Some announcements can’t be taken back. An order can be withdrawn, a broadcast cancelled and a spokesman sent out to say that everyone in the building agrees. By then the words have already travelled, and other people have started doing their own work with them.
A date and an hour
In November 2009 Nidal Hasan, a US Army major who had once tried to contact Al Qaeda, opened fire at Fort Hood in Texas. He killed 13 people and injured 32. He was shot and captured where it happened and later sentenced to death. Then, for most of the following seventeen years, the world forgot him. Even the extremists who might have claimed him seldom mentioned his name.
That changed this autumn. On October 5 the Pentagon announced that Trump had approved Hasan’s execution by firing squad at Fort Hood. The acting Secretary of the Army, Adam Telle, set the date for December 3 at 1 p.m. local time, CNN reported. No American service member has been executed by firing squad since the Second World War. In a podcast interview with Jack Posobiec, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth went further: “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.” The Pentagon said it would livestream the execution. The remark drew criticism from both parties. The Army began working out what a public execution would require, and the military’s archbishop advised Catholic soldiers to ask off the firing squad.
The country was not convinced. A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that 80 percent of Americans believed the execution should not be streamed live. On October 9 Trump said he “absolutely” approved the plan. Later he told reporters: “We’re looking at it.”
Thursday, on Truth Social
On Thursday, October 15, the president ended it. Hasan “will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed,” he wrote on Truth Social. The victims’ immediate families could still watch in person. He did not give up the original idea, though. A stream, he wrote, “might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM.”
The Pentagon, which had been preparing the broadcast days earlier, now found itself in full agreement. “The Secretary supports the President’s decision, and they are completely aligned,” said the department’s spokesman, Sean Parnell.
So the camera was switched off before anything had been filmed. By then, people far from Texas had already made their own pictures.
The other production
“It’s already started,” Moustafa Ayad, research chair in global Islamism and counter-terrorism at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told Matthew Gault of 404 Media. “We’re already seeing edited videos in support of Nidal Hasan, and they’re specifically based around how he’s a martyr and that his legacy lives on.”
Ayad shared one image from Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. It called Hasan a “heroic mujahid brother” and then quoted Osama bin Laden: “The day America makes this decision, it will have made a decision to execute whoever among you falls captive.” According to Ayad, a propaganda group affiliated with Al Qaeda made Hasan the feature of its newsletter last Friday. He described a man who “hasn’t really been referenced since 2017 really or that much at all” whose attack is now being discussed again as “quote unquote glorious” and used for recruitment, “and will continue to do so.”
Some of what Ayad described sounds absurd, and none of it is funny. He spoke of “rampage” edits in which Hasan appears to dance over a number standing for how many people he killed. On TikTok, 404 Media viewed a clip in which a picture of Hasan with laser eyes pulsed in time to electronic music. Ayad thinks the people making these are young. “I don’t think some 35-year-old dude is doing that,” he said. “You have a younger generation that is now attuned to what he did.”
“You have fed the wolves,” he said. “They now have a thing they can latch on to.”
Saints of the feed
Groups like these have always needed martyrs, and they make them in a particular way. In Ayad’s account, dead ideologues are revered and lionized among supporters of Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and other terrorist groups. He said a similar “saint” culture surrounds the accelerationists, where such killers are treated as a vanguard. Online nihilists, gore communities and Islamists all use footage of death to draw in young people. Killers who get wide media attention become objects of fascination and models for others. Some researchers have proposed that news organisations report what a shooter did without naming or showing him, so that the notoriety and the contagion die out.
A broadcast execution would have given these groups more material, perhaps the most valuable footage they could have asked for. That footage won’t exist now. But what they had lacked was a reason to talk about him at all, and Washington supplied that before it reversed course.
A government that wants to show its strength can end up advertising for its enemies. Officials who staged that show seem to have thought the audience would be Americans watching justice done. Al Qaeda’s propagandists were watching too, and they reached their own audience before the official one had been told the show was off.
“We’re already seeing it being incorporated into talking points, we’re past that,” Ayad said. “He is still going to be labeled a martyr. Will it be a public spectacle? Not anymore [...] but terror groups and their supporters took advantage of the news to highlight just how much of a contribution Nidal Hasan made to their respective movements.”
The firing squad is still scheduled for December 3, at 1 p.m., at Fort Hood.