Defense Secretary Hegseth--announcing yesterday that Nidal Hasan, the radicalized Army psychiatrist who murdered thirteen soldiers at Texas's Fort Hood in 2009, and injured thirty-two others, would not only be executed in December by a firing squad, but that the execution would be livestreamed.
Trump, today, said he approved of the livestreaming.
Livestreaming an execution. This is grotesque, and depraved.
From a New York Times story, today:
“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said [yesterday] in an interview with a conservative news outlet.
The Times reporter wrote:
No public execution has been conducted in the United States in 90 years, and the decision to conduct this one in front of an audience would put the country in the company of Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea and Somalia. Just 17 executions around the world were confirmed to be conducted publicly last year, according to Amnesty International: six in Afghanistan and 11 in Iran. Even Saudi Arabia, once known for hanging prisoners in public, has not conducted a public execution since 2022.
Even some supporters of capital punishment flinched at the idea of livestreaming Mr. Hasan’s execution, calling it medieval and barbaric. “Hasan should face the death penalty, but making his execution public and streaming it? Beyond disgusting,” said Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina. “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.”
Trump has been unable to win his gut-driven, impulsive, erratic war against the Islamic Republic of Iran, a war he said in March would last four to six weeks. I am guessing--at least in part because of his inability, thus far, to bring the war to a successful conclusion--that both he and Hegseth are finding a perverse kind of pleasure in this planned livestreaming. The idea of the livestream--letting people across the world watch as the United States executes a mass murderer, a radicalized Muslim man--is hideous on its own terms. Yet it feels, indeed, as though the announced December livestream is very possibly being used as a proxy for the administration's failures abroad.
(Please note: a few changes were made to the above in the hours after it was posted.)
