Well, well. Pete Hegseth wanted to put the firing squad on the internet, and for about 24 hours the Pentagon was actually going to do it. Then Trump posted the obvious on Truth Social: no stream. Hasan dies December 3 at Fort Hood, 1 p.m. Central, same as scheduled, but the cameras stay off. “He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed,” the president wrote, and that was that.
Now the usual crowd is treating this like some great moral crisis was averted. The experts wrung their hands that footage of a mass murderer meeting justice would become a “recruiting tool.” Notice how that logic only ever runs one direction. Hollywood can pump out a thousand slow-motion cop-killers and that’s art. But show the American people the consequence of treason, and suddenly it’s too dangerous for your eyes. The elites trust you to watch whatever filth they’re selling, just not this.
And let’s be honest about who Hasan is, because the media keeps soft-pedaling it. A former Army major, a psychiatrist no less, walked into a medical processing building at Fort Hood on November 5, 2009, shouted “Allahu akbar,” and shot 13 people dead and wounded 32 more. Soldiers getting ready to deploy. He represented himself at his own court-martial because even his lawyers couldn’t stomach the job, and he told the court he did it for the “leadership of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the Taliban.” Traitor is not my word. It’s the mildest word that fits.
Here’s the part the papers bury on paragraph nine. The FBI had this man’s emails to Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical cleric, intercepted before the attack. Read them. Knew about them. And the geniuses in the Obama-era security apparatus looked at an Army officer corresponding with a terrorist preacher and concluded, eh, nothing to see here. Trump called it out by name in his post, and good. Thirteen dead Americans, and the same class of people who lecture you about “our democracy” every election season couldn’t be bothered to flag the one guy literally writing to the enemy. But sure, keep telling me the experts deserve more trust, not less.
Was the livestream a good idea? I’ll say this for Hegseth: the instinct wasn’t wrong. The last military execution in this country was 1961, when they hanged a private named John Bennett, and since then the machinery of justice has rusted in a warehouse somewhere while lawyers bill by the decade. Hasan has been sitting on death row for over a decade, paralyzed from the waist down courtesy of the return fire, filing papers. Deterrence stopped working the moment consequences became optional. Trump’s reasoning was fair, though: many good people would rather not watch a man die on a screen, and the families of the 13 deserve to see justice done in person, not share it with the whole internet. “They deserve to witness JUSTICE!” he wrote. Hard to argue with that.
Of course the lawyers aren’t done. Word is Hasan can still file a habeas petition in civilian court, and the experts say that could push this thing off for years. So the one man who confessed, in open court, in his own voice, gets another run through the procedural maze. The little guy who worked his whole life pays every fee on time and follows every rule, and the traitor gets a fourth decade of appeals. You connect the dots on who that system was built to serve. I know what I think.
December 3. Fort Hood. Firing squad. First one in 65 years. No cameras, no spectacle, just the sentence finally catching up to the crime. The swamp will call it barbaric. The families of the 13 will call it overdue. I know whose side I’m on.