Pete Hegseth announced plans for the Pentagon to broadcast the execution of former US Army major and psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan live, according to an opinion article in The Independent. The article gives December 3 as the scheduled date and quotes Hegseth as saying that the execution will be carried out by a firing squad. The criticism centers on the decision to allow the public to watch an execution, beyond the imposition of the death penalty itself.
Hasan killed 13 colleagues and wounded another 32 at a US military base in Texas in 2009. According to the article, he admitted to the attack, was convicted of murder and attempted murder, and was sentenced to death. The case therefore concerns an already convicted perpetrator, while Hegseth's announcement adds the dimension of publicly broadcasting his execution.
Hegseth presented the opportunity to watch as a way for people to understand the severity of the consequences of such acts. As his statement is reported in the article, he supported both execution by soldiers and its public nature. The columnist counters that this approach turns the execution into entertainment, even when there is a court conviction for a particularly serious crime.
The article places the announcement within the political context of Donald Trump's administration. It notes that the reported execution date falls after the November midterm elections, in which control of the Senate and the House of Representatives is at stake. The connection between the public execution and political messaging is the columnist's interpretation; the text does not present evidence establishing an electoral strategy behind the announcement.
To develop his criticism, the writer draws on satire about “bread and circuses,” referring to Juvenal. He also mentions comedian George Carlin, who in 1996 satirized the idea that the death penalty could be used to distract citizens from inequality. These references serve the article's argument about the political function of spectacle and are not evidence of the administration's intentions.
References to the films Starship Troopers and The Hunger Games play a similar role. The columnist sees parallels with fictional worlds where propaganda combines war, patriotism and punishment with mass entertainment. In particular, he cites a scene in Starship Troopers featuring a televised execution announcement to comment on the planned broadcast. These are cinematic analogies within an opinion piece.
The criticism also extends to other actions the article attributes to Hegseth, such as deadly attacks on alleged drug traffickers aboard boats in the Caribbean and elsewhere. The writer describes these actions as illegal, without citing court rulings or detailed legal evidence in the supplied text. In Hasan's case, he acknowledges the existence of a court conviction but separates that fact from the question of whether the execution should be shown to the public. The central issue he raises is how a state chooses to present the violence it carries out and what place it gives spectacle in the administration of justice.
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