Trump casts doubts about live execution of military

O president of the United States sowed doubts this Friday about the live transmission of the perpetrator's execution of a deadly attack on American military personnel, an announcement made by his Defense Minister, Pete Hegseth, which generated indignation.

A 56-year-old Nidal Hasan is expected to be shot on December 3rd at Fort Hood base in Texas, South, where he killed 13 people, including 12 military personnel, and injured more than 30 others on November 5th, 2009 in an attack inspired by terrorist organization Al-Qaeda.

“ They are making a decision, but he will be killed, by firing squad ", said the Republican president in the White House, when asked about the plan to broadcast his execution live.

Donald Trump, a fervent defender of the death penalty, expressed satisfaction that this sentence was applied to Nidal Hasan, for whom he personally approved the execution squad as commander-in-chief.

Prior to these statements, his vice president JD Vance had distanced himself from the announcement of Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host of martial performances. “I don’t know if that’s going to happen,” answered a journalist at AFP. “If it is broadcast live, I won’t see it,” Vance added.

Something very rare is Republican politicians, that is, Donald Trump's party, publicly expressing their opposition to this idea in very strong terms.

“ I fully support the death penalty, but broadcasting live executions is what terrorists do. America is worth more than that,” said Austin Scott, deputy in the House of Representatives.

Democratic Senator Mark Kelly, former astronaut and naval officer, also stressed that “Nidal Hasan is a murderer” who will have to answer for his actions. “But a public execution? Here in the United States? That's the kind of thing Iran and the Taliban do. Is it with them that we want to be associated?”, asked, echoing other reactions, including international ones.

A live broadcast like this would constitute a form of “torture,” the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights warned, reaffirming his position against “public executions in Afghanistan and Iran.”.

This execution will be the first performed by the American army since 1961, and the first by firing squad since 1945.

A live broadcast “would only aggravate the cruelty of the death penalty and perpetuate the cycle of violence that authorities say they want to end,” said an American branch of Amnesty International, Justin Mazzola.

“ This announcement joins the manifestation of cruelty that we have just witnessed during the foolish attempt to execute Christa Pike in Tennessee (south),” he added.

That person referred to the unsuccessful and unprecedented execution last week of a woman who survived two lethal injections, relaunching the debate on the application of the death penalty in the United States.

The president of the Conference of American Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Paul Coakley, qualified the decision to publicly shoot Nidal Hasan as a “barbaric promotion of a culture of death”.

According to Amnesty International, at least 17 public executions took place in 2025 in the world: 11 in Iran and six in Afghanistan.

Nidal Hasan, an American military psychiatrist, a Muslim of Palestinian origin, had problems with his spine during the 2009 shooting, having been incapacitated and in a wheelchair ever since.

This military “will be shot by soldiers, as it should be, and we will ensure that the public can watch, that it is public,” Minister Hegseth said in an interview filmed on Wednesday, without specifying which channel of broadcast was planned.