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

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.

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?)

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.

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.)

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.

“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.”

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.)

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.”

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

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.

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

“It would taint the honor of the military that employs it, and a nation that allows it,” the letter read.

Vice-President JD Vance’s discomfort with the idea was palpable, though he only went so far as to say he wasn’t sure it would end up happening and that he absolutely would not be watching.

As illustrated above, there are defensible arguments for supporting (or not opposing) the death penalty while not supporting its broadcasting. They strike me as particularly relevant to executions of terrorists like Hasan, which may serve to inspire other terrorists.

But I don’t think Trump would have hesitated to intervene in a similar death sentence in a less charged case if it suited him, and I can’t see the arguments against it being much different.

As I understand it, the U.S. in theory executes people for general society’s supposed benefit and that of the victims’ families (not that all victims’ families support capital punishment). It’s supposed to provide ultimate retribution, ultimate public protection and ultimate deterrence.

On the “martyr” issue, MacFarland made an interesting comparison to the leaked photos of prisoner abuse in Iraq by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib: “How many insurgents were inspired to attack our troops (because of them)?”

But should Americans concerned with all this wish those photos had never emerged, all these years later, revealing the truth about what really went on at Abu Ghraib? I can’t see how.

I also fundamentally can’t wrestle my mind past this contradiction: Executing people isn’t barbaric, but showing people being executed would be barbaric? Isn’t justice supposed to be visible as a fundamental principle? That’s why courtrooms (and indeed court-martials) are open by default. It’s why many states mandate that “regular people,” as well as a pool of reporters, attend executions: to bear witness. But the broader public can’t be trusted with witnessing it, somehow.

It’s certainly not the only contradiction in the U.S. execution system. On Sept. 30, Tennessee tried twice and failed twice to execute convicted murderer Christa Pike via lethal injection. They gave up, took her to hospital, and soon enough she was walking and talking, and then she was discharged and is back on death row. Presumably at one point the state will try again.

So why didn’t they just smother her with a pillow on the gurney when the drugs didn’t work? Oh no, that would be uncivilized. Killing people must be clean, clinical, unseen.

National Post
cselley@postmedia.com