Pentagon says Fort Hood firing-squad execution will be livestreamed

In the days after Nidal Hasan opened fire on his fellow soldiers, the Army’s chief of staff said that as horrific as the tragedy was, it would be worse if “our diversity becomes a casualty.” Thirteen people were already dead. Thirty-two were wounded. One of the dead, Private Francheska Velez, was pregnant and was heard begging for her baby. The institution’s next contribution was a phrase: workplace violence.

That phrase did real work. Hasan was not a disgruntled employee who snapped. He was an Army psychiatrist who had corresponded with the jihadist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, shouted “Allahu Akbar,” and tried, at his 2013 court-martial, to justify the killings as holy war. A military jury convicted him of thirteen counts of premeditated murder and sentenced him to death. The government that could not bear to name the crime then spent more than a decade not finishing the sentence. Families had to fight to have the attack treated as terrorism at all. Purple Hearts arrived years late, after Congress rewrote the standard. Warning signs in Hasan’s communications had sat inside the bureaucracy before the shooting. None of this is ancient history. It is why the announcement of a firing squad cannot be read as a simple story about toughness.

The approval itself is the part the system was built to require. A military death sentence does not carry itself out. The president has to own it. President Trump has now done so, on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s recommendation of a firing squad. The armed forces have not executed anyone since 1961, and have not used a firing squad since 1945. There is nothing illegitimate about using a power that has merely gone unused. Nor is a firing squad a moral embarrassment beside the euphemisms of lethal injection. Hasan killed soldiers in uniform, on a military post, for a cause he has never repudiated. A squad is a military instrument for a military judgment: severe, brief, and hard to dress up as medicine. Retribution here does not depend on the fantasy that the next jihadist will consult the method of execution before he pulls a trigger. It depends on whether a lawful sentence means what it says, and on whether soldiers can believe that murdering them is not an administrative tragedy with an indefinite ending.

The livestream is a different decision, and a worse one.

A record is not a broadcast. The law already provides for witnesses: officials, counsel, members of the victims’ families who choose to be there. That is accountability. A public feed is a crowd, updated for a century that has trouble telling a proceeding from a show. Hasan has wanted an audience since the day of the attack. The court that tried him refused to let the courtroom become his pulpit. Streaming his death rebuilds the pulpit and hands the footage to anyone who needs a martyr. People who massacre in the name of jihad are not short of propagandists. A confident country does not volunteer the pictures.

There is a coarser cost, closer to home. Executions left the town square for reasons worth remembering. Public killing trains the public in spectatorship. It flatters the part of us that wants to feel stern while watching someone else do the hard thing. Severity does not require an audience of millions. If Americans ought to understand Fort Hood, the trial record, the names of the dead, and the years of official euphemism teach more than a volley on a screen.

His lawyer, John Galligan, says Hasan was told of the approval without counsel present and that a federal habeas petition is still possible. That should slow anyone treating December 3 as a programmed finale. Hasan’s guilt is not a close question. The government’s right to take his life is. It lasts only as long as the last lawful review is honored. The conservative case for capital punishment has never been that the right defendant makes procedure optional. If a petition is filed, the date moves. Performing inevitability before the courts are finished is how a sentence becomes a demonstration. An administration that wants this remembered as justice rather than programming has to earn the distinction.

The two failures rhyme. First the state would not say what Hasan was. Then it would not carry out what a court had ordered. Now it proposes to make the remedy visible enough to trend. That is not the recovery of order. It is the same insecurity in a harsher costume. Finish the filings. If the sentence remains lawful, carry it out. Invite the witnesses the law already names, and keep the cameras off the volley.