Blood Work - THIS WEEK IN VIOLENCE: Look at Me

2026, Week 42

For this week’s newsletter, we’ve got some thoughts about US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s expressed desire to publicly broadcast an execution, the long history of violence, justice and spectacle in American politics, and how this latest development sits in that tableau.

Pentagon says the firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan will be livestreamedAssociated Press – Oct 09, 2026Reporting by Konstantin Toropin, Eric Tucker and Claudia Lauer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan will be livestreamed, the Pentagon said Thursday, a stunning revelation about plans for the first military execution in more than 65 years after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had described it as being “public.”

The Army announced this week that the execution would take place at Fort Hood on Dec. 3 after Hasan was convicted of killing 13 people and injuring 32 others in a shooting at the military base in 2009.

Hegseth, speaking to the conservative TV outlet Real America’s Voice on Wednesday, said, “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public.” Officials in the Pentagon clarified Thursday that the execution would be livestreamed and that more details would follow.

The revelation from Hegseth about the public nature of the execution — let alone one as violent as a firing squad — has raised further questions about how the death penalty is carried out in the U.S., especially after the botched lethal injection of Christa Pike in Tennessee.

Experts offer mixed reactions on the plan

Hasan could choose to resist execution and file a habeas petition — a legal request to review the legality of a detention — in civilian court, which could significantly delay the execution, experts said.

“It frankly might outlast the current administration, and who knows if the next one will have the same penchant for executions,” said Eugene R. Fidell, a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School specializing in military law.

Deborah Denno, a death penalty expert and law professor at Fordham University, said livestreaming an execution could make the process “much more transparent” and inform the public about all that capital punishment entails. Those are benefits that she said would be useful at a time when Pike’s botched execution has raised fresh questions about the manner by which criminal defendants are put to death for their crimes.

“I think it could possibly be a good idea because it would be transparent and the public would be fully aware that it’s happening,” she said.

When many states have had difficulty carrying out lethal injections due to difficulty accessing drugs or finding medical professionals willing to participate in executions, firing squads are coming to be seen as a less inhumane alternative, said Brenner Fissell, a professor at Villanova Law and vice president of the National Institute of Military Justice.

“Firing squads can be a quicker, cleaner, more precise way to execute a prisoner,” he said. “I don’t think that’s what’s motivating this. There’s a perceived masculinity and military-ness to firing squads that is part of the aura Hegseth is trying to emphasize — the ‘lethality culture.’”

Elisabeth Semel, co-director of the Death Penalty Clinic at UC Berkeley Law, said Hegseth’s announcement raises a host of legal and public policy questions, including concerns for the dignity of the defendant, who will be eligible to view the execution and what the Trump administration has in mind in opting for an unusual spectacle.

Though there has been long-running discussion about the idea of televising an execution, “I don’t recall a situation in which it was instigated by the government. I think that also raises serious questions about what is the motivation of the government,” she said.

“This is a president who’s about spectacle and that’s, I think, precisely the message that he intends to deliver,” Semel said, adding that she was skeptical that the administration had given a second thought to the legal and social questions being presented by the decision.

Trump has spoken out against public executions in Iran

Trump, who approved Hasan’s execution, has previously been critical of public executions in Iran, at times using the possibility of protesters being killed by the Iranian government as a possible rationale for military action that preceded his ultimate choice to attack Iran on Feb. 28.

“We’ve been told that the killing in Iran is stopping,” Trump told reporters on Jan. 14. “It’s stopping, and there’s no plan for executions.”

In his State of the Union address just days before launching the Iran war, Trump reiterated, “We stopped them from hanging a lot of them with the threat of serious violence.”

The White House on Thursday referred questions about the plans for the livestreamed execution to the Pentagon.

Hegseth was asked Wednesday if Hasan had made any final requests or reached out to the Trump administration. The Pentagon chief replied: “Don’t care. We’ll see him on Dec. 3.”

It’s not clear if Hasan will try to appeal

Hasan, an Army psychiatrist who held the rank of major, walked into a medical building on Nov. 5, 2009, where soldiers were waiting in long lines to receive immunizations and medical clearance for deployment. He shouted “Allahu akbar” — Arabic for “God is great!” — and opened fire with a laser-sighted handgun. He also shot at the backs of soldiers fleeing toward the parking lot.

Hasan said it was an effort to stop them from going to Afghanistan and killing his fellow Muslims. A military judge barred him from presenting that as a defense during his 2013 trial. Hasan was left paralyzed from the waist down after being shot in the back by law enforcement, and he now uses a wheelchair.

Hasan could seek a lengthy delay of his execution, though given his behavior at trial, he may not want to.

After firing his lawyers and representing himself, Hasan began his portion of the trial by telling jurors he was the gunman. He said little else over the next three weeks, which convinced his court-appointed standby lawyers that Hasan’s only goal was to get a death sentence.

The military called nearly 90 witnesses, but Hasan rested his case without calling a single person to testify in his defense and made no closing argument. Yet he leaked documents during the trial to journalists that revealed him telling military mental health workers that he could “still be a martyr” if executed.

Attorney John Galligan, a former military judge who had represented Hasan in several civil matters following his criminal trial, spoke with Hasan on Wednesday but is barred from offering much detail about that conversation. He is not representing Hasan in his criminal case but said he’s worried about his physical health under the plan laid out by officials, and that Hasan has not yet had access to legal counsel.

The US’s selection of lethal injection as its preferred method of execution is itself the product of something of a juridico-ethical enquiry. The eighth amendment of the United States Constitution, adopted in the earliest years of the Republic, sets limits and prohibitions on excessive bail or fines, but also cruel and unusual punishment.

What, precisely, constitutes the character of ‘cruel and unusual’ has since been elucidated in case law. In a concurring opinion regarding a landmark case from 1972, Justice William Brennan stated that a punishment is cruel and unusual if it is ‘degrading to human dignity’ (as in the case of torture); if it is arbitrary; if the means are wholly rejected by society; or if the means are wholly unnecessary. While Brennan’s criteria certainly clarify the picture somewhat, they also arguably beg the question. What, then, does it mean for a punishment to be ‘arbitrary’ or ‘unnecessary’?

Similar to the modern military ethics discussed in part 3 of our drone series, capital punishment presents the states which practice it and jurists which adjudicate its operation with a forbidden moral limit. Capital punishment is punitive in the extreme, as it imposes the gravest penalty for an individual; the taking of their life. Nevertheless, the means through which this most grave of acts is carried out must maintain its ostensibly neutral, dispassionate and patrician character.

The taking of life must dispense justice, but it cannot be perceived as indulging a bloodlust lest the act be morally tarnished. One need only think of the long history of hangings in the American context—and more pointedly, lynchings—to understand the particular historical and political sensitivities.

The injection of individuals sentenced to death with a cocktail of lethal chemicals, with its perceived non-spectacular and medical character, is ironically an antidote to the bloodlust that properly administered capital punishment disavows.

But there are, of course, a litany of chemicals and substances which can be injected into a human being to induce death, many of which induce symptoms and reactions one might call ‘cruel and unusual’. There are, of course, also chemicals and substances which could be used which might make the end of life comfortable or pleasurable (for want of a better term). But such sensations would diminish the punitive nature of the sentence. For whom? The recipient of the injection or the people and entities on whose behalf the act is being carried out? This is certainly an interesting question.

As a consequence, execution by lethal injection in the United States today is typically carried out by means of a cocktail of chemicals administered sequentially. For example, a sedative or anaesthetic to medically induce a comatose state; a compound to induce muscle paralysis to minimise any possible physiological responses, and finally a chemical to stop the heart and induce death. The specifics are more complex. Each US state which practices capital punishment by lethal injection has its own specific protocol for the process. 

Having an established protocol, however, is not the same as having access to the ideal materials with which that protocol is to be carried out, or even that the protocol will be carried out smoothly. 

Due to the vagaries of globalised economy and international supply chains, some of the chemicals used in executions in the United States are now produced elsewhere in the world, such as in Europe. 

In recent decades, countries producing these chemicals have imposed restrictions on exporting chemicals in instances where it is suspected they will be used for the purpose of capital punishment. As a result, capital punishment states in some instances experimented with alternative chemical protocols which produced disturbing and undesired effects. In others, difficulties establishing intravenous (IV) lines for the administering of the drugs led to inmates receiving multiple needle punctures. These are just two typical scenarios which can lead to what is called a ‘botched execution’, which can occur irrespective of whether the executee ultimately lives or dies.

What is important is that all of this reveals the central matter which capital punishment circles around, but which nonetheless cannot be named. A wish to totally disavow drives of vengeance, punitiveness and bloodlust, or the indulgence of desires which might rob capital punishment of what is proclaimed as the pursuit of justice, despite such drives and desires being inherent to the belief that taking a life is an operable means of administering justice.

Of course, the punitive aspect is theoretically core to any criminal sentence, but those sentences for the most severe of crimes, such as life sentences, are ideally intended to serve deterrent effects, discouraging individuals from committing such crimes in the first place. 

Unfortunately, the types of crimes which incur life imprisonment or death sentences are crimes of passion, for which deterrents can have minimal impact. Defenders of the death penalty will often either expound the act’s deterrent potential, which is at best dubious, or otherwise affirm there are some crimes for which the only appropriate response is one which is purely punitive. 

But can such a purely punitive act ever produce justice without indulging unsavoury drives? It is at times like this that I think of a remark often encountered in the comment sections of stories about capital punishment, in particular the unusual cruelty of botched executions. It is never long before someone remarks, “So what? If they didn’t want to suffer and/or die, they should not have committed the crime.” 

The espoused attitude is one of indifference, but this, again, merely seeks to disavow a belief and/or desire that cruelty be put in service of justice and the good. The speaker is not disinterested in the executee’s suffering. Far from it. They have simply embraced what the rest of the act’s advocates tacitly understand; that the taking of life is the administering of extreme cruelty and violence on a body in service of the good, to restore some semblance of order and justice to the world. This is, of course, the rationale of many murderers. You understand the bind.

These are just a few of the legal, historical and politico-ethical dimensions of the question of capital punishment in the United States. You can, of course, go back further, and broaden your aperture. In both cases, it is a question of how far you want to go; or, how long you want to tug on the knitted jumper and watch it unravel.

For our purposes, it suffices to think of capital punishment in the context of ‘Law & Order’; not the legal system’s two practical aspirations, but the political strategy spearheaded by Richard Nixon in the 1968 US Presidential Election and which went on to become an essential marker of ‘serious’ politicians in the decades that followed.

In 1992, during the Presidential elections of that year, Bill Clinton was in competition with Republican George H. W. Bush and the right-wing independent candidate Ross Perot. During that campaign, which inaugurated the ‘Third Way’ style which has dominated the Democratic Party ever since, Clinton was eager to burnish his pragmatic, moderate credentials. In service of this, during his election campaign he returned to the state of Arkansas, of which he was then Governor, to personally witness the execution by lethal injection of Rickey Ray Rector.

Rector, then forty, had been arrested and convicted for shooting and killing a man in a restaurant, and then shooting and killing a police officer during negotiations for his surrender days later. After this second shooting, Rector attempted to commit suicide with his gun, but failed, effectively lobotomising himself.

Allegedly after Rector was administered his last meal, he had left his pecan pie dessert, informing wardens he wanted to ‘save it for later’. The exchange encapsulated debates about Rector’s mental capacity and the ethics of executing people with intellectual disabilities or incapacitations.

More important, for our concerns, and for this story, are the actions and motivations of Clinton. By returning to Arkansas to observe Rector’s execution, as a demonstration of his seriousness, Clinton was implicitly making a statement on what serious politics entails; in this instance, bearing witness, unblinking, to the administration of justice through the taking of life—or perhaps the order of those two should be reversed.

And what is this assemblage—the administration of justice, the taking of life, and the combination and elevation of those two, into and through public spectacle—in the American context, if not the lynching? Attendees of public lynchings in prior eras would often take photographs and sell them to the public as souvenirs. 

Such acts made tangible, visible and legible the sociopolitical order and hierarchy of the time through the spectacular administration of violence. Decades later, capital punishments were to be carried out in the sterile seclusion of a prison wing. But Clinton’s attendance merely performed a similar function on the electorate’s behalf; bearing witness to the morbid dramaturgy of justice, violence and spectacle.

What relevance does all of this have to the current case regarding Nidal Malik Hasan? Firstly, Hegseth and Trump’s announcement should be understood as an electoral tactic. In a manner quite typical of conservative election campaigns the world over, the Republican party is seeking to invoke the spectre of ‘law & order’ and its attendant framing which implicitly benefits the right-wing, and use the spectacle of death to cover over Trump et al’s manifest failings of the past two years.

Secondly, that all of this should, again, be understood as an electoral and political tactic. You may be aware that there are currently two major stories circulating concerning the death penalty in the United States, the second being the case of Christa Pike, who remained alive but hospitalised after surviving her own botched lethal injection. 

By elevating Hasan’s story, which tickles so many right-wing neuroreceptors about troops, Islamic terror and immigration, to front page news, Hegseth and his allies likely seek to bury the Pike story beneath a mountain of obfuscatory debates about the death penalty which implicitly positions Republicans as the side willing to ‘do the job’.

Thirdly, and this is perhaps the most crucial, the push to have Hasan’s execution carried out through a visceral and bloody method, broadcast on national television, is revealing of his faction’s own relation to violence, justice and pleasure. For figures like Hegseth, violence in pursuit of justice dispensed privately denies the act the spectacular dimension which gives it its explicitly political (which is also to say aesthetic) dimension, and to deny that dimension is to deny, or refuse, its right to be pleasurable.

And this is, for Hegseth, what the administration of justice is a conduit for. An emasculated figure like Hegseth fixates on violence and cruelty because it soothes his fragile ego. Justice is merely the empty corridor through which he seeks to channel and legitimise his bloodlust. 

In this sense, it is apt that Hegseth, as a former Fox News commentator, is the midwife of this elevation of death-dealing into a national primetime spectacle. For Fox commentators, too, mask the real function of their productions behind veils of justice, virtue, morality and so on. 

But that is not what programmes such as Fox & Friends are, first and foremost. What they are, first and foremost, is an invitation to their viewers, to participate, collectively, in the validation and permission of limitless cruelty and viciousness, as a public spectacle, against those deemed to deserve it, ostensibly in service of justice and the good, but primarily, and truthfully, because it feels good, even though one cannot say so, and especially because one should be able to say so.

It is also worth noting that Hegseth made this announcement not from the White House or Pentagon, nor on a major cable news network like Fox News, nor even OANN or Newsmax, but via Real America’s Voice, a comparatively piddling right-wing cable and streaming service which hosted the talk show of Charlie Kirk. 

As Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message. For all his swagger and bluster, Hegseth was not disclosing this plan triumphantly to a national audience, but sharing it with Trump’s most diehard, committed supporters via a carefully constructed MAGA safe space. These actions should be understood not as coming from a position of strength, but one of extreme weakness, and a retreat to safe territory with reliable applause lines. That the safe and laudable territory is one of extraordinary spectacular cruelty is, itself, worth dwelling on.

It cannot also be ignored that, if reporting on Hasan’s own statements and sentiments are accurate, the consummation of his killing through execution, which would make him a martyr, is precisely the final objective he seeks to achieve. Arguably the most effective action the US could take to meaningfully punish Hasan and deny his actions their significance would be to not kill him. But this fact is completely overlooked, in part, of course, because law cannot operate on such subjective and contingent factors. Law’s administrators, however, can. The reason Hegseth has not factored such considerations into the process is because they are not relevant, because for Hegseth the means and ends of the process are the same thing: Killing.

Perhaps the most revealing passage in this story is the quote from President Donald Trump from January 14 of this year, in which he shares a belief that executions in Iran following the outbreak of protests and riots in that country had been declining and coming to a stop.

At that time, where bellicosity toward Iran was already on the rise in Washington, it would have been reasonable (though naive) to interpret Trump’s comments as potentially signalling a softening of his stance toward the country. And then, six weeks later, he joined arms with Israel to launch an illegal war of choice against that country which continues to this day.

The message to be gleaned from this is not that the right’s espoused hatred and condemnations of illiberal or authoritarian governments is hypocritical (though it is). Nor is it the case that such sentiments are rooted in envy (though they certainly are); a feeling that such governments do the things that, deep down, they would like to do. Of course, on both counts this is more than likely the case, as anyone who has listened to a boilerplate right-winger express their desire to bring back hangings or cut off the hands of thieves understands.

No. What should be gleaned from Trump’s feint toward peaceable relations before hurling the world headfirst into a conflict which has left us all poorer and less secure, and our institutions and standards of conduct more degraded, is a message much cruder and simpler, but one which has been constant throughout Trump’s political career and life: I get to do whatever I want to do.

This is a sentiment Trump expressed just a few days ago, this time in the context of prosecutions mounted against him during the Biden Presidency, and his magnanimity in not launching retaliatory prosecutions himself.

“I could have done very bad things to Hillary Clinton. I could have done very, very bad things to Joe Biden. I could have done very bad things to Barack Hussein Obama [...] I thought it was inappropriate to do so because you have to treat the office of the presidency with respect [...] Then I found out that they impeached me twice. I certainly, even to this moment, I can do whatever I want, if I want.”

This is the throughline of both Trump’s presidency and ascendant right-wing movements across the developed world right now, a belief that, for them, it should be a world in which not only is nothing off-limits and everything is permitted, but in which they should never be compelled to seek permission nor consent. 

It might feel glib to describe the politics of Donald Trump et al as embodying the politics of the rapist, but this is not simply because he and his global bedfellows surround themselves with people accused of sexual assault. It is because they derive great pleasure and satisfaction from enacting, or directing the enacting of cruelty on the bodies of other, lesser people. And they derive as much pleasure, if not more, from making others watch.