The Pentagon Turns State Killing into a Digital Colosseum
When state authority abandons the rule of law to stage a public spectacle of death, it invariably borrows the aesthetic of the abattoir. On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced during a television interview that the Department of Defense intends to conduct the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan—scheduled for December 3, 2026, at Fort Hood, Texas—before a firing squad of soldiers and broadcast the shooting live over the internet. To remove any doubt about the regime’s appetite for vulgar theater, Hegseth declared on Real America’s Voice that “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.” Asked whether he cared about the condemned prisoner’s final requests, the secretary sneered: “Don’t care. We’ll see him on December 3.”
By Friday, the spectacle had received the typically chaotic blessing of Donald Trump on the South Lawn of the White House. “Did I approve? Absolutely,” Trump told reporters, while simultaneously hedging that a final administrative determination remained pending. In the next breath, the commander in chief summarized his penological philosophy with characteristic crudity: “I really don’t care how he goes as long as he goes.” Vice President JD Vance was left to mutter in Ohio that he doubted the broadcast would occur and announced, with telling squeamishness, that he would not watch it if it did. The administration cannot even decide whether it is inaugurating a solemn deterrent or an unseemly circus that its own secondary officers lack the stomach to witness.
Hasan’s guilt is not in dispute, nor is the monstrous nature of his crime. On November 5, 2009, Hasan walked into the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood and opened fire on unarmed comrades, murdering thirteen people and wounding more than thirty others. He was tried, convicted by a military court-martial, and sentenced to death under Article 118 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Paralyzed from the waist down since his arrest, Hasan has lingered on death row at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth for over a decade. But the debate ignited by Hegseth’s broadcast is not about Hasan’s innocence; it is about the moral sanity of the government that proposes to dispatch him.
The administration’s defense of this online spectacle rests entirely on the crude dogma of deterrence and retribution. By parading the rifle volley across every screen in the republic, officials claim they will frighten future jihadists and honor the fallen with unsparing vengeance. This is the ancient, bloody delusion that has always sustained public slaughter. In the real world, as Stéphane Dujarric pointed out on Friday on behalf of the United Nations, staging and streaming executions live constitutes cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment that directly assaults the international prohibition against torture. There are only four regimes on the contemporary globe that routinely butcher human beings in public view: Iran, the Taliban’s Afghanistan, Somalia, and North Korea. Hegseth and Trump are now proposing to enroll the American military in that squalid company.
The American republic once knew better. The last formal public execution in the United States occurred ninety years ago, on August 14, 1936, when Rainey Bethea was hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky, before a drunken, raucous crowd of twenty thousand onlookers. The nauseating carnival atmosphere of that morning revolted the nation and hastened the total withdrawal of executions behind prison walls. Lawmakers and penal theorists did not retreat from public squares out of misplaced sympathy for the condemned, but out of a necessary disgust with the crowd. They understood what modern criminology has repeatedly confirmed: public state violence does not deter criminality; it brutalizes the civil society forced to look upon it.
Even within the Pentagon’s own institutional framework, Hegseth’s internet snuff film collapses under legal scrutiny. Army Regulation 190-55, governing procedures for military executions, strictly limits the observation gallery to official escorts, designated family representatives, and a tiny pool of vetted media observers. Paragraph 2-5 explicitly mandates that “no person under the age of 18 shall witness” an execution—a standard made instantly absurd by an unencrypted digital stream piped to millions of mobile phones and schoolroom monitors. As Geoffrey Corn, a former military lawyer in the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps, observed to CBS News, reducing capital punishment to mass electronic entertainment abandons every historical acknowledgment of institutional gravity.
If Hasan faces the volley on December 3, 2026, he will be the first American service member executed by the military since John A. Bennett was hanged at Fort Leavenworth in 1961, and the first shot by a firing squad since Private Eddie Slovik in 1945. But to transform that grim machinery into a gladiatorial broadcast for jacked-up television personalities and online comment sections is an act of sheer civic desecration. It demonstrates that under the guise of militant patriotism, the Pentagon’s leaders share the exact same thirst for performative barbarism that characterizes the theocratic regimes they claim to despise. Federal courts could yet hear habeas petitions contesting the constitutionality of this feed, but the broader question belongs to the public: whether we intend to remain a constitutional democracy or degenerate into a digital Colosseum cheering the state’s bullets in high definition.