The Pentagon announced that the public could watch a man be shot to death by a firing squad. Then, a week later, the administration began to wonder whether that was such a good idea. That sequence tells you more than any official statement about how this government thinks about killing.
Nobody seems to have started with the question that matters: what does it mean for the United States to execute a man, and what do citizens owe themselves when it does so in their name? The question was whether it would play well. Mike Johnson worries that footage could become a recruiting tool for terrorists. JD Vance says he wouldn't watch. Donald Trump says it's under review. This is a communications problem being worked out in public, and the subject is a human life.
Let me be plain about Nidal Hasan. He murdered 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009 and wounded dozens more. The families have waited sixteen years. Nothing here asks anyone to pity him. But the Left's objection to the death penalty has never depended on the sympathy of the condemned. It rests on the belief that the state is fallible, that its killing power is the most dangerous it has, and that such power should be used with gravity or not at all. The military hasn't carried out an execution since 1961. Reviving the practice with a firing squad, and then haggling over camera angles, is not gravity.
Here is where the administration's squeamishness becomes hard to take. This is a White House that has turned state force into content. It posts videos of boat strikes. It circulates footage of shackled deportees. It treats cruelty as a message to be broadcast and the broadcast as the point. Now, faced with the most literal exercise of state violence there is, it suddenly discovers the virtue of discretion. The honest reading is that officials understand how this looks. If a killing can't survive being seen, that is not an argument for hiding it. It is an argument against doing it.
To be clear, I am not asking for a livestream. Executions as spectacle corrode the people who watch and the institution that stages them, and the families of the dead should not have their grief turned into a ratings event. Those families, not the political staff, should have the strongest voice in how this is handled. But the opposite of spectacle is not secrecy. It is accountability: credible, independent witnesses, a press presence that can describe exactly what happened, and a full public record. Anyone who has read about botched executions knows why. States have repeatedly told us these killings are clean and humane until the witnesses said otherwise. The firing squad is generally regarded as more reliable than lethal injection, and failures have been rare. But "rare" is not "never," and a promise of reliability is exactly the kind of claim that independent witnesses exist to check.
The recruiting-tool argument deserves a direct answer, because it is not stupid. Hasan wanted to be a martyr, and a dramatic broadcast could feed that story. But notice what the argument concedes: that the execution is a symbolic act whose meaning the government cannot control. If the state's own supporters fear that the killing will do more for extremists than for justice, perhaps that should have been settled before a date was set.
My own side should not be let off easily either. Opposing the death penalty is easy when the defendant is sympathetic. It is harder, and more necessary, when he is a man like Hasan, because that is the case that tests whether the principle holds. The Left's answer should be that the same state that can lawfully kill him can lawfully kill the innocent, and that a government eager to make its violence a brand is the last one to trust with the power.
If the United States is going to do this, it should do it soberly, with witnesses, with a public record, and with the victims' families, not the communications office, in the lead. If it can't, it should ask why.
