By Jeremy Gordon
Pete Hegseth announced that the execution of former Major Nidal Hasan will be done by firing squad and livestreamed to the public. These kinds of acts are reminiscent of Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.
Hegseth at 2023 Pastor’s Summit hosted by Turning Point Faith. Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
In an interview on Thursday, the U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth dropped a major bombshell. Speaking to the conservative outlet Real America’s Voice aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, Hegseth announced that the United States military plans to, for the first time in its history, hold a livestreamed public execution. The execution will be of former Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. The firing squad execution is scheduled to take place on Dec. 3, 2026.
Hasan is a former Army psychiatrist who, in 2009, used a personal handgun to open fire at the Fort Hood processing center, where troops were preparing for deployment in Afghanistan. During the attack, Hasan was heard shouting “Allahu akbar,” translating to “God is greatest,” before he was shot four times, becoming paralyzed from the waist down, and arrested by civilian security officers. His attack killed 13 people and injured 32 others. It is the deadliest shooting ever at an American military base.
Pete Hegseth, a vocal Christian who has used his tenure as defense secretary to inject more religion into the armed forces, has long championed a harsh punishment for Hasan. His announcement that the military will “make sure people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” represents a departure from all modern norms.
The U.S. military has not performed an execution since 1961. It has not performed one by firing squad since 1945. The last state-sanctioned public execution in the United States was in 1936. That event, which took place in Owensboro, Kentucky, brought about 20,000 people out to witness the hanging of Rainey Bethea, a young Black man convicted of raping an elderly white woman.
These days, public executions are only performed by a handful of countries. Iran routinely carries out executions, performing over 1,600 in 2025, including 11 of them publicly, according to a report by Iran Human Rights and ECPM. North Korea has long used public executions as a means of state control and intimidation, gathering civilian witnesses and sometimes forcing children to watch. Afghanistan, now run by the Taliban, has used sports stadiums as venues for public executions, performing 3 such bloody spectacles in February 2024. Saudi Arabia, which has dramatically increased its number of executions in the last 5 years, has actually stepped away from public ones.
A recorded execution is even rarer, typically reserved for terrorist organizations. The technique was pioneered by al-Qaida in the early 2000s as a tool of psychological warfare. In the 2010s, the Islamic State garnered infamy by filming the beheadings of enemies, hostages and journalists and releasing the videos online. Other terror groups like Boko Haram in West Africa and al-Shabaab in East Africa have also experimented with the technique.
In a statement on Hegseth’s plan, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights at the United Nations declared that, “The livestreaming of an execution is tantamount to a public execution and would breach the absolute prohibition of torture.” They have made similar statements about such events in Afghanistan and Iran in the recent past. If the U.S. goes through with this on December 3, the country will be joining a small, largely ostracized and notably harsh category of nations and terror organizations. It will be one more step in the shocking reimagining of the United States of America.
Jeremy Gordon
Jeremy is a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University studying Creative Writing. He graduated from the University of Maryland with a bachelor's in Criminology and Criminal Justice and worked for four years as an Investigative Specialist with the Public Defender Service for DC.