Trump cancels livestream of Nidal Hasan's firing squad execution

Donald Trump has cancelled the planned livestream of Nidal Hasan's firing squad execution, announcing the reversal in a post on Truth Social. The Pentagon's chief spokesperson, Sean Parnell, told reporters that the president and defence secretary Pete Hegseth had spoken about the decision before it was announced, that Hegseth supports it, and that the two men are 'completely aligned' — a word choice that answered a question nobody had formally asked.

The broadcast would have been the first livestreamed execution in American history. It was Hegseth who had promised the public execution of the Fort Hood gunman, who killed 13 people in 2009, and the plan had drawn objections from unlikely quarters: Damien Echols, freed from death row after the West Memphis case, publicly urged Americans not to watch, and the brother of one of Hasan's victims wrote to Trump asking that the killing not be staged as spectacle. The Guardian's report on the reversal ran under the words 'after global condemnation.'

The decision applies to the broadcast alone. Hasan's execution remains scheduled for December 3; the firing squad, the date and the death are all unchanged. What was withdrawn was the feed — after weeks in which a defence department promoted an execution the way a network promotes a premiere, complete with a secretary's promise that the public would see it. The state tried its hand at broadcasting, found that an execution tests badly as content, and pulled the one part of the arrangement that turned out to be negotiable: the audience.

Parnell's alignment statement exists because the showcase being dismantled was the defence secretary's own. A department that had cast itself as a broadcaster spent the day explaining that its promised programming had been cancelled from above.

Hasan is still to be shot on December 3. The only thing withdrawn was the cameras.