What a bunch of freaking phonies! The generals who brought you drone bombing footage to your nightly newscasts fired off a letter blasting Department of War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to livestream the execution of an Islamist terrorist 17 years after his murderous rampage at the U.S. Army installation at Fort Hood. President Donald Trump has since reversed the plan.
The group of 72 self-righteous retired U.S. generals, admirals, and other high-ranking military officers audaciously argue that covering Nidal Hasan’s death by firing squad would transform a “solemn and grave punishment” into “a carnival for the enjoyment of voyeurs and spectators.”
The anti-livestreaming sentiment military officials are peddling — and the media are promoting — is rich considering the parts those parties played in such death films as A Yemen Wedding and 12 Funerals and Drones Over Kabul.
“This type of exploitative broadcasting — that debases human dignity — will taint the honor of the military that employs it, and a nation that allows it,” the former military brass insist.
Shut up, you insufferable mutts. How many thousands of guilty and innocent men, women, and children bombed into human pulp have these masters of war ordered filmed?
And the sanctimonious corporate media players that have piled on in their distaste for very public executions have giddily and gratuitously hit play on coverage of the carnage.
Remember the Obama administration drone attack that, we’re told, was targeting an al-Qaida militant. Turns out what the bombs hit was a Yemeni wedding, killing 12 and injuring 14 others. NBC News in January 2014 proudly announced it had “obtained exclusive videos and photos taken in the aftermath of the strike.”
“The graphic images show the scorched bodies of young men who villagers say were part of a convoy on their way to the wedding celebration when they were killed in their pickups by two Hellfire missiles fired by a U.S. drone,” NBC News reported at the time.
And show them they did. Was it to expose the horrors of war and a bungling administration overmatched in its pursuit of terrorists? Perhaps. But NBC News, like its brethren in the video press, has long indulged deeply in morbid pornography.
As Don Henley said, “It’s interesting when people die.”
And generals who have fed the fever with endless wars have little standing in this matter.
Department of Justice weaponizer Eric Holder also has no standing on the execution of the terrorist. But there was bloviating anyway. The former attorney general called the livestream proposal “a disgrace.” As they say, it takes a disgrace to know a disgrace.
Wasn’t Holder the AG for the same president, Barack Obama, whose administration couldn’t even classify Hasan’s terrorist attack on a U.S. military installation as a terrorist attack on a U.S. military installation? He was. Fearing being labeled as Islamophobic, Barack Hussein Obama’s Pentagon listed the “incident” as “workplace violence.” This despite the fact that the terrorist screamed “Allahu Akbar” as he began systematically shooting dozens of his U.S. military comrades at the Texas military installation in central Texas. Hasan admitted in court that he murdered and maimed to defend the Taliban from the United States.
Categorizing the mass shooting as workplace violence denied the victims and their families the financial benefits they were entitled to.
I agree with the vast majority of Americans who believe live streaming Hasan’s execution would be gratuitous and would only serve to create more Islamist maniacs bucking for martyrdom. These freak shows truly believe 72 virgins await them after the bullet hits the brain or the bomb blows them and innocents to smithereens.
We don’t need any more of that.
We also don’t need Trump-hating members of the military-industrial complex and their promoters of war porn to lecture us on “exploitative broadcasting.”
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.