Pete Hegseth degrades the Pentagon with a livestreamed execution
By Maya Ellison · Reporting from Detroit ·
The Pentagon’s reckless order to livestream a military firing squad execution drags our nation into moral decay, weaponizing state violence for political entertainment.
A broadcast of blood and vengeance
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wants the world to watch a man get shot to death. In an October interview aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, Hegseth announced that the upcoming execution of former Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan would be public and livestreamed. Hasan, convicted in the Fort Hood shooting that left 13 people dead, is scheduled to die by firing squad on December 3. But Hegseth, acting Army Secretary Adam Telle, and Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell have decided that quiet justice is not enough. They want a spectacle. They want a digital colosseum.
Let us be entirely clear about what is happening here. This is not about law. It is not about closure for the families who suffered unimaginable loss during the Fort Hood shooting. This is the calculated weaponization of state violence for political theater. It is a top-down decree from civilian leadership that blindsided career military personnel. According to CNN, Army regulations strictly limit execution attendees to the prisoner's family, victim representatives, media pools, and a chaplain. Hegseth's order blows past those guardrails with casual cruelty. It commands uniform-wearing troops to stand in front of an immobile man in a wheelchair and watch him get riddled with bullets on camera.
President Donald Trump and defenders of the Pentagon's plan articulate the strongest opposing case. They argue that the gravity of Hasan’s crimes demands a punishment so absolute and visible that it deters future atrocities and satisfies an unyielding public demand for retribution. "We’re giving a man the death penalty who killed 14 soldiers a couple of years ago. Death penalty through firing squad — and he deserves it," Trump said during a White House event honoring Christopher Columbus. He added that while he was not involved in the livestream decision, he understands it. This argument rests on the seductive, primitive logic that the magnitude of a terrible crime can be balanced only by an equally unbridled display of state power.
Yet this defense collapses under the weight of its own barbarism. Deterrence requires justice, not voyeurism. When the state turns the deliberate killing of a human being into internet content, it abandons the rule of law for the aesthetics of a lynch mob. As one Army officer bluntly told CNN, "It takes away everything America stands for when we do public executions." The last military execution occurred in 1961, and the last military firing squad took place during World War II. Public executions in the United States ended nearly a century ago in 1936. There is a reason those practices were abandoned by a society striving to call itself civilized. They brutalize the watchers just as surely as they destroy the watched.
The moral rot of performative cruelty
We have seen this machinery of degradation before, and we know the profound wreckage it leaves in its wake. This latest stunt invites that same moral rot into our domestic armed forces.
> Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse > During the early stages of the Iraq War, members of the United States Army and the Central Intelligence Agency committed a series of human rights violations and war crimes against detainees in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. These abuses included physical abuse, sexual humiliation, physical and psychological torture, and rape, as well as the killing of Manadel al-Jamadi and the desecration of his body. The abuses came to public attention with the publication of photographs by CBS News in April 2004, causing shock and outrage and receiving widespread condemnation within the United States and internationally.
Just as the Abu Ghraib photographs exposed how institutional sanctioning of abuse corrodes the soul of the military, Hegseth's livestream order forces service members into an untenable moral crisis. Officials are currently evaluating the psychological impacts on the specific unit selected to fire on Hasan. Soldiers are left to wonder if they can legally decline an order that turns them into executioners for a webcam. This shared mechanism — the state using military personnel to perform dehumanizing acts of violence against a prisoner for public or psychological effect — inflicts irreparable moral injury on the troops involved. You cannot ask young men and women in uniform to participate in a televised slaughter without breaking something vital inside them.
The backlash spans borders and ideologies. Pope Leo XIV declared capital punishment "inadmissible," emphasizing that effective systems of detention protect citizens without completely depriving the guilty of the possibility of redemption. Yet an administration drunk on nationalist posturing ignores the moral authority of global leaders and the ethical traditions of human dignity.
Letter writers to the Los Angeles Times warned that broadcasting a state execution lowers the United States to the level of terrorist groups livestreaming beheadings. They raised terrifying questions about whether such spectacles could later be applied to political dissidents under the charge of treason. Vice President JD Vance admitted he did not know if the livestream would actually happen and stated he would not watch it. It is a cowardly evasion from a leader whose own administration set the gears in motion. When the architects of a policy cannot even bring themselves to look at the screen, they confess the moral bankruptcy of their own decree.
A test of our national conscience
The Pentagon may quietly walk back the livestream component under intense internal pressure from uniformed lawyers and commanders. Alternatively, federal courts and military appeals boards will intervene to halt a broadcast that violates evolving standards of decency. But whether the cameras roll or the order is quietly buried in a Pentagon corridor, the intent stands exposed. Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump have revealed a chilling eagerness to trade constitutional guardrails for the cheap applause of the bloodthirsty.
We are a nation built on the promise of equal justice under law. Yet we are being dragged backward into an era where power is measured by the brutality of its display. Students drowning in debt, workers struggling to keep their heads above water, and families watching our public institutions get hollowed out share the same vulnerability. They all face a state that has lost its moral compass. When leaders treat human life as disposable entertainment, they signal that no one's rights are safe from the next authoritarian whim.
We must reject this descent into barbarism with every civic tool we possess. Justice requires accountability, not a livestreamed execution. It demands the preservation of human dignity, not the promotion of a culture of death. If we allow the Department of Defense to turn a firing squad into public theater, we surrender the last remnants of our moral authority. We invite a darkness from which our national conscience may never recover.
Sources
- CNN: Army caught off guard by Hegseth’s order to make firing squad execution public
- NBC News: Pope Leo declares death penalty ‘inadmissible’ as his native U.S. plans to livestream execution
- The Washington Post: What to know about public executions, and why they stopped in the U.S.
- Los Angeles Times: Letters to the Editor: A livestreamed execution? I thought the U.S. was better than this
- Global News: Pope Leo declares death penalty ‘inadmissible’ as his native US plans to livestream execution
- G1 Globo: Papa Leão XIV diz que pena de morte é 'inadmissível' em meio a planos dos EUA de transmitir execução ao vivo