President Donald Trump said on Thursday that the military firing-squad execution of former Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, scheduled for December 3 at Fort Hood, Texas, will not be livestreamed. The decision reverses a plan Secretary of War Pete Hegseth unveiled a week earlier to broadcast the killing.
In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote that streaming the execution “might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan,” but that “many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die.” He added: “He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed.” The military is still preparing to shoot Hasan, who is paralyzed, at the base where the crime occurred, in the first US military execution since 1961.
On November 5, 2009, Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, opened fire in a medical processing center at Fort Hood where soldiers were being prepared for deployment to Afghanistan. He killed 13 people, 12 of them soldiers, and wounded 32 others before police shot him, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. At his 2013 court-martial he said he acted to stop troops from killing Muslims in Afghanistan, and he was sentenced to death.
The World Socialist Web Site described the massacre as a reactionary crime that, it argued, cannot be separated from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which it said took close to a million lives.
Hegseth announced the livestream on October 8 in an interview aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln with Jack Posobiec of Real America’s Voice. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” he said, “because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.” The UN human rights office said broadcasting an execution amounts to a public execution and would violate international bans on such torture.
According to CNN, Trump learned that Hasan uses a wheelchair only after approving the plan and disliked the optics of a firing squad shooting a man who cannot stand. Advisers also warned that a livestream could make Hasan a martyr. An administration official told the Washington Post the White House had been “caught off guard” by Hegseth. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said Trump and Hegseth are “completely aligned.” The World Socialist Web Site said the two are in agreement on carrying out the execution.
Hegseth chose the firing squad, with Trump’s approval, saying, “Well I kind of like the mentality we had in World War II.” The World Socialist Web Site noted that the US Army carried out most of its executions in that war by hanging, while Hitler’s Wehrmacht used firing squads as discipline and shot more than 18,000 of its own soldiers. It also recalled that in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union the Nazis staged mass public hangings to terrorize the population, and said these were the methods Hegseth admires. The site described Hegseth, who has purged generals and the military’s top lawyers and championed soldiers accused of war crimes, as taking Heinrich Himmler as a model.
Many Republicans and military figures opposed the broadcast. Vice President JD Vance said he would not watch it. Republican Senator Thom Tillis called it “beyond disgusting,” and 72 retired officers wrote in an open letter that it would taint the military’s honor.
The Fort Hood execution sits within a wider expansion of capital punishment. On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order on “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety,” directing the attorney general to seek death sentences in every case of sufficient “severity,” including the killing of police officers and capital crimes by undocumented immigrants. On April 24 the Justice Department added the firing squad, electrocution and gas asphyxiation to federal execution methods. The administration has also pursued the 37 federal prisoners whose death sentences Joe Biden commuted. At least 10 have been sent to ADX Florence in Colorado, where prisoners spend 22 to 24 hours a day alone in concrete cells smaller than a parking space and exercise in solitary cages.
In September, Trump’s approval rating fell to 32 percent in a Reuters/Ipsos poll, the lowest of either term, and a Fox News poll found that more than 60 percent of voters thought the war against Iran was the wrong decision. A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released Thursday, hours before Trump cancelled the livestream, found that 80 percent of Americans opposed it and 18 percent favored it.
The livestream plan followed the failed execution of Christa Pike on September 30 in Tennessee. Pike, 50, was sentenced to death for the murder of Colleen Slemmer, committed when Pike was 18. She survived two large doses of pentobarbital, was taken to a Nashville hospital with burned and blistered arms, and lay unconscious on a ventilator until her attorneys said on October 6 that she was awake and speaking. About 10 days later she was returned to prison. Governor Bill Lee has halted executions for the rest of the year but has not commuted her sentence. Jamaal Howard was executed in Texas on October 7, and Florida executed James Robertson on October 13, its 17th execution of the year. William Reaves is scheduled to die in Florida on October 20, and Jesse Guardado on November 5.
Hasan is scheduled to be shot at 1 p.m. on December 3, though a federal habeas corpus petition could delay the execution. The Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site say they oppose the death penalty for both the guilty and the innocent, and argue that abolition is tied to opposition to war and dictatorship.