Pentagon plans to livestream Fort Hood killer’s execution

What happened

The Pentagon plans to broadcast the execution of Nidal Hasan online, opening the military’s use of a firing squad to a live public audience. The former US Army major received a death sentence for the 2009 Fort Hood attack, in which he killed 13 people and wounded 32.

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the public viewing plan on Thursday during an interview with Real America’s Voice. A defence department official subsequently confirmed that the execution would be livestreamed. Soldiers carrying rifles are to form the firing squad.

The Army has scheduled the execution for 1pm local time on Thursday, 3 December, at Fort Hood in Texas. That places it on the same weekday and at the same hour as the attack. For viewers in the UK, the scheduled time would be 7pm.

President Donald Trump approved Hegseth’s recommendation earlier this week, with the Pentagon announcing his decision on Monday. The Army secretary set out the location and date on Tuesday. Carrying out the sentence would end a period of more than six decades without a US military execution.

Broadcasting it would also mark a separate departure from modern American practice. The last public execution in the United States is understood to have been in 1937, when Roscoe Jackson was hanged in Missouri. Legal specialists say an online broadcast would raise questions beyond those surrounding the sentence itself.

The background

Hasan, an Army psychiatrist from Virginia, entered a medical processing building at Fort Hood on 5 November 2009 with two guns and ammunition magazines. Soldiers were waiting for medical tests and vaccinations when he began shooting. The attack remains the deadliest at a military installation within the United States.

Gunfire during the attack left Hasan paralysed from the waist down. A military jury sentenced him to death in 2013, and he has since been held at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. He is one of four prisoners under a death sentence in the Army justice system.

At his court martial, Hasan admitted carrying out the shootings and said his purpose was to prevent American troops travelling to Afghanistan to kill Muslims. He also portrayed his actions as protecting the Taliban. Government lawyers said he had wanted to avoid his own forthcoming deployment to Afghanistan.

Investigators discovered that Hasan had exchanged 18 emails with radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki before the attack. A review headed by former FBI director William Webster concluded that the bureau’s investigation of the correspondence had been inadequate. Al-Awlaki was later killed in an American drone strike.

The Pentagon initially classified the shooting as workplace violence rather than terrorism. That distinction had practical consequences for victims, affecting their eligibility for Purple Hearts and benefits associated with combat. Hegseth now characterises the killings as an Islamist attack carried out by someone serving within the armed forces.

The execution plan comes amid a wider federal shift towards capital punishment. Trump reversed Joe Biden’s moratorium on federal executions after returning to office. Earlier this year, the Justice Department announced that it would permit firing squads as an execution method as the administration sought to accelerate death penalty cases.

What people are saying

Hegseth presented public access as a way of demonstrating the consequences of such crimes. He also linked the choice of a firing squad to Hasan’s use of firearms against his victims. Asked during the interview about final requests or contact with Trump, he dismissed those considerations and pointed to the December date.

John Mills, a lawyer representing prisoners sentenced to death, questioned both the legal footing of the broadcast and the likelihood of the execution proceeding as scheduled. He said Hasan’s appellate process remained unfinished and that a federal court challenge to his conviction and sentence would probably bring a stay.

Eugene R Fidell, a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School, strongly criticised the proposal to make the execution available to a mass audience. He also said litigation brought by Hasan could continue for years, potentially taking the case beyond the end of Trump’s current presidency.

Deborah Denno, a Fordham University law professor who studies execution methods, identified a different potential consequence: making the realities of capital punishment visible to people who support it. She said a livestream would expose the process to an exceptional degree of public scrutiny, while raising questions about age restrictions and hosting rules.

The rules for online viewing

Public access to an execution does not usually mean unrestricted broadcasting. Some US states require journalists to witness executions, while prisoners can invite witnesses in certain jurisdictions. Other states allow members of the public to volunteer to attend. Those arrangements involve admitting people to observe, rather than transmitting a death online.

Major social platforms impose restrictions directly relevant to the Pentagon’s proposal. Meta, which operates Facebook, Instagram and Threads, prohibits live broadcasts of capital punishment. TikTok also bans them. Those policies create an obstacle to distributing the planned execution through services with large international audiences.

X’s policy provides for removing footage showing someone’s death when the family or an authorised representative requests it. Truth Social, the platform owned by Trump, does not offer users a live-video broadcasting feature. Denno said any hosting arrangements would have to be considered alongside safeguards for younger viewers.

What happens next

Military law requires more than a presidential decision before an execution can proceed. The sentence must undergo appellate scrutiny, and there must be a final legal determination allowing it to be carried out. Mills’s assessment puts further federal court proceedings at the centre of whether the December timetable can hold.

The last completed US military execution was in 1961, when an Army private convicted of raping an 11-year-old Austrian girl was hanged. President Dwight D Eisenhower authorised the sentence; the victim’s family later sought clemency from his successor, John F Kennedy. The military’s last use of a firing squad dates to the end of the Second World War.

Firing squads also remain an option under civilian law in five states: Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah. Federal executions, meanwhile, resumed during the final year of Trump’s first presidency after a 17-year gap. Thirteen people were executed during that renewed federal programme.

The proposed public broadcast would put the United States alongside very few countries. Amnesty International recorded more than 2,700 executions across 17 countries in 2025, but identified public executions in only two: 11 in Iran and six in Afghanistan.

Why this matters

For UK audiences, an online execution raises a practical distinction between material being broadcast by a government and being permitted on social media. A public livestream would not override platforms’ own restrictions, which govern whether users can watch or circulate it through those services.

The case also illustrates the separation between military and civilian capital punishment in the United States. Presidential authorisation is a specific requirement of the military process; the next legal decisions will determine whether this sentence can be carried out on the administration’s timetable.