It’s ‘what jihadists do’: Plan to livestream U.S. military firing squad execution draws criticism

U.S. Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan opened fire at the Fort Hood Soldier Readiness Center in Killeen, Texas, killing 13 and wounding 32 on Nov. 5, 2009. Photo by Handout/AFP/GettyImages

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Condemnation of U.S. plans for a public execution by military firing squad escalated Friday, as Vice President JD Vance cast doubt on whether it would be livestreamed as proposed and insisted he would not watch if it is.

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Nidal Hasan’s execution — scheduled for December 3 at Fort Hood, Texas, where he gunned down 13 people in 2009 — is set to be the first by U.S. military firing squad since 1945.

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Asked about the planned livestream, Vance told journalists he does not “know that that’s actually going to happen.”

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“This is a guy who committed, in my view, the worst terrorist attack on American soil outside of 9/11,” Vance said, but added that if the execution is broadcast live, “I’m not going to be watching it.”

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Representative Austin Scott of President Donald Trump’s Republican Party said he supported executing Hasan but “livestreaming executions is what jihadists do. America is better than that.”

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Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Hasan should “face justice” but that public executions are “the kind of thing Iran and the Taliban do. Is this who we want to be associated with?”

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A Pentagon official told AFP on Thursday that the execution would be streamed live, after U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said “we’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public.”

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But Trump on Friday contradicted Hegseth’s confirmation, and said there has been no decision yet on whether to publicly broadcast the execution, which he supports.

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“They are making a determination about that, but he will be killed,” Trump said. “I really don’t care how he goes, as long as he goes.”

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Tech firms YouTube, Meta and X did not immediately respond to requests for comment on whether they would allow the execution to be streamed on their platforms.

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TikTok directed AFP to its policy banning depictions of “graphic incidents and violence” including “the shooting of an individual.”

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The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights condemned the move, saying in a message sent to AFP on Friday that “the livestreaming of an execution is tantamount to a public execution and would breach the absolute prohibition of torture.”

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Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said it was a “barbaric promotion of a culture of death and must be reconsidered.”

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Hegseth said it would be the military’s first firing squad execution since the Second World War.

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“People need to understand that…there’s serious consequence for these types of things,” Hegseth said in a video shared Thursday on official Pentagon X accounts.