Pete Hegseth wants to livestream the execution of Maj Nidal Hasan, the army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009. If he follows through, the United States will join a list currently occupied by Iran and Taliban-governed Afghanistan — the only two countries that systematically carry out public executions. The scheduled date is 3 December, though federal court appeals could delay it for years. The proposal is not merely logistical. Hegseth has specified the execution will occur at the same time and place as Hasan's attack, using firearms — mirroring the original crime. This is choreography, not justice administration. It tracks directly with the spectacle-execution playbook used by ISIS, which videotaped thousands of killings between 2014 and 2019 to terrorize enemies and recruit supporters. Hamas livestreamed executions on Facebook in 2017 for similar reasons. The global context is stark. Amnesty International recorded 2,707 executions worldwide in 2025 — the highest since 1981 — driven overwhelmingly by Iran's 2,100-plus killings. The organization explicitly connected the surge to governments placing the death penalty "at the centre of flawed public security and 'tough on crime' narratives to assert control, project state power and score political points." That framing applies without modification to Hegseth's stated rationale. Historians and legal scholars identify two functions of public execution: convincing populations that criminals will be punished (legitimacy signaling where rule of law is weak), and terrorizing populations into compliance. Neither function is one a functioning democracy should need. Saudi Arabia — not historically squeamish about state violence — appears to have abandoned public beheadings. The US ended the practice in the 1930s. The last adjacent case in the US was Timothy McVeigh's 2001 execution by lethal injection, where some victims' relatives were permitted to watch. That was a closed viewing, not a broadcast. The distance between a controlled witness room and a livestream is the distance between accountability and spectacle. Hegseth holds the authority to decide the manner of military executions, but that authority has never been exercised this way. The legal terrain is uncharted — Hasan retains access to the civilian federal court system for appeals, meaning the spectacle may be announced long before it can actually occur. The announcement itself, however, performs its own function: signaling a willingness to deploy state violence as public entertainment. The 20-year trajectory here is not about one execution. It is about whether the normalization of state-administered spectacle violence migrates from military jurisdiction into the broader criminal justice system, and whether livestreaming creates a feedback loop where public appetite for visible punishment drives policy rather than the reverse.
