Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist convicted of killing 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, is still scheduled to be executed by an Army firing squad on December 3. The change on Thursday was about who gets to watch. President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that Hasan “will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed.” That undoes the plan Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced last week, which the Pentagon was still defending as recently as Tuesday.
The president did not say the idea was wrong. As Ashley Belanger reported for Ars Technica, the post kept the argument and dropped the broadcast:
I think streaming the execution for all to see might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan but, many very good and well-meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device.
He added that “the execution may be viewed in person by the immediate families of the victims, if they so choose.” Put plainly, the deterrence theory is still official policy. The audience has shrunk from everyone with an internet connection to the people with the strongest claim to be there.
The plan began, as rews has covered, with a podcast. Hegseth was talking to the right-wing podcaster Jack Posobiec aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln when he said: “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 Defense Department confirmed it, and Al Jazeera noted that Trump had said he “absolutely” supported it. It would have been the first public execution of its kind in the US since 1936, after decades in which American administrations criticised other governments for holding them.
But Trump also kept his options open. “I’ll make a decision, ultimately. I know what the military would like to do, but we’ll make a decision,” he said on Saturday. Looking back, that was the moment the policy became a draft.
The numbers
Common Dreams pointed out that the reversal came hours after a Washington Post, ABC News and Ipsos poll was published. The poll, fielded October 9 to 13 among 2,545 adults, found 80% opposed to livestreaming the execution, 18% in favour and 2% not answering. Opposition ran at 91% of Democrats, 83% of independents and 64% of Republicans. Among Republicans who identify with the MAGA movement, 55% were opposed. The only group in which a majority backed the livestream was MAGA-identifying men, at 57%.
The most telling figure is how the question about the stream differs from the question about the execution itself. Ipsos’s release puts support for executing Hasan at 52%; several outlets reported 53%. Either way, just over half the country wants him executed, while four in five do not want it broadcast, and nearly 70% of execution supporters oppose the stream. So a large share of the people who want this execution want it to happen somewhere they do not have to see. That is roughly how the American death penalty has worked for 90 years.
The poll’s respondents put it more simply. Lawrence Sagstetter, an independent in Minnesota, said streaming would be “going too far,” adding: “It’s just going to cause more of an uproar, not only nationally but internationally.” Bruce Gonka, a New York Republican, called the plan “all for shock, and we don’t need that. We’re better than that.”
The practical problems
Leave the ethics aside for a moment and the plan had operational gaps too. CNN reported that the Pentagon did not appear to have thought them through. Social media and broadcasters have rules against graphic violence, so it was unclear whether the feed could run anywhere except the Pentagon’s own site. The soldiers ordered onto the firing squad could also be identified on camera. Those are soldiers who, in some cases, were already being advised by the military’s archbishop to ask to be excused. Bishop Daniel Garcia of Austin said a broadcast “would make a spectacle of death.” House Speaker Mike Johnson warned that the footage could become a “recruiting tool for future terrorists,” a concern that extremist propagandists have already made concrete.
Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert, did not oppose the plan outright. He said that if it happened, “I’m not going to be watching it.” Trump’s reference to “very good and well-meaning people” seems to include him.
Criticism from abroad was less restrained. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said a livestreamed execution “would breach the absolute prohibition of torture,” and Amnesty International called it “barbaric and deeply shocking.” The historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who studies fascism, called it “an attempt to normalize extreme violence, ritualize violence, militarize the country, and make violence entertaining so when they ask you to commit violence in their name, you will be ready.”
Who decides
The process is the oddest part. A cabinet secretary announced a major change in how the US carries out the death penalty in a podcast interview. The department confirmed it. The president first endorsed it, then said the call was his, then reversed it on social media. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said afterwards that Trump and Hegseth had talked before the post, and that “the Secretary supports the President’s decision, and they are completely aligned.” Both statements can be true, since aligning with your boss after he overrules you is how this usually works.
The execution, the first by the US military in more than six decades, remains set for 1 p.m. on December 3 at Fort Hood. The poll showed the country split almost evenly on whether it should happen at all. That question did not get a Truth Social post.