Execution live: Washington would push ahead in jihadist style

For the first time since the end of World War II, the United States military would carry out a death sentence by firing squad, and according to a Pentagon official, the execution would be broadcast live on the internet. Nidal Hasan, a former army psychiatrist who opened fire on his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood military base in Texas in 2009 and killed thirteen people, was sentenced to death by a military court in 2013, and the execution has been scheduled for December 3. According to an AFP report, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth originally confirmed plans for a live broadcast, though Washington later became less resolute on the matter. In any case, the European Union warned online platforms on Monday not to broadcast the execution, and indicated that it has a legal basis to sanction them if they fail to comply with the ban.

Thomas Regnier, a spokesman for the European Commission, said that platforms must carefully apply their own usage rules. As an example, he mentioned that Meta explicitly bans the live broadcasting of executions, while X and TikTok ban shocking content or content that glorifies violence. He declined to comment on what happens in the United States, but stressed that there are clear rules in Europe. He was referring to the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA), which also regulates action against illegal online content and can be applied when platforms fail to comply with their own rules. The Trump administration regularly brands this regulation as a censorship tool, so it is entirely possible that in early December it will stand up, in the name of free speech, for the worldwide broadcast of a public execution.

Nidal Hasan's guilt is not in question, nor should the gravity of his act be downplayed. He murdered thirteen people, wounded more than thirty, and according to the investigation, was in contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, al-Qaeda's preacher in Yemen. He received a final verdict, in proceedings before the court of a constitutional state, which is fundamentally different from the way terrorist organizations kill — and that is precisely why it is particularly unsettling that the American state would choose, to punish a terrorist, exactly the form that terrorism itself made infamous. The online broadcasting of public executions was one of the most important propaganda tools of the Islamic State, which the world considered barbaric precisely because it turned death into spectacle and punishment into a deterrent, mobilizing show. If Washington broadcasts the firing squad live, it will not be making justice transparent — it will be adopting exactly the logic against which it has waged war for twenty years: violence as a message aimed at an audience, execution as content, death as a click.

The video that might circulate across the internet on December 3 will not display the reasoning behind the sentence, but it will be perfect raw material for jihadist recruiters, who will sell Hasan's death as martyrdom, and for all the autocrats who will henceforth be able to argue that public execution is now a Western practice. In Moscow, Tehran and Pyongyang, they will no doubt note with satisfaction that the leading power of the free world is itself erasing the line between the aesthetics of a constitutional state and those of a terrorist state. Whether the broadcast will actually take place is not yet certain, since Washington itself appears to be backpedaling, but it already says a great deal that an American defense secretary confirmed such a plan at all, and that it is the European Union that has to remind the world's largest social media platforms that a human being's death is not a live show.

Ugar