The Pentagon Wants to Turn an Execution Into Content

Somewhere in the Pentagon, this had to be said out loud: the military is going to execute a man by firing squad, and the public should be able to watch it on a screen.

Then somebody signed off.

Nidal Malik Hasan was convicted in the killing of 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009. He is not a sympathetic figure. Nothing about a livestream changes that. It just changes the audience from the people with a reason and a right to be there into whoever happens to have a phone, poor impulse control, and an internet connection.

Pete Hegseth said people need to see “serious consequences.” The Pentagon then said Hasan’s Dec. 3 execution would be livestreamed. It is scheduled for 1 p.m., the same hour Hegseth pointed out that Hasan carried out the attack.

That last detail tells you where this has gone. This is not a difficult conversation about punishment. It is production design.

The Army has a regulation for executions, AR 190-55. It is a very Army document. It has an execution team, an execution watch team, an execution management and coordination team, press procedures, medical support, a witness list, and no apparent shortage of people who have to initial something before anybody moves. The authorized witnesses include officials, counsel if requested, selected family and victim representatives, and at least two media representatives. Nobody under 18 may witness it.

That is a closed, controlled procedure. It is supposed to be. A government deciding to take a life should not act like it just announced a new season of a show nobody asked for.

There is an annoying legal wrinkle, because of course there is. Reuters reports that federal prison law expressly prohibits recording or broadcasting executions. Military regulations do not contain the same explicit ban. Maybe the administration can find a way through that gap. Governments are very good at finding gaps when the alternative is admitting an idea is ugly.

But a missing sentence in a regulation is not a mandate to add cameras. The absence of a stop sign is not always an invitation to drive into the lake.

The political reaction has not been subtle. Republican Sen. Thom Tillis said Hasan should face the death penalty but called streaming it “beyond disgusting.” Democratic Rep. Adam Smith said it would make a mockery of the legal system. They are right, and it should not take a bipartisan warning label to establish that public spectacle is not the same thing as public accountability.

Victims and families deserve a serious process. The Army’s witness rules try to make room for that. They do not promise a nationwide viewing party. There is a reason the military execution manual looks like a manual instead of a media plan.

If the government carries out this sentence, it will be exercising its most permanent power. It can do that with gravity, procedure, and whatever dignity is still available in a situation like this.

Or it can point a camera at it and call the result strength.

That is not strength. That is the government mistaking an audience for authority.

The Pentagon Wants to Turn an Execution Into Content

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