In an interview with far-right conspiracist Jack Posobiec (of Pizzagate fame), Pete Hegseth announced his intention to livestream the execution, by firing squad, of Nidal Hasan. Hasan, who committed the 2009 Fort Hood mass shooting that killed 13 people, is scheduled to be executed on Dec. 3 at 1 p.m., the hour, Hegseth noted, at which the shooting began. Hegseth told Posobiec he liked “the mentality we had in World War II,” which is also, as it happens, the last time the U.S. military executed anyone by firing squad. The last public execution in the country was in the 1930s.
CNN has the story:
“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,” Hegseth told far-right podcaster Jack Posobiec in an interview aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on Wednesday, drawing swift backlash from both sides of the aisle. ...
Republican Sen. Thom Tillis late Thursday called it “beyond disgusting.” He said on X, “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.” Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat, is stunned—telling CNN’s Erin Burnett that public executions are “medieval.” “I mean, that’s disgusting, what is he mimicking ISIS executions?” Murphy said. “That’s what America has become? That’s pretty extraordinary.” The president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops denounced the plan on Friday calling it a “barbaric promotion of a culture of death.”
Bipartisan opposition eventually led Trump to call it off. On Oct. 15, he announced on Truth Social that the execution “will not be streamed”—a missed opportunity, the president suggested, since it “might have been a strong deterrent.” Trump’s objection, in other words, concerns the optics. That Hegseth floated the idea at all, and that it took more than a week of condemnation from senators of both parties and the nation’s Catholic bishops for the administration to drop it, says a great deal about the people now running the country’s armed forces.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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