Pete Hegseth’s desire to publicly execute a self-proclaimed jihadist who murdered more than a dozen soldiers in 2009 is an act of barbarity akin to despotic regimes like North Korea, Iran and Nazi Germany.
President Donald Trump personally ordered the death by firing squad, the first of a US service member since WWII.
“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 said today (Oct. 8), during a television broadcast.
‘It’s going to be soldiers with rifles executing the firing squad,” Hegseth added.
Former Army Major Nidal Hasan is set to be executed by firing squad by Army soldiers on Dec. 3 on the same Texas military base at the same time, 1 pm, as the murders he committed occurred.
While the execution order itself is valid, Hegseth’s announcement that the execution will be publicly livestreamed introduces an entirely untested and highly contested legal issue.
No legal precedent or existing military regulation allows a state-sanctioned execution to be broadcast or live-streamed to the public. The last public execution in the United States took place 90 years prior, in 1936.
The response to Hegseth’s announcement has raised political, ethical, and legal questions over a practice used primarily for propaganda purposes by extremist militant groups and rogue religious dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan.
Human rights groups, legal analysts, and civil liberties advocates have reacted with deep alarm, criticizing the decision as a descent into state-sponsored spectacle, according to The New York Times. Legal challenges are expected almost immediately.
Strict U.S. Army protocols dictate how military executions are to be carried out. Traditionally only a highly regulated, minimal number of official witnesses and a small selection of media members (typically at least two) are allowed to be physically present, according to media reports.
The last public execution took place in 1937, during the height of Jim Crow. A black man, Roscoe Jackson, was hanged in Missouri after being convicted of murdering a white woman.
Hasan justifed the Fort Hood attack over his anger that American troops were deployed in Afghanistan and wanted to protect Islamic and Taliban leaders.
Hasan walked into a Fort Hood medical readiness building in Nov 2009 armed with two guns and several magazines of ammunition. He shouted ‘Allahu Akbar!’ – Arabic for ‘God is great!’ – and opened fire on soldiers waiting for medical tests and vaccines, according to media reports.
Hasan killed 13 soldiers and left 32 wounded. Hasan was shot and paralyzed from the waist down in the resulting gunfire and was sentenced to death in 2013.
During his trial, Hasan told jurors he had ‘switched sides’ in what he called America’s war with Islam. Hasan was scheduled to deploy and did not want to go, according to evidence presented at his trial.
Five states — Utah, Idaho, Mississippi, South Carolina and Oklahoma — all Republican controlled permit firing squad executions. The Justice Department only approved the use of firing squads this past April. The U.S. military last carried out a death penalty execution in 1961.
Utah has used firing squads more than any other state in modern history, but hasn’t executed anyone that way since 2010. All states also use death by lethal injection.
Trump has been pushing to expedite capital punishment cases.
“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it,” Hegseth told Trump sycophant and conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec.
“No-brainer,” Hegseth said. “Execution by firing squad. Army major betrays his country, radical Islamist, kills a bunch of Americans at Fort Hood ― of course we’re going to do it at Fort Hood.”
A U.S. service member cannot refuse a direct order to serve on a firing squad based on personal or moral objections, and would risk a court-martial for insubordination or willful disobedience of an order..
But standard military execution procedures make a forced order highly unlikely. Firing squads are typically made up of volunteers.
From 1608 to 1976, only 141 firing squad executions or 1% of all executions were carried out of 14,489 total executions. Since 1976, the firing squad has accounted for just 6 of 1,664 (0.4%) executions, according to The Death Penalty Information Center.
Keith Girard has four decades of experience as an award-winning reporter, editor-in-chief, and senior media executive. Keith’s career began in Washington, D.C., where he was a reporter for The Washington Post and a contributing editor for Regardie’s and Washingtonian magazines. He also worked as a writer/producer in CNN’s Washington Bureau and has written non-fiction books on the U.S. Marines in the Gulf War and Donald Trump and two novels, “The Heidelberg Conundrum” and “The Curse of Northam Bay.”