Outrage over plan to livestream US military firing squad execution

WASHINGTON: Condemnation of US plans for a public execution by military firing squad escalated on Friday, as Vice President JD Vance cast doubt on whether it would be livestreamed as proposed and insisted he would not watch if it was.

Nidal Hasan's execution — scheduled for December 3 at Fort Hood, Texas, where he gunned down 13 people in 2009 — is set to be the first by US military firing squad since 1945.

Asked about the planned livestream, Vance told journalists he did not "know that that's actually going to happen".

"This is a guy who committed, in my view, the worst terrorist attack on American soil outside of 9/11," Vance said, but added that if the execution was broadcast live, "I'm not going to be watching it".

Representative Austin Scott of President Donald Trump's Republican Party said he supported executing Hasan but that "livestreaming executions is what jihadists do. America is better than that".

Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Hasan should "face justice" but that public executions were "the kind of thing Iran and the Taliban do. Is this who we want to be associated with?"

A Pentagon official told AFP on Thursday that the execution would be streamed live, after US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said "we'll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it's public".

But Trump on Friday contradicted Hegseth's confirmation and said no decision had yet been made on whether to publicly broadcast the execution, which he supports.

"They are making a determination about that, but he will be killed," Trump said. "I really don't care how he goes, as long as he goes."

Tech firms YouTube, Meta and X did not immediately respond to requests for comment on whether they would allow the execution to be streamed on their platforms.

TikTok directed AFP to its policy banning depictions of "graphic incidents and violence", including "the shooting of an individual".

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights condemned the move, saying in a message sent to AFP on Friday that "the livestreaming of an execution is tantamount to a public execution and would breach the absolute prohibition of torture".

Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, said it was a "barbaric promotion of a culture of death and must be reconsidered".

'Compound the cruelty'

Hegseth said it would be the military's first firing squad execution since World War II.

"People need to understand that...there's serious consequence for these types of things," Hegseth said in a video shared on Thursday on official Pentagon X accounts.

The last US military execution was carried out in 1961, when John Bennett was hanged for rape and attempted murder.

The Death Penalty Information Center says 135 troops have been executed by the US military since 1916.

According to rights group Amnesty International, at least 17 public executions are known to have been carried out in 2025 — six in Afghanistan and 11 in Iran.

Amnesty's Justin Mazzola said on Friday that the death penalty was "a violation of human rights" and that streaming Hasan's execution "would only compound the cruelty".

Twelve of the 13 people Hasan killed and 30 of those he wounded were soldiers. He was shot by a civilian police officer who responded to the attack and is paralysed from the waist down.

Hasan chose to conduct his own defence during the trial but called no witnesses, gave no testimony and made no attempt to deny the charges.

He was sentenced to death by a military jury in 2013.

Court-appointed defence attorneys expressed concern that he was seeking execution.

The court that convicted Hasan was told he opposed the US military's occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and had spoken online with an alleged Al-Qaeda figure, radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who was subsequently killed in a US drone strike in Yemen.