The Pentagon Wants To Produce, Direct and Distribute A Death Scene. Who Will Watch?
As the US Department of Defense prepares to broadcast the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the state steps into the role of producer, director, and distributor of a real-time death scene.
On Thursday, 3 December, at 1 p.m. local time in Fort Hood, Texas—the same hour former US Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan opened fire on his fellow soldiers in 2009, killing 13—the United States military plans to put the 56-year-old, wheelchair-bound prisoner before a firing squad and shoot him to death. It will be the first US military execution since 1961, and the first by firing squad since 1945. Yet the most radical rupture with modern precedent is not the method of death, but its distribution strategy. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has announced that the execution will be livestreamed. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” Hegseth declared, explaining that “people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”
By deciding to broadcast a firing squad to the internet, the Pentagon is transforming itself into studio head, director of photography, and streaming platform for a state-sanctioned snuff film. And in doing so, it forces a question that has haunted moving images since their infancy: who frames the shot, and what does watching do to the audience?
From Edison’s Electric Chair to the Terre Haute Courtroom
Cinema and capital punishment grew up together. In November 1901, just days after Leon Czolgosz was electrocuted for assassinating President William McKinley, Thomas Edison’s company released Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison. Barred from bringing his bulky camera inside the death chamber, director Edwin S. Porter shot documentary panoramas of the prison exterior and seamlessly spliced them into a studio re-enactment of guards strapping Czolgosz into the electric chair and throwing the switch. Paying audiences watched a simulated state killing framed as thrilling actuality. Just over a year later, Edison’s cameramen bypassed re-enactment altogether, filming the actual electrocution of Topsy the elephant at Coney Island.
For the next three decades, the camera’s hunger for the scaffold only grew, culminating on 14 August 1936 in Owensboro, Kentucky, where 20,000 people gathered in a carnival atmosphere to watch the hanging of Rainey Bethea. Photographers captured the scene while vendors sold sandwiches and Coca-Cola to the crowd. The resulting press coverage horrified the country, exposing how easily judicial punishment dissolved into voyeuristic theatre. Within two years, Kentucky had outlawed public executions, and the American scaffold retreated behind prison walls. Even in Nazi Germany, where Adolf Hitler ordered film crews to record the trials of the July 20 plotters in 1944, and where their hangings at Plötzensee prison were filmed too, the footage was screened only for senior party and military figures and never shown to the public.
Throughout the television and early internet eras, US courts held that line. In 2001, ahead of the execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, a Florida internet company called Entertainment Network—best known for running VoyeurDorm.com, a site streaming 55 webcams inside a college women’s house—sued federal prison officials for the right to webcast McVeigh’s lethal injection for $1.95 per viewer. In Entertainment Network, Inc. v. Lappin, a federal court in Terre Haute flatly rejected the bid, ruling that there is no First Amendment “right to record or broadcast an execution from within a prison.” McVeigh’s death was transmitted only via an encrypted, closed-circuit feed to survivors in Oklahoma City, and federal rules barred anyone from recording it.
Hegseth’s Pentagon is exploiting a legal grey zone to tear down that ninety-year barrier. While Title 28 of the Code of Federal Regulations strictly prohibits visual or audio recording inside federal civilian execution chambers, military executions are governed by an Army regulation that says nothing about broadcasting. Meanwhile, the regulatory guardrails meant to police the public airwaves have preemptively folded: Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr said this week that the FCC has no role because the feed is “not on broadcast TV,” adding: “I trust Secretary Hegseth.”
The Grammar of the Shot: From Pixelated Abstraction to Visceral Blood
Until now, the modern American security state has relied on a visual grammar of abstraction. Since the first Gulf War in 1991, the Pentagon has fed the public green-tinted night-vision footage and grainy, black-and-white FLIR thermal videos. Over the past year, that aesthetic has been deployed across social media feeds to showcase unilateral US kinetic power—whether in overhead drone clips of missiles vaporising suspected smuggling boats in the Caribbean, strikes across a war with Iran now in its eighth month, or the military operation that seized Venezuela’s leadership.
In those thermal videos, death is bloodless and geometric. A crosshair locks onto a roof, a bunker, or a hull in the sea; a silent white flash blooms on screen; the target dissolves into grey pixels. Because we see the explosion rather than the bodies inside the school, hospital, or boat, the human cost remains abstract, safely quarantined in the viewer’s imagination. Iran’s Red Crescent counted 65 schools and 32 medical facilities hit in the first nine days of that war alone.
A livestreamed firing squad shatters that abstraction. You cannot film an execution without making directorial choices. Someone in the Department of Defense must decide on lighting, focal length, and camera blocking. Will it be a static wide shot from the witness gallery, or a multi-camera setup with a medium close-up on the target pinned over Hasan’s chest? How will the microphones be mixed—tuned to pick up the rustle of the straps, the shouted command, the deafening crack of the rifles, and the physical impact of bullets tearing into a paralysed man in a wheelchair? When a South Carolina firing squad shot Mikal Mahdi last year, the bullets missed his heart, and a reporter in the room watched him groan and keep breathing for some two minutes. For the first time in modern American history, the state is inviting viewers to watch blood splatter and a body convulse in real time.
The Digital Colosseum and the Psychology of Sovereign Spectacle
Even conservative lawmakers have recoiled at the aesthetics of the plan. Republican Representative Austin Scott warned this week that “live-streaming executions is what jihadists do,” Senator Thom Tillis that “public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do,” while Senator John Curtis noted that “a civilization erodes when it cultivates an appetite for executions as a form of entertainment.” Yet the comparison to ISIS, while visually apt, misses a crucial distinction in political motive. When ISIS released slickly edited, multi-camera execution videos a decade ago, an insurgent group was weaponising cinema to project terror and coerce submission.
The Pentagon’s proposed livestream reaches further back, to the Roman munera, the gladiatorial games and midday executions of criminals in the Colosseum. Roman emperors did not stage public killings merely to frighten their subjects; they staged them as panem et circenses, a visceral civic entertainment designed to bind the plebeian crowd to the sovereign’s absolute authority through shared bloodlust. When President Donald Trump told reporters this week that Hasan would face the firing squad “and he deserves it” before adding, of the livestream, “I’ll make a decision ultimately,” he stepped effortlessly into the theatrical posture of the Roman emperor holding his thumb aloft before the roaring arena, savouring the suspense of the final signal.
What the Roman emperor could offer only to 50,000 spectators in stone bleachers, however, streaming architecture can deliver to hundreds of millions of smartphones simultaneously. Over the past quarter-century, reality television and algorithmic social platforms have steadily conditioned audiences to watch human humiliation, panic, and pain as casual diversion. Each season pushed the envelope of moral and legal tolerance a fraction further, priming the public nervous system for the ultimate transgression: state-sponsored reality death, offered free of charge on an official government livestream rather than hidden in the recesses of the dark web.
Psychiatrists have already warned that broadcasting Hasan’s execution risks triggering trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder in vulnerable viewers. From Geneva, the UN human rights office condemned the plan, saying that livestreaming an execution “is tantamount to a public execution and would breach the absolute prohibition of torture.” Yet for an administration that has spent the past year systematically dismantling the architecture of external accountability—from sanctioning the International Criminal Court to conducting summary maritime strikes and foreign regime decapitations—breaking the taboo against public execution is not a policy oversight. It is the point.
As philosopher Michel Foucault observed in Discipline and Punish, the public scaffold was always a theatre in which the sovereign inscribed his unchallengeable power directly onto the body of the condemned. When the modern state moved executions behind closed doors, it did so not out of mercy for the prisoner, but out of fear that the spectacle degraded the state and brutalised the spectators. If the cameras roll at Fort Hood on 3 December, the corpse in the frame will belong to Nidal Hasan—but the true subject of the shot will be the millions of us staring back at the glass, clicking play.
Sources: US Army; Al Jazeera; CBS News; CBS News (reaction); CBS News (public executions); Euronews; OPB/NPR; PBS NewsHour; TheWrap (FCC); TheWrap (Trump); The Guardian via AOL; AFP via Arab News; Wikipedia (Execution of Czolgosz); Wikipedia (Electrocuting an Elephant); Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung; Jewish Virtual Library; The Globe and Mail; Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press; US Department of Justice; Associated Press; Wikipedia (2026 Iran war); WLRN; KPBS/NPR; World History Encyclopedia (Roman executions); World History Encyclopedia (Colosseum); Human Rights Watch.
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