Forum

May I ask you an honest question? If the Patriot Command Center membership agrees, and if I'm allowed by law, should I post the live execution here on our site?

Here is the update. The debate is heating up. The planned livestream of Nidal Hasan’s December 3 firing-squad execution has forced a blunt national question: is broadcasting the execution of the Fort Hood shooter the good that justice demands, or does it fall short of the best America can be?

Hasan, a former Army psychiatrist, killed 13 people and wounded 32 others in a 2009 attack at Fort Hood. After years of appeals, President Trump approved the death sentence, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth proposed making the execution public, so Americans would “understand that there are serious consequences.”

The issue is clear: It is not simply whether Hasan deserves death. It is whether the method of delivering that death should be treated as a public lesson or as a restrained act of state power.

• Supporters argue that a ‘closed execution’ would bury the very accountability the military and the country claim to uphold. A public broadcast, they say, would deter future attacks on service members, give victims’ families a shared witness to the outcome, and replace vague official statements with visible proof that treasonous violence carries a final cost. In that view, secrecy softens the message; visibility hardens it.   

•  Opponents, including many who accept the death sentence itself, reject the broadcast as a different act altogether. Interviews and public statements have called the idea an “abomination,” “weird,” “medieval,” and a conversion of capital punishment into entertainment. Critics note that Army regulations already bar anyone under 18 from witnessing a military execution, yet a livestream would place the scene on screens that children can reach.

• Others warn the United States would be adopting a practice more associated with authoritarian regimes and terrorist groups than with a constitutional republic. Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike have described public executions as something “jihadists do” or a mark of dictatorships, arguing that even a justified sentence can be degraded by spectacle.

Transparency can clarify consequences; it can also train a society to treat violence as content. America has long accepted capital punishment under law while keeping the act itself out of general view. The proposed livestream tests whether that restraint was a flaw to be corrected or a boundary that still marks the difference between necessary force and performative force.

The choice is not whether the sentence stands. It is whether America is ready to admit evil exists and must be dealt with openly, or whether justice must remain within the justice system.

If the membership of our Patriot Command Center agrees, and if I'm allowed by law.

Should I post the live execution here on the site?