Pentagon (GNP): The United States will livestream the army’s firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the gunman who killed 13 people at the Fort Hood military base in 2009, the Pentagon has said. It would be an unprecedented broadcast of a US execution.
Hasan, a former army psychiatrist, is set to become the first person executed by firing squad by the US military since 1945. The execution is scheduled for December 3 at the same sprawling Texas base where he opened fire with a laser-sighted handgun in a medical facility.
Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, who championed the push for a firing squad, confirmed the livestream plans in a post on X. He said the date and time were chosen to match the approximate day, hour and location of the 2009 shooting, a Thursday at 1pm. He also argued that the public must see the consequences of such crimes.
Under US military law, a president must approve an execution by firing squad. The Pentagon said on Monday that President Donald Trump gave that approval on Hegseth’s recommendation. The White House declined to say whether Trump supports the livestream and referred questions to the Pentagon.
The case itself dates back more than a decade. A military jury sentenced Hasan to death in August 2013 after finding him guilty of 45 counts of premeditated murder and attempted premeditated murder. The shooting came weeks before the 56-year-old was due to deploy to Afghanistan. He was left partially paralysed and confined to a wheelchair after police shot him during his arrest.
The livestream is what makes the plan stand out. Media organisations have tried to televise US executions in the past but were blocked by the courts, and experts say no other country is known to televise or livestream a legal execution. Public executions have become exceedingly rare worldwide, with Iran and Taliban-run Afghanistan among the countries known to carry them out in recent years. Death penalty experts say the last legally sanctioned public execution in the US took place in 1936.
The announcement also lands amid heightened debate over capital punishment. Last week in Tennessee, prison personnel botched a lethal injection attempt on death-row inmate Christa Pike, leaving her alive but hospitalised. Her lawyers said on Wednesday that she awoke angry and confused, and remains very sick and shackled to her hospital bed.
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Difficulties in obtaining lethal injection drugs are one reason the Trump administration recently expanded the federal options for the gravest crimes. Firing squads now sit alongside electrocution and gas asphyxiation. At least five states already have firing squads on the books, and South Carolina carried out the first such execution in the US in 15 years in 2025.
Death Penalty Action, which opposes capital punishment, said Hasan’s would be the first military execution since 1961. The Death Penalty Information Centre says that execution was carried out by hanging, and that the last known US military firing squad executions were in 1945.
Legal questions remain open. Eugene Fidell, a military law expert who lectures at Yale Law School, said Hasan would need to sue in federal court to block a public display of his death, and that the Supreme Court has never addressed the question. He said, “It would be extremely, extremely strange”.
Managing Editor at Global News Pakistan (GNP), with a Bachelor's degree in International Relations from Riphah International University, graduated with a Gold Medal. Reach out at sabahtareengnp@gmail.com
