The Public Execution That Wasn’t
On October 8, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the plan. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan would be public. “And 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,” Hegseth said in an interview with right-wing media figure Jack Posobiec. [1] Hegseth added a date and stopped there: “We’ll see him on Dec. 3.” Hasan was scheduled to be executed on December 3 at 1pm US Central Time (18:00 GMT) — the same day of the week and the same hour at which the 2009 shooting began. The Pentagon confirmed to Military.com that the plan involved livestreaming Hasan’s death, but provided no logistics on how the streaming would take place or be enforced.
Hasan, an Army major, opened fire at the Fort Hood military base in Texas in 2009. He killed 13 people and wounded 32 others. The shooting is the reason the case has an execution date at all. It is also why the hour of 1pm Central carries weight: the moment of the attack was chosen as the moment of the punishment.
Then, on Thursday, the president withdrew the plan. In a post on Truth Social, Donald Trump wrote that Hasan “will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed.” [1] He called Hasan “a very bad and evil man.” He also accused the administration of former President Barack Obama of an “intelligence failure” ahead of the attack. Streaming the execution, he wrote, “might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan.” But he added that “many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device.” One group is still invited to watch: immediate family members of the victims, who Trump said may view the execution in person. “They deserve to witness JUSTICE!” he wrote.
The Pushback Ran Through His Own Party
The plan drew condemnation from lawmakers, including members of Trump’s own Republican Party. Vice President JD Vance said: ‘If it’s ultimately livestreamed, I’m not going to be watching it.
Religious institutions also objected. On October 9, Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, called the decision ‘a barbaric promotion of a culture of death’ and said it ‘must be reconsidered.
People closest to the case also broke with the Pentagon in public. Army Staff Sgt. Alonzo Lunsford, a survivor of the shooting, told BBC Radio 4’s Today: ‘To show the whole thing without it being censored for the general public, for me personally, I don’t agree with that, but it’s not about my personal belief.’ Keely Vanacker, the daughter of victim Michael Grant Cahill, told The Spokesman-Review: ‘Livestreaming and taking joy in a tragedy that has deeply affected our family doesn’t bring my dad back.
The first objection was legal: some experts said livestreaming the killing could violate US law that prevents the transmission of obscene, indecent, or graphic material, and that it would be impossible to ensure minors were not able to access the livestream. The second was empirical: critics questioned Hegseth’s claim that a public execution would serve as a deterrent, arguing it instead risked glorifying the attacker and inspiring copycats.
The Day And The Hour
The chief Pentagon spokesperson, Sean Parnell, told Military.com the decision was reached after a meeting between Trump and Hegseth. ‘President Trump and Secretary Hegseth spoke about the decision to not livestream Hasan’s execution ahead of the Truth Social announcement,’ Parnell said. ‘The secretary supports the president’s decision, and they are completely aligned.’ That leaves no daylight between the Pentagon’s stated position and the president’s.
The precedent for such an event is distant. A public killing of this kind would have been the first in the United States since 1936. It is also the sort of event that US administrations have spent decades criticising other governments for holding. To stage one would have placed the United States alongside the governments its own officials have criticised on precisely this point.
One narrower question followed the plan to the end. Because a firing squad is composed of soldiers, Archbishop Timothy Broglio, who provides pastoral services to Catholics in the US military, said in a statement on Monday that if a Catholic soldier is assigned to the firing squad, that soldier should ask to be excused from the duty. He also asked what the public staging of the execution was for. Hasan’s crime ‘was heinous, but does exposing the public to his execution serve any purpose?’ Broglio said.
