiers, it would be filed somewhere with a year on it, a transcript, a press conference, a wire story from 2009 itself. I moved four boxes looking. I'm sorry — I keep coming back to this one thing, the date — but where would a sentence like that even be written down, if not in 2009?
I didn't find a 2009 for it. I found the Secretary's sentence about the sentence. Is the earlier one anywhere in this clipping at all?
It isn't there.
I want to come at this from the money side now — I'm sorry, I know I keep going back to this — but here's what the line is buying: the frame around a livestream. The firing squad hasn't happened since 1961 — the Pentagon's own number — which by my math on the back of the clipping is sixty-five years. President Trump approved it on a Monday, on the Secretary's recommendation; the Pentagon's spokesman put that on the record himself. The line about Obama came out two days later, in the same cycle of coverage as the livestream announcement. Which came first, the livestream or the line about Obama?
The livestream did.
One more side — I'm sorry, I promise this is the last one — my neighbor and I carried a filing cabinet across his lawn last fall, four drawers, steel, the kind that takes two grown men and a bad decision. The whole walk I kept thinking a thing that heavy ought to have something important behind it. That filing cabinet had four drawers of paper in it. How many pages of paper are behind this one sentence, the one about Obama?
None that I could find.
I don't know what else to do with that. I'm sorry, I really am going to put this clipping away now.
Actually — I'm sorry, one more thing, since I've still got it out. The reporters who wrote this same story, whose names are right there under the Secretary's quote — did they print a date, a transcript, a place, anything at all, for the sentence he says Obama said?
It isn't there.
“They want to put a man's execution on live television and call it transparency, and the guy announcing it got caught making up a quote from a former president to help sell it. That's not accountability, that's a press release with a firing squad attached. First public military execution in 65 years, and the only part anybody had to invent was the reason for it.”
“This is about transparency, plain and simple — Americans deserve to see justice carried out, not hidden behind closed doors. And sure, maybe the Secretary paraphrased something Obama never actually said, but the broader point about accountability still stands on its own two feet. Wait, did I just defend quoting a president for a line he never said? That's — that's not usually how I'd put it.”
The receipts
The Pentagon says the firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan will be livestreamed after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the execution would be "public.
If carried out, the public execution of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan by firing squad set for Dec. 3 would be the first in modern U.S.
The US will livestream the army's upcoming firing squad execution of a man who killed 13 people at the Fort Hood military base in 2009, the Pentagon has said.
Hegseth said he would make sure "people are able to watch it, that it's public."
Pentagon chief joins Trump in attempt to use deadly shooting at Texas base to attack former Democratic president Thousands turn out to welcome weary USS Lincoln sailors Sign up for the US Breaking News email Donald Trump has urged James Talarico , the Democratic nominee in the US Senate race in Texas, to debate Ken Paxton – Republican…
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday said Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan's execution by firing squad will be public. CBS News national security correspondent Charlie D'Agata reports. Then, legal contributor Jessica Levinson joins with analysis.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the public will be able to watch the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the ex-Army major who was convicted of killing 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009.
The Pentagon said on Thursday the firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan would be livestreamed on December 3 after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth vowed to make the execution "public". Hasan was convicted of killing 13 people and injuring 32 in a 2009 shooting at the Texas military base.
President Donald Trump authorized the execution of Nidal Hasan, the soldier convicted in the deadly 2009 Fort Hood shooting, by an Army firing squad following War Secretary Pete Hegseth‘s request, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said Monday. “Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has recommended — and President Donald J. Trump has approved …
Nidal Hasan sentenced to death by military jury in 2013 for carrying out deadly shooting attack at army base in Texas Donald Trump has approved the execution by US army firing squad of Nidal Hasan, who was sentenced to death for killing 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a social media post.…
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Thursday that Nidal Hasan's execution by firing squad will be shown publicly on Dec. 3, and a Pentagon official later told CBS News the U.S. military plans to livestream it.
The US will livestream the army's upcoming firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan, who fatally shot 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas in 2009, according to a Pentagon official.
The Pentagon has failed its audit eight years running - the only major federal agency never to pass one Military Times, 19 December 2025
Firing squad execution to be livestreamed, Pentagon saysPete Hegseth says the execution will be public, but a legal expert says the "unprecedented" decision is on "uncertain legal terrain".
The Pentagon said US President Donald Trump approved Nidal Hasan's execution for the 2009 fatal shooting of 13 people, 12 of whom were soldiers at Fort Hood. This will be the first execution conducted by the US military since 1961.
Nidal Hasan, army psychiatrist who killed 13 people, will be executed by firing squad on 3 December Pete Hegseth has said the execution of Nidal Hasan, the former army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, will be a public event when the sentence is carried out later this year. A defense department official later confirmed the…
President Trump has approved the use of a firing squad to execute convicted Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hassan, the Pentagon announced Monday.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.