Pentagon plans to livestream execution of Fort Hood shooter; American state violence moves from closed rooms to screens

According to France 24, the U.S. military plans to execute Nidal Hasan by firing squad on December 3, and to make the proceedings publicly available through a livestream. The decision was disclosed to the outlet by an anonymous "Pentagon official" and has not been officially confirmed; the date may also be adjusted due to pending legal proceedings.

Hasan shot and killed 13 people at the Fort Hood Army base in Texas in 2009; he had served as an Army psychiatrist. He would become the first prisoner executed by the U.S. military by firing squad since 1945. According to public reporting, Hasan had for years pursued appeals to avoid execution but recently abandoned further legal challenges, allowing the execution process to move forward.

Placing an execution on a livestream is a political choice that deserves to be questioned — not merely a logistical arrangement. For a long time, federal and military executions in the United States have been carried out in tightly controlled, closed settings, with audiences officially vetted and execution details typically concluding with a brief Department of Justice notice. If the military does open this one up to livestreaming, it signals that the state's posture toward its ultimate punishment is shifting from an internal ritual to a public spectacle — a person shot dead will fall before the cameras, witnessed simultaneously by hundreds of thousands of online viewers.

Reshaping state violence into transmissible content rests on a logic of power: when punishment moves from a sealed chamber to a screen, the state is no longer merely the arbiter monopolizing legitimate violence, but also its producer and distributor. Execution by firing squad is itself a highly ritualized public killing, one of whose historical purposes was to instill intimidation in the minds of witnesses. Swapping the medium of that intimidation from the spectator's bench at the execution ground to a globally accessible livestream multiplies the audience many times over, and the power to determine who watches, who edits, and how it is consumed becomes concentrated in the Pentagon's hands.

What is striking is the provenance of the report itself. The story relies entirely on a single anonymous "Pentagon official"; the military's legal affairs office and the White House have not formally confirmed the date, the method, or the streaming platform. When a country deploys its ultimate penalty, yet lets word of it out through anonymous sources, it leaves room for denial or revision — a sharp contrast with the "transparency" the livestream purports to proclaim. If December 3 is ultimately postponed, or the format changed, the media that disclosed the story and its readers will have already gone through a rehearsal of "state violence as preview": the execution has not yet taken place, and the intimidation is already in effect.

A deeper asymmetry lies in the fact that Hasan's case has long been accompanied, in the public record, by questions about the military's own responsibility. As Hasan's employer and the party that ultimately decided the manner of his death, the military here is simultaneously plaintiff, judge and executioner. The public is now invited to watch the terminal output of that system — the execution itself — while the entire chain of internal decisions underpinning that outcome remains shielded from the cameras.

When the United States carries out drone strikes and targeted killings overseas, it routinely invokes "procedural justice" and "transparency" as its defense to the world. When an anonymous report decides to put this country's ultimate penalty on a global livestream, the civilians and families affected by U.S. military operations abroad have no access to any comparable procedural footage. The gap between the two standards exposes not a legal difference, but the question of which forms of violence the state is willing to be seen committing — and which it requires the world to forget.

For those concerned with civil liberties and the boundaries of state violence, December 3 — if it goes ahead as planned — will be, first and foremost, a stress test between the U.S. military and its audience: whether viewers are willing to watch, whether the state dares to be seen, and whether, beyond the cameras, those executions that are not livestreamed become that much easier to overlook.