Just when you thought this era of American governance couldn’t get more disgusting: The U.S. Army plans to execute a convict by firing squad and stream it live.
The condemned man is ex-Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who was convicted of and sentenced to death for murdering 13 unarmed soldiers and wounding 32 other people in a 2009 terror attack on Fort Hood near Killeen, Texas. The Army hasn’t killed anyone via the death penalty since 1961, and has not carried out executions in the handful of death penalty cases between then and now. President Donald Trump approved Hasan’s execution via firing squad just days ago.
During a Thursday interview with notorious conspiracy theorist and Pizzagate promoter Jack Posobiec, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stated 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.”
“Of course we’re going to do it at Fort Hood, and do it on a Thursday and we’re going to do it at 1 o’clock—which is when he did it—and it’s going to be soldiers with rifles executing the firing squad,” Hegseth said, thus turning a sentence into something more resembling a re-enactment.
“It hadn’t been since World War II since we’ve done that. Well, I kind of like the mentality we had in World War II, which was win,” Hegseth added.
Pentagon officials have since confirmed to outlets including the Associated Press, CNN, and the New York Times that the execution and accompanying broadcast are scheduled for Dec. 3, 2026.
The last time in the U.S. an officially sanctioned execution was shown to the public for their edification was in 1936, when 20,000 people showed up to watch the state of Kentucky hang a Black man convicted of raping an elderly white woman. A 2017 article in the Kentucky Historical Society’s academic journal stated that incident seemed “perversely ordinary” in the context of the South, with its history of racially motivated hangings and lynchings.
As the Times noted, public executions are usually the domain of authoritarian governments like Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Even they aren’t often cynical or tone-deaf enough to videotape them for propaganda purposes—the Times noted that the U.S. appears to be joining a category composed primarily of mass shooters who broadcast killing sprees and terror groups like the Islamic State. (Iraqi authorities initially planned to broadcast former dictator Saddam Hussein’s 2006 execution; they chose not to, though a cell phone video leaked.)
Hasan put up virtually no defense at his trial. He has suggested that the death penalty would allow him to be a martyr.
It’s not clear whether the announcement has any legal rationale. Eugene R. Fidell, a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School, told the AP that Hasan could file a habeas petition to review the legality of the livestreamed execution. The resulting legal battle, he said, “might outlast the current administration, and who knows if the next one will have the same penchant for executions.”
It’s also not clear if the Pentagon established the broadcasting plan prior to that interview, or Hegseth just wanted to impress a Pizzagater and proposed it on the spot. Trump has made no secret of his enthusiasm for the federal death penalty, and Hegseth’s tenure has been characterized by an obsession with projecting masculinity and “maximum lethality.” A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed on Thursday evening that, either way, the livestream has Trump’s endorsement.
This wouldn’t even be the first dubiously legal execution that Hegseth has had a hand in ordering. Hegseth reportedly ordered personnel to kill survivors of a strike on a suspected drug cartel boat, a war crime. Legal experts have said the administration’s strikes on alleged cartel boats were already illegal in and of themselves.
