Public Execution of Nidal Hasan to Be Livestreamed, Says Defense Secretary

Well, bless their hearts, the usual crowd is upset again, and this time it’s over something most Americans figured was common sense about a decade and a half ago. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced this week that Nidal Hasan, the Army major who walked into a readiness center at Fort Hood in 2009 and murdered 12 soldiers and one civilian, will finally face a firing squad. December 3, at Fort Hood, on a Thursday at one o’clock in the afternoon. The same day, the same hour, he opened fire on unarmed people. And yes, the Pentagon says it will be livestreamed so the public can actually see it happen.

Now watch the fancy papers faint onto their fainting couches.

Here’s what I know, and what you know too, whether the experts have gotten around to admitting it: Hasan was an Army psychiatrist, a man this country trained and paid and trusted, and he stood on a podium in 2009 and shouted that we needed to rise up against our own troops. Then he did it himself. Thirteen dead. More than thirty wounded. And what did the official paperwork call it for years? “Workplace violence.” I’d laugh if it weren’t so insulting. A man says why he did it, out loud, in open court, and some committee somewhere still needed a second opinion on the motive.

Sgt. Jason R. Krawczyk (Public domain) via Wikimedia Commons

That’s the part that ought to make you mad. Not the firing squad. The seventeen years of paperwork between the crime and the consequence. Hasan has been sitting on death row since 2013 while the system that couldn’t bring itself to name his crime dutifully processed appeal after appeal. President Trump approved the firing squad, and Hegseth explained the reasoning plainly: “People need to understand that there are serious consequences for these types of things.” Imagine needing a Cabinet secretary to say that out loud. Consequences for murder. What a novel concept.

Of course the livestream is what has everybody in Washington’s opinion pages reaching for their smelling salts. Public executions, they gasp, are beneath a civilized nation. Well, hon, where was all this civilization when Hasan’s victims were carrying him out on stretchers? Where was the concern for the families who have waited through seventeen holiday seasons for the sentence to mean something? I have questions for the manager, and the manager keeps sending me a press release about our “values.”

This would be the military’s first execution since 1961. Sixty-five years. In that time we’ve managed to put a man on the moon, invent the smartphone, and define “woman” into a six-week committee hearing, but executing a mass murderer who was convicted by a full military court? Took us more than half a century. That’s not caution. That’s a system that forgot what it’s for.

Oğuzhan ÖZDEMİR / Pexels

Hegseth said it plainly: it was a radical Islamist attack in uniform, inside the ranks, and it’s going to be soldiers with rifles carrying out the sentence. As it should be. The people Hasan betrayed are the ones who will see justice done. There’s a rightness to that you can feel in your bones, no committee required.

So yes, I’ll say it. Thirteen people didn’t get to watch the sun come up on November 6, 2009. The least the rest of us can do is witness what their killer finally earned. If that makes the elites squeamish, they’re welcome to look away. The families of the fallen never got that option.