The Trump administration has been condemned for planning to livestream a firing squad execution of a gunman who killed 13 people at the Fort Hood military base in Texas in 2009.
The Pentagon announced earlier this week it would execute former US Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan in the first military execution in more than 60 years.
The UN human rights office said livestreaming the execution would be “tantamount to a public execution and would breach the absolute prohibition of torture”.
US defence secretary Pete Hegseth said the firing squad will carry out the sentence at Fort Hood, Texas, at 1pm on Thursday, December 3rd. This would be the first US military execution in more than 60 years.
RM Block
“It was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks, and so he’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be, and we’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said.
Jack Reed, the Senate armed services committee ranking member, condemned the Pentagon’s decision to broadcast the shooting.
Reed, a Democrat, called the decision “a barbaric spectacle”, adding: “This is yet another stunt by secretary Hegseth to distract from his tenure’s repeated failings which have only weakened our national security and standing in the world.”
[ The Irish Times view on US executions: a barbaric practiceOpens in new window ]
Reed called on US president Donald Trump to “reconsider this abhorrent move” and said that a livestream would be a “gift to anti-American terrorist recruiters”.
At the White House on Friday, Trump said he “absolutely” approved of the execution of Hasan but said he had not made a determination on showing the death via livestream.
Trump said that Hasan deserves the death penalty by firing squad, calling him “a maniac”, but has not said whether he thinks the event should be shown on a livestream.
A senior White House official familiar with the matter said that Trump “doesn’t oppose the idea” of a livestream of the execution, but that his position is not yet final and he could change his mind.
US vice-president JD Vance said on Friday he does not know whether the Pentagon will proceed with a livestream of the execution.
“I don’t know that that’s actually going to happen,” Vance told reporters in Cincinnati, referring to the livestream. He added that if a livestream does go ahead, “I’m not going to be watching it”.
Hasan opened fire at a medical processing centre on the Texas base on November 5th, 2009, killing 13 people and wounding dozens more. A military jury sentenced him to death in 2013, and he has been held at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas ever since. He exhausted his appeals last year, which cleared the way for Trump to approve the sentence this week on a recommendation from Hegseth.
Investigators had found that Hasan had exchanged 18 emails with Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric who was subsequently killed in a US drone strike, in the months before the attack. At his court martial, Hasan said he had acted to stop American soldiers from deploying to Afghanistan to kill fellow Muslims, before his own impending deployment.
A review led by William Webster, a former FBI director, concluded that the bureau should have investigated his correspondence more thoroughly.
In his interview, Hegseth said Barack Obama had called the attack “workplace violence”. The Pentagon initially treated the shooting as a workplace-violence incident rather than a terrorist attack, a classification that affected the victims’ eligibility for Purple Hearts and other combat-related benefits.
But there is no record of Obama himself using the phrase. At a memorial days after the attack, he instead described the victims as Americans who had been unable to escape “the horror of war”, while calling the shooting a tragedy and saying the killer would face justice.
The last known case of a military firing squad in the US was in November 1945, but the Trump administration has sought to bring it back in Trump’s second term to expedite capital punishment cases. Five US states allow for firing squads: Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah.
Amnesty International’s most recent annual review lists Afghanistan, China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen among the countries that still use firing squads.
Asked whether Hasan had made a final request or reached out to Trump, Hegseth replied: “Don’t care. We’ll see him on December 3rd.”
– Guardian; additional reporting: Reuters
