Pete Hegseth Wants to Livestream a Snuff Film
Mother Jones · L · trust 46/100
"We're going to make sure people are able to watch it, that it's public," Hegseth said. Matt Kaminsky/ZUMA
This week, Donald Trump approved the military’s first execution by firing squad since 1945. The Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced, will livestream it.
The execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, who opened fire on dozens of people at the Soldier Readiness Processing Center in Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009, is now scheduled for December 3. Hasan, at the time an active-duty major in the Army, was shot in the back by police during the massacre and now, paralyzed from the waist down, uses a wheelchair. When Hegseth spoke about the execution livestream with far-right streamer Jack Posobiec on Thursday, he hardly seemed able to contain his excitement.
“They like it because it’s the same kind of video game brutality that they like in every other context.”
“He’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be,” Hegseth said. The execution, as Hegseth envisions it, would be first and foremost a mass spectacle. “We’re going to make sure people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” he said.
That is to say, Pete Hegseth wants to make a snuff film.
Jim Craig, a veteran Mississippi death penalty lawyer, spoke with me in April, after Trump announced his plan to bring back the federal firing squad. The obscenity of the violence, Craig said, is the whole idea.
This proposal by the Trump Justice Department is characterized by their attraction to brutality. It’s characterized by their affection for causing visible harm to people. You see it in their foreign policy. You see it in their policing. The firing squad is very physical and visceral in the damage that it does to the person being executed. That’s why they like it. We should not mince words about this. It has nothing to do with the Eighth Amendment. It has nothing to do with the supply of drugs, or anything else. They like it because it’s the same kind of video game brutality that they like in every other context of this administration’s barbarism.
A firing squad execution, when the executioners aim well, “essentially vaporizes” a person’s heart, Craig explained. When they don’t, the victim bleeds out and dies slowly.
The last time the US military executed a man by firing squad was in 1945—it was called “musketry” at the time.
“Well, I kind of like the mentality we had in World War II, which was win,” Hegseth said. “Which was, understand when the enemy attacks you, you stand your ground.”
Hasan’s killing would be the United States’ first livestreamed execution. The closest equivalent in recent memory, by anything approaching a state, is the graphic series of public execution tapes that galvanized the world against ISIS in 2014; before that, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya telecast an execution at a basketball stadium in 1984.
But it would hardly be Hegseth’s first encounter with disseminating death on video. Over the past year, the military has released at least 46 different clips of US attacks on noncombatant vessels—the extrajudicial slaughter of people on alleged “drug boats,” including at least one “double-tap” strike on clinging survivors—in the Caribbean Sea. Sometimes, the clips are posted on their own, in grainy gray and green. Other times, the official White House X account posts footage of human death interspersed with video-game and Hollywood action film footage.
In their interview, Posobiec asked Hegseth whether Hasan had any final requests.
“Don’t care,” Hegseth said. “See him on December 3.”
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