The Pentagon will livestream Nidal Hasan's firing-squad execution on 3 December

The Defense Department said on Thursday that the firing-squad execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist convicted of the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, will be livestreamed to the public. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had said earlier in the day that he wanted the execution to be public. The date is 3 December.

Hegseth told Jack Posobiec that Hasan would face a firing squad of soldiers, and that the department would make sure people could watch, because "people need to understand that there's serious consequences for these types of things." He called the choice of a firing squad a "no-brainer," and noted that the military had not carried one out since the Second World War. The department's statement later on Thursday confirmed the livestream. The Washington Post reported that Hasan's death would be the first time the US military has broadcast an execution live on the internet.

The last known US military firing-squad execution was by musketry on 9 November 1945. American civilian executions have been closed for decades. A small number of states still allow a firing squad as a method. None of them puts the death on a public stream. A few countries still conduct executions in public. The United States has not. Thursday's decision puts a military death, on a set date, on a feed anyone with a connection can open.

Hasan was convicted by court-martial of killing 13 people and wounding more than 30 at Fort Hood, Texas, on 5 November 2009. He was sentenced to death. Appeals and competency fights have kept him on the military's death row for more than a decade. The 3 December date is the first time the Pentagon has paired that sentence with a public broadcast. Hegseth has framed the method as fitting for a soldier who killed soldiers. The stream is a separate decision. A firing squad can be used inside a chamber with a handful of official witnesses. A livestream adds an audience the Uniform Code of Military Justice did not have in 1945.

The legal questions are practical. Military executions are rare, and the rules for who may witness them were written for a room. A stream has no room. The department has not, in the Thursday statement as reported, said which platform will carry it, whether the feed will be delayed, whether the moment of fire will be shown, or what happens if a court orders a stay on 2 December. A public promise to broadcast is harder to walk back than a closed execution that can be postponed without a million people waiting on a link.

Opponents of public execution have a narrow argument available that does not require a view on Hasan's guilt. The conviction is not in serious dispute. The question Thursday's order raises is whether the state, having kept civilian executions out of public view for generations, will now use a military case to put one online. Hegseth's answer is that visibility is the point. The families of the Fort Hood dead have not, in the reports used here, been quoted on the stream. Their status as witnesses, in a room or on a feed, is one of the details the December protocol will have to settle.

The calendar is short. 3 December is eight weeks from Friday. Any stay, any competency claim, and any fight over the method will have to move inside that window. The department has said the execution will be a firing squad, and that it will be livestreamed. Those are the two facts that were not public at the start of the week.