By Jeffrey Blehar
Friday, October 09, 2026
On November 5, 2009, doctor and U.S. Army Major Nidal
Malik Hasan murdered 13 people — twelve U.S. soldiers and one civilian — while
wounding 30 others at Fort Hood Army base near Killeen, Texas. It remains one
of the deadliest Islamist terror attacks in the United States since 9/11. He
was sentenced to death by a military jury in August of 2013 and has been
rotting in a cell at Fort Leavenworth ever since, playing out the string as he
exhausted his appeals.
Few men deserve death more richly. The world is full of
skeptics about the religious and ethical appropriateness of the death penalty;
I have never been one of them. Quite simply, I think there are acts a man or
woman can commit that render them unworthy of life in society’s eyes, and
slaughtering 13 people and wounding 30 others — all while betraying your oath
to your country and your military brethren — amply qualifies. In fact, 13 years
is an appallingly long time for the survivors and families of the victims to
have to wait through the law’s delay, but procedure must be observed.
Hasan’s final appeal was finally exhausted on October 3,
as expected. And then Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth put on his Bad Idea
jeans and made a rather unexpected public announcement on Thursday:
Not only would Hasan’s execution by firing squad (standard for military
justice) proceed as planned on December 3, Hegseth promised it would be live-streamed
to the American public, so that the whole world could savor the event.
Even Vice President Vance tossed a caution flag on that one, saying today that it was
the first he’d heard of such plans and generally pouring cold water on the
idea. (“I’m not going to be watching.”) Other Trump allies in Congress were
more taken aback, as well they might be at the idea of not only holding
America’s first public execution in 90 years, but digitally broadcasting it to
literally the entire world.
Senator John L. Kennedy of Louisiana expressed a
queasiness with the idea that has spoken for most of his elected Republican
colleagues since Hegseth made his announcement: “If it were me, I wouldn’t
televise it or publicize it or whatever they’re doing,” Kennedy said today. “I
just think it makes — it makes our society coarser, and I wouldn’t do it. But
there are arguments, you know, on both sides.”
In fact, there are actually very few arguments in favor
of holding a public execution, much less televising one. (Inarticulate
bloodthirst, and the need of the masses for public “entertainment,” are not
reasons.) Perhaps the secretary of defense thinks that reviving the tradition —
and indeed expanding it — makes for a sparkling display of America’s revived
warrior thumos. More likely, I suspect that if such things were to
become common again, we would find ourselves one further step down the path to
the re-barbarization of our society and cultural sensibilities. That was
Senator Kennedy’s point, and it deserves examination.
American society has never been “too delicate” for public
executions. In fact, quite the opposite: We are quintessential rubberneckers.
The last public execution in America — of a man convicted of
rape, not murder — was held in Kentucky in 1936, and the reason it was the last
is because it attracted 20,000 onlookers, ruffians, and drunks eager to watch a
man die: behavior from an overly giddy crowd so disgraceful that the Kentucky
legislature repealed the law in its next session.
Things have changed less about human nature since then
than you might think. Our darker social impulses have only retreated further
inward. We live in a world where many corners of the internet — and not even
all of them political, many simply nihilist — have been thrilling for over a
year to the bloody video of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Nidal Hasan is surely
no moral comparison, but anyone who thinks it a good idea to broadcast the
man’s execution probably rented Faces of Death from the local Video
Village one too many times as an adolescent.
And, of course, there is one final consideration that
trumps all others: Nidal Hasan has spent the last 13 years of his life sitting
in a wheelchair, devastated that he failed in his final appointed task in life
— to die as a glorious martyr for the cause of radical Islam. What kind of
rock-headed fool would give him that public honor now?
Whatever message Pete Hegseth believes himself to be
sending by having the entire world watch Hasan die — most of the world already
understands “terrorist are evil, and we kill them” — I can guarantee you the
Islamist world will interpret it very differently. Why give Hasan the victory
he so eagerly craves by turning him into a public martyr for our enemies to
fixate upon? Death is supposed to be a penalty, not a reward.
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