Chris Selley: The unpleasant logic of live-streaming Nidal Hasan’s execution

Nidal Hasan at Bell County Jail in Belton, Texas, in April 2010. Photo by Handout/BELL COUNTY SHERIFFS DEPARTMENT

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The firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the former army psychiatrist who murdered 13 people at the Fort Hood military base in Texas in 2009, won’t be streamed live online Dec. 3 as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had earlier announced.

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Trump stood by the original decision, but conceded “many very good and well-meaning people would rather not watch him die,” Trump wrote on social media. (Who said they had to watch it?)

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It’s always somewhat off-putting to see Trump make a 100 per cent logical political decision, apparently having heeded advice from lesser human specimens. You almost wonder if he did it by accident, because he usually seems nowadays as if he’s given up.

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The idea of public executions is very unpopular among Americans, according to a Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll released this week: two-thirds of Republican voters and just over half of MAGA-Republican voters thought it a bad idea. (Those results are pretty much identical to what polls found 25 years ago during a similar debate over whether to televise Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh’s execution — and in that case, it was actually McVeigh’s idea to broadcast it.)

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Republicans and retired senior military figures weren’t shy with their criticisms about live-streaming the killing of Hasan, who was rendered paraplegic in his shootout with police.

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“A civilization erodes when it cultivates an appetite for executions as a form of entertainment,” Utah Republican Senator John Curtis said. “The victims deserve justice administered with solemnity.”

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House Speaker Mike Johnson warned the broadcast could become a “recruiting tool for terrorists.” (Hasan characterized his mass murder of his fellow American soldiers as a religious jihad.)

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Retired three-star Army lieutenant-general Sean MacFarland was commander at Fort Hood at the time of the massacre. He actually had to approve Hasan’s execution. But in a recent LinkedIn post, he argued a public execution was a “terrible idea.”

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“Shooting a hole in the chest of a wheelchair bound paraplegic on live tv will not be a good look for America,” he warned.

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It would surrender “a piece of the moral high ground we have held up to now in our campaigns against Al Qaeda and ISIS by adopting their barbaric practice of video-recording the executions of their prisoners… Worst of all, it will make Nidal Hasan an international martyr,” MacFarland wrote.

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A letter signed by dozens of senior retired military officers warned streaming the event would “ensure that Hasan becomes a martyr.”