Whatever message Hegseth intends to send by having the public watch Hasan die, the Islamist world will interpret it very differently.
On November 5, 2009, doctor and U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan murdered 13 people — twelve U.S. soldiers and one civilian — while wounding 30 others at Fort Hood Army base near Killeen, Texas. It remains one of the deadliest Islamist terror attacks in the United States since 9/11. He was sentenced to death by a military jury in August of 2013 and has been rotting in a cell at Fort Leavenworth ever since, playing out the string as he exhausted his appeals.
Few men deserve death more richly. The world is full of skeptics about the religious and ethical appropriateness of the death penalty; I have never been one of them. Quite simply, I think there are acts a man or woman can commit that render them unworthy of life in society’s eyes, and slaughtering 13 people and wounding 30 others — all while betraying your oath to your country and your military brethren — amply qualifies. In fact, 13 years is an appallingly long time for the survivors and families of the victims to have to wait through the law’s delay, but procedure must be observed.
Hasan’s final appeal was finally exhausted on October 3, as expected. And then Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth put on his Bad Idea jeans and made a rather unexpected public announcement on Thursday: Not only would Hasan’s execution by firing squad (standard for military justice) proceed as planned on December 3, Hegseth promised it would be live-streamed to the American public, so that the whole world could savor the event.
Even Vice President Vance tossed a caution flag on that one, saying today that it was the first he’d heard of such plans and generally pouring cold water on the idea. (“I’m not going to be watching.”) Other Trump allies in Congress were more taken aback, as well they might be at the idea of not only holding America’s first public execution in 90 years, but digitally broadcasting it to literally the entire world.
Senator John L. Kennedy of Louisiana expressed a queasiness with the idea that has spoken for most of his elected Republican colleagues since Hegseth made his announcement: “If it were me, I wouldn’t televise it or publicize it or whatever they’re doing,” Kennedy said today. “I just think it makes — it makes our society coarser, and I wouldn’t do it. But there are arguments, you know, on both sides.”
In fact, there are actually very few arguments in favor of holding a public execution, much less televising one. (Inarticulate bloodthirst, and the need of the masses for public “entertainment,” are not reasons.) Perhaps the secretary of defense thinks that reviving the tradition — and indeed expanding it — makes for a sparkling display of America’s revived warrior thumos. More likely, I suspect that if such things were to become common again, we would find ourselves one further step down the path to the re-barbarization of our society and cultural sensibilities. That was Senator Kennedy’s point, and it deserves examination.
American society has never been “too delicate” for public executions. In fact, quite the opposite: We are quintessential rubberneckers. The last public execution in America — of a man convicted of rape, not murder — was held in Kentucky in 1936, and the reason it was the last is because it attracted 20,000 onlookers, ruffians, and drunks eager to watch a man die: behavior from an overly giddy crowd so disgraceful that the Kentucky legislature repealed the law in its next session.
Things have changed less about human nature since then than you might think. Our darker social impulses have only retreated further inward. We live in a world where many corners of the internet — and not even all of them political, many simply nihilist — have been thrilling for over a year to the bloody video of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Nidal Hasan is surely no moral comparison, but anyone who thinks it a good idea to broadcast the man’s execution probably rented Faces of Death from the local Video Village one too many times as an adolescent.
And, of course, there is one final consideration that trumps all others: Nidal Hasan has spent the last 13 years of his life sitting in a wheelchair, devastated that he failed in his final appointed task in life — to die as a glorious martyr for the cause of radical Islam. What kind of rock-headed fool would give him that public honor now?
Whatever message Pete Hegseth believes himself to be sending by having the entire world watch Hasan die — most of the world already understands “terrorist are evil, and we kill them” — I can guarantee you the Islamist world will interpret it very differently. Why give Hasan the victory he so eagerly craves by turning him into a public martyr for our enemies to fixate upon? Death is supposed to be a penalty, not a reward.