Latest
49 minutes agoLifelong Democrat Sheriff Quits the Party After Locals Told Him to Leave for Backing Rogers and James49 minutes agoTaco Bell Coworker’s Tip Stopped a Self-Described Neo-Nazi’s Alleged Plot Against an Aurora Hindu Temple4 hours agoParalympian Veteran Waited 5 Years for a Wheelchair Lift. She Says Canada Offered Her Assisted Death.4 hours agoGlenview Teen Shot Dead at Home: Sheriff Says Evidence Is There, Cook County Still Won’t Charge4 hours agoRhode Island Ruled Him Incompetent for 23 Years and Let Him Walk. Now a Toddler Was Stabbed in Her Stroller.4 hours agoHistorian Recounts Digging Through a Building Floor on Tarawa to Bring 11 Missing Americans Home4 hours agoHe Says He Refused a DNR for His Wife Five Times. The Hospital Put It on Her Chart Anyway.9 hours agoIDF Kills Hamas Weapons Commander Who Infiltrated Israel on October 710 hours agoTrump Calls Zelensky ‘P.T. Barnum,’ Says Biden-Era Missiles Were ‘Sold on the Open Market’10 hours agoNew Jersey Deputy Attorney General Charged With Using AI to Create and Share Child Sexual Abuse Material11 hours agoPowder-Filled Letters Hit Election Offices in at Least 15 States and Senate Offices Weeks Before the Midterms15 hours agoArmed Community Member Stopped Oregon School Gunman Within Minutes. Even CNN Said ‘Thank God for That Person.’49 minutes agoLifelong Democrat Sheriff Quits the Party After Locals Told Him to Leave for Backing Rogers and James49 minutes agoTaco Bell Coworker’s Tip Stopped a Self-Described Neo-Nazi’s Alleged Plot Against an Aurora Hindu Temple4 hours agoParalympian Veteran Waited 5 Years for a Wheelchair Lift. She Says Canada Offered Her Assisted Death.4 hours agoGlenview Teen Shot Dead at Home: Sheriff Says Evidence Is There, Cook County Still Won’t Charge4 hours agoRhode Island Ruled Him Incompetent for 23 Years and Let Him Walk. Now a Toddler Was Stabbed in Her Stroller.4 hours agoHistorian Recounts Digging Through a Building Floor on Tarawa to Bring 11 Missing Americans Home4 hours agoHe Says He Refused a DNR for His Wife Five Times. The Hospital Put It on Her Chart Anyway.9 hours agoIDF Kills Hamas Weapons Commander Who Infiltrated Israel on October 710 hours agoTrump Calls Zelensky ‘P.T. Barnum,’ Says Biden-Era Missiles Were ‘Sold on the Open Market’10 hours agoNew Jersey Deputy Attorney General Charged With Using AI to Create and Share Child Sexual Abuse Material11 hours agoPowder-Filled Letters Hit Election Offices in at Least 15 States and Senate Offices Weeks Before the Midterms15 hours agoArmed Community Member Stopped Oregon School Gunman Within Minutes. Even CNN Said ‘Thank God for That Person.’
Carl Higbie on the Fort Hood killer's firing squad: 'Put this in my veins'

Former Navy SEAL Carl Higbie on Fort Hood Killer’s Firing Squad: ‘Put This in My Veins’

by
M.A. Rothman

By M.A. RothmanOctober 13, 2026 · 5 min read
𝕏f

Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist who murdered 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, is scheduled to be executed by firing squad on December 3, and former Navy SEAL and Newsmax host Carl Higbie made no effort to hide how he feels about it. “We are so back,” Higbie told his audience. “We’ve gone from drag queens prancing around on aircraft carriers to executing terrorists by firing squad. Put this in my veins.”

His segment aired as critics lined up against the Pentagon’s plan to make the execution public. Higbie’s answer to them was simple: the outrage is aimed at the wrong man.

The first military execution since 1961

The facts of the case are not in dispute. On November 5, 2009, Hasan, then an Army major, opened fire inside a Fort Hood medical building where soldiers were getting routine checkups before deployment. He killed 12 soldiers and one civilian and wounded more than 30 others. He later said he attacked to stop soldiers from deploying to Afghanistan to fight fellow Muslims, and at his 2013 court-martial he described himself as a soldier who had “switched sides.” He was convicted in 2013 of murdering 13 people and sentenced to death. In 2025 the Supreme Court declined to review his case.

The Pentagon said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recommended death by firing squad and President Trump approved the sentence on October 2. Acting Army Secretary Adam Telle signed the execution order on October 6 and announced on October 7 that it “will take place at Fort Hood, Texas on Thursday, December 3rd, 2026, at 1 p.m. CT.” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell put it plainly: “Judgment day for Hasan has finally come.”

If it goes forward, it will be the first execution carried out by the U.S. military since 1961, when Pvt. John Bennett was hanged for the rape of an 11-year-old girl. Hegseth has said the military has not used a firing squad since World War II. He has also said he wants it seen. “He’s gonna get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be,” Hegseth said, according to CBS News. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public.”

“Let me tell you why I support this”

That public element is what drew objections, including from Texas Tech law professor and former Army judge advocate Geoffrey Corn, who told CBS News that “turning the execution of such a penalty into some type of public spectacle echoes of the past we seem to have put behind us.” Higbie went straight at the critics.

“Let me tell you why I support this,” he said. “Because an American military officer turned his gun on his fellow service members in the name of Islam, including standing over a nine-month pregnant mother and shooting her.”

The pregnant victim was real. Pvt. Francheska Velez, 21, of Chicago, had become pregnant while serving in Iraq and had recently returned. Spc. Jonathan Sims testified at Hasan’s 2010 pretrial hearing that the soldier beside him “was in the fetal position. She was screaming: ‘My baby! My baby!'” The published accounts of the case do not support Higbie’s “nine-month” detail, but that does not change what was done to her. Her father, Juan Velez, testified at the 2013 sentencing: “He killed my (unborn) grandson, and he killed me slowly.”

Higbie said he has zero sympathy for the condemned man. “I want him to die in the most painful death imaginable,” he said. Later in the segment he added, “I certainly don’t care that he is in a wheelchair. Zero sympathy because he killed my brothers and sisters.”

The double standard

The sharpest part of the segment was aimed at the people objecting. “I’d also remind you that we just had an entire trial of a mother who killed her three children and the same libs spazzing out over executing a terrorist wanted that woman acquitted,” Higbie said. “Stop it. The same party that kills millions of babies every year through abortion is going to clutch their pearls about shooting a terrorist in the face. That’s about the least genuine thing I have ever heard.”

He also asked a question that critics have not really answered: “What the hell is the difference between shooting him during the actual terrorist attack or a few years later? I don’t really see the difference.” And he dismissed the worry that an execution would turn Hasan into a hero for jihadists. “People worried about him being a martyr,” he said. “He’d be a martyr if we don’t kill him.”

On the livestream question, he was all in. “So live stream it,” he said. “I don’t care if my tax dollars go to advertising and playing it during the next Super Bowl.”

Why it lands

Higbie is a performer, and parts of his monologue went further than most people would. But his core point is hard to argue with. Hasan has been on military death row since 2013. He has had a full court-martial, years of appeals and a trip to the Supreme Court. Thirteen families have waited seventeen years for the sentence to be carried out, and for most of that time, Washington seemed content to let it sit.

There is a reasonable debate about whether an execution should be broadcast. There is no reasonable debate about whether this one is deserved. Hasan did not snap. He chose a room full of fellow soldiers on an American base and, by his own account, attacked them for the other side. The Uniform Code of Military Justice provides for the death penalty for precisely this.

Those who find the firing squad distasteful are entitled to their discomfort. They are not entitled to pretend that the man facing it is the victim.

Seventeen years after Fort Hood, the only scandal is how long it took the Army to carry out its own verdict.

Sources

More from The Rothman Report

Pro-life Democrat sheriff backs Rogers and James, says his own party told him to leaveLifelong Democrat Sheriff Quits the Party After Locals Told Him to Leave for Backing Rogers and JamesA Taco Bell coworker's call stopped an alleged neo-Nazi plot against a Hindu temple.Taco Bell Coworker’s Tip Stopped a Self-Described Neo-Nazi’s Alleged Plot Against an Aurora Hindu TempleShe waited five years for a wheelchair lift. She says Veterans Affairs offered assisted dying.Paralympian Veteran Waited 5 Years for a Wheelchair Lift. She Says Canada Offered Her Assisted Death.