Live execution: U.S. state violence as spectacle, Pentagon overreach, and the collision with the "absolute prohibition on torture"

The Pentagon announced this week that Nidal Hasan, the perpetrator of the 2009 Fort Hood attack, would be executed by firing squad, with the execution planned to be broadcast live to the public. According to BBC reporting, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gave the reason as "people need to understand that there's serious consequences for these types of things." Should it proceed, this would be the first U.S. military firing-squad execution in over 60 years.

In 2009, Hasan, then a U.S. Army major and deployed psychiatrist, opened fire on unarmed soldiers at the Fort Hood military base in Texas, killing 13 and wounding 32. The BBC, citing Vice President Vance, described it as "the worst terror attack on American soil since 9/11." Convicting a man who had treated soldiers for psychological trauma as the perpetrator of a mass shooting already required the full machinery of judicial and military justice; but the Pentagon's decision to add the variable of "broadcasting live to the public" at the execution stage effectively pushes state violence out of a closed judicial process and onto the stage of mass communication.

Around the live-broadcast decision, a rare bipartisan backlash has emerged across the U.S. political spectrum. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy told CNN that the idea was "sickening" and reminiscent of "Islamic State-style executions." Republican Representative Austin Scott of Georgia, while "absolutely" supporting the death penalty, likewise warned that broadcasting an execution live was "something jihadists do — not something America should do." Former national security adviser John Bolton, speaking on BBC Radio 4, said bluntly that Hegseth's move amounted to "I just think this is a mark by Secretary Hegseth doing something he thinks will please President Trump," calling it "really not appropriate" for a defense secretary. Republican Senator John Curtis of Utah, invoking Rome's history of "carnage as spectacle" corroding its audiences, warned that public executions "cultivate a recreational appetite for execution that erodes civilization," and that "what the victims deserve is justice carried out with dignity; broadcasting someone's death only diminishes us and does not serve as an effective deterrent."

International-level opposition has been equally swift and has reached a deeper legal-strategic plane. The United Nations human rights office told Agence France-Presse that a live broadcast "would amount to a public execution and would violate the absolute prohibition on torture." The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement expressing "shock and deep sorrow" at the decision and condemning it.

An obvious fissure has also opened between the White House and the Pentagon in their public messaging. According to BBC reporting, when Trump was leaving the White House and was asked by reporters about the possibility that the footage could be used as propaganda by terrorist organizations, he called Hasan "totally crazy" and stated, "I really don't care how he goes, as long as he goes, and I think that the death penalty is a very worthy way of going for him," while saying he had "absolutely" approved the live-broadcast plan, only to then add that the Pentagon was still "making the decision." Hours earlier, Vice President Vance had already voiced doubts about the plan's feasibility to reporters: "I don't know that that's actually going to happen," and made clear that, if it were live, he "would not watch." When the BBC asked the Pentagon for details on the broadcast decision, the Department of Defense declined to comment further.

A more practical obstacle comes at the platform level. The BBC, after sorting through the issues, pointed out that all major social media platforms on which the U.S. government maintains accounts have bans on violent imagery: Meta explicitly prohibits any livestream of executions; YouTube bans "violent or gory content intended to shock or disgust viewers"; TikTok likewise prohibits footage including "the moment of death of an individual" and "shooting of a person" — although both YouTube and TikTok retain "public interest" exceptions, a TikTok spokesperson told the BBC: "Regardless, I'd ask you to refer back to the position reflected in the 'not allowed' section."

Turning a person's death into a spectacle pushed onto public screens — no matter how grave the offense — does not touch merely the execution method of an individual case, but the boundary between state violence and fundamental human rights. When the United Nations invokes the phrase "absolute prohibition," the substantive weight of that boundary becomes apparent: it is not a policy option that can be weighed away by "deterrent effect" or "political necessity."