The United States government plans to put a man before a firing squad and broadcast his death to the public. The Pentagon has confirmed plans to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist responsible for the 2009 Fort Hood massacre. Scheduled for December 3, the execution has President Donald Trump’s approval and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s enthusiastic support. A government with the power to imprison a convicted murderer now wants an audience for his killing.
Hasan murdered 13 people and wounded 32. His victims deserved to live, and the survivors and bereaved families deserve lasting support. The horror of his crime is beyond dispute. However, that horror cannot settle every question about what the state should do to him. A government’s conduct requires its own moral justification, even when the person in its custody has committed an atrocity.
Hegseth’s words expose the purpose of the proposed spectacle. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” he said. Pentagon officials subsequently confirmed plans for a livestream, although the broadcast arrangements remain unannounced. The administration has deliberately made public visibility part of the punishment.
A captive audience for state violence
An execution involves an enormous imbalance of power. The state controls the prisoner, the guards, the weapons, the location, and the timing. The condemned person cannot leave or resist. Broadcasting that moment invites millions of people to watch the government exercise its most irreversible power over someone entirely at its mercy.
Supporters may describe this as accountability. Yet the public can scrutinize criminal proceedings, examine evidence, read judgments, and demand explanations from officials without watching a person die. A broadcast of the final violence adds something else: the opportunity to experience punishment as a spectacle. The state becomes the producer, and a human death becomes the event.
That distinction matters even for people who support capital punishment. Believing that a particular crime warrants death does not require believing that its perpetrator’s final moments should become public programming. The decision to broadcast demands a separate defense. Hegseth’s enthusiasm offers little indication that he appreciates the moral weight of that decision.
The victims deserve more than a spectacle
Political leaders frequently invoke victims when demanding harsher punishment. However, survivors and bereaved families are individuals with different beliefs, needs, and responses to grief. No official should presume that a public execution speaks for all of them. Nor should anyone promise that watching a killing will deliver emotional closure.
The government can honor victims through sustained care for survivors, support for families, and serious efforts to prevent future attacks. Those obligations extend long beyond a news cycle. They require resources, patience, and attention to people whose suffering may continue after public interest fades.
A livestream offers a much simpler political product. It creates a date, an audience, and a dramatic demonstration of authority. Officials can present themselves as resolute while the difficult work of caring for those affected remains largely outside the frame. That is a deeply inadequate way to measure a government’s commitment to victims.
Cruelty does not become wisdom when officials endorse it
Hegseth presents public visibility as a way to communicate the consequences of such crimes. But an assertion about deterrence requires evidence. The fact that an execution looks frightening does not establish that broadcasting it will prevent another attack, particularly when an attacker may already expect or welcome death.
Even if a public spectacle satisfies widespread anger, satisfaction alone cannot justify state policy. Governments routinely have to distinguish understandable emotions from defensible actions. Grief and rage deserve recognition. They do not relieve officials of the responsibility to exercise restraint.
The same principle applies to human dignity. It becomes almost meaningless if it protects only people whom society likes. Its hardest test comes when the person concerned has done something monstrous. We can hold Hasan fully responsible while still insisting that the government has obligations toward a prisoner in its custody.
Accepting those obligations requires no sympathy for his ideology or his crimes. It requires confidence that society can condemn murder without organizing a viewing event around another death. A state capable of secure imprisonment has ample power to protect the public without inviting it to watch a captive being shot.
What the government teaches
If carried out, Hasan’s execution would be the first U.S. military execution since 1961. The proposed broadcast would add a disturbing dimension to that resumption. The government would make the deliberate killing of a prisoner available for public consumption, with all the possibilities for repetition, circulation, and celebration that online distribution creates.
Officials should consider what lesson that teaches. When leaders eagerly advertise a killing, they encourage the public to associate strength with the visible infliction of death. They make restraint look weak and invite citizens to judge justice by the intensity of the punishment they can witness.
A democracy should demand more of its leaders. It should expect them to explain how their decisions protect people, respect limits, and serve the public interest. The power to kill deserves the most exacting scrutiny a society can apply. Turning its exercise into a broadcast makes that responsibility more urgent.
Hasan’s crimes were barbaric. The government remains responsible for its own choices, and it has chosen to plan a spectacle around his death. A firing squad with a livestream is barbarism in action, backed by public authority and offered to the world as justice.
