Mister Hegseth, have you no dignity? Livestreaming an execution? Sadly, I am not shocked given Hegseth’s cowardly bloodlust; neither am I surprised by the idea of streaming an execution. Our government does it all the time nowadays. Our military (and CIA) under Hegseth’s orders and direction has been conducting extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and Pacific for well over a year now as part of Operation Southern Spear. 200 plus victims. You can scroll through dozens of videos of these extrajudicial executions on YouTube.
Problem is most Americans, it seems, shrug their shoulders, ‘they are drug smugglers’ they tell themselves. Some are, many aren’t, but they have two things in common whether innocent or smuggler: none were given the opportunity to defend themselves in court and they are dead, dead, dead. We have become addicted, habituated, and desensitized to this government’s use of violence to discipline and punish those they dislike or disagree with.
This moment has been a long time coming since Americans developed a toleration, no, a sweet tooth, for these DoD snuff videos during the first Gulf War. Antiseptic, digital vengeance, news as entertainment. This has antecedents in our country’s history. Back at the height of lynchings in early 20th century America, photographs of lynched men were made into postcards and mailed to family and friends with ghastly preprinted references to southern BBQ. Not quite a Hallmark moment.
Many Americans it seems were shocked at Hegseth’s pronouncement, however. A step too far.
Timothy Broglio, Archbishop of the Dioceses for the Military Services, released a statement questioning the morality and intent of Secretary Hegseth’s announcement that Nidal Hasan, an active-duty Army Major convicted of murdering 13 persons during a mass shooting at an Army base in Texas in 2009, will be executed by firing squad and that it would be livestreamed.
Bishop Broglio condemned the heinous act of Hasan, but also objected to the execution of Hasan. The Catholic Church has a long-standing opposition to the death penalty. Not that long really, but recently long. Like from 2018. For most of its 2000-year history it found executions expedient for heretics and witches and the like. But that is another story for inquisitive minds.
Broglio also questioned the intention to livestream the execution: “Do we really want to imitate the terrorists of this world and make a public spectacle of barbarically killing our adversaries” Broglio wrote. He also asked to “what purpose” would the livestream serve and opined that the members of the firing squad would sustain a “moral injury.” You can read his full statement at this link: (https://www.milarch.org/archbishop-broglio-issues-statement-on-proposed-execution-livestream/).
Indeed, a serving member of the armed forces turning on their fellow soldiers, is monstruous and deservedly is a capital offense, I believe. But livestreaming? What caught my attention is that Hegseth characterized Hasan’s act as a terrorist attack rooted in Islam. If Hasan was catholic or protestant or any other sect other than Islam, his execution would not be livestreamed, I judge.
Bishop Broglio asked what purpose this public spectacle of Hasan’s execution could serve. That’s an easy one. Its primary purpose, I argue, is not to execute Hasan by firing squad but to discipline and punish the Islamic world in general, and American Muslims in particular. Frankly, this proposed livestreamed spectacle is reminiscent of America’s long history of lynching the “other.”
Even Speaker Johnson appears skeptical of the public execution as well, claiming it would motivate more terrorist attacks. Yes, it would. It would make the cowardly Hasan a martyr. It would also ignite a surge of right-wing white nationalist violence towards American Muslims. Or as Trump would describe these right wing nationalists, real American patriots. It would inflame religious inspired fanatics and bigots of both the Christian and Muslim faiths.
Media outlets quickly pointed out that the last publicly attended execution occured in Kentucky in 1936 when twenty thousand spectators gathered to participate in the execution of Rainey Bethea, an African- American man. In fact, the last man publicly hanged and left dangling from a tree limb was a 19-year-old African American man named Michael Donald in 1981, in Mobile, Alabama.
Yes, I understand the counter argument, that the execution of Hasan is the implementation of a judicial death warrant, but I think an execution behind prison walls is one thing while the public spectacle of livestreaming an execution to tens of millions of homes, bars, schools, is another. It is a lynching spectacle. This is what ISIS, Iran, and the Taliban do. This proposed spectacle does a moral injury to our nation. Are we not a better people than the murderous thugs of ISIS, Iran’s rulers, and the Taliban?
Hasan was selected for this lynching because he is Muslim, and Hegseth, a Christian zealot, wants to use Hasan’s public death to restore the suzerainty of white, Christian America. I make my case below.
In a seminal work “Discipline and Punish,” Michel Foucault, argued that a public execution is a “ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted. It restores the sovereignty by manifesting it at its most spectacular.” Adding, “[It] belongs to a whole series of great rituals in which power is eclipsed and restored…; over and above the crime that has placed the sovereign in contempt, it deploys before all eyes an invincible force. Its aim is not so much to re-establish a balance as to bring into play, as its extreme point, the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law,” in this case a Muslim killing Christian soldiers, “and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength.”
Hasan’s streaming public execution is just such a display by Hegseth and Trump.
If anyone deserves a livestreamed public execution it is Dylan Roof, a white supremacist fond of the confederate flag, for murdering worshippers at the Emmanuel AMC Church in Charleston, South Carolina, during a prayer meeting. The Supreme Court is to hear arguments about this case in October I believe.
A week after the announcement of the execution plans for Hasan, federal agents raided the home of Representative Ilham Omar in Washington DC, an outspoken and frequent critic of President Trump. Omar, a Somali refuge now American citizen, is Muslim and proudly wears a head scarf. The federal search warrant is still sealed. According to news reporting, however, the warrant was issued as part of a broader immigration and citizenship fraud investigation. The affidavit for the warrant would have had to have stated that there was “probable cause’ to find evidence of a crime at Omar’s residence.
Given the tainted and corrupt and laughably incompetent U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia under Jeanine Pirro, I suspect the probable cause was questionable. Surely the judge that read the supporting affidavit must have questioned the agents/federal prosecutor who submitted the affidavit, and would in my mind, have serious reservations about the timing of the search warrant so close to the November mid-terms and veracity of the information provided. Yet, he or she still signed the warrant.
Additionally, the search coincided with a Trump rally held later that day. I presume Trump’s remarks were written in advance knowledge of the raid and to complement the raid. According to Fox news, Trump said at the rally spectacle, that “she’s a disaster. She comes in from a country without laws, without police, without military. All they do is shoot each other, and she comes into our country and says, ‘I have a constitutional right,’” Trump joked. “She’s got a constitutional right. She’s telling us about the Constitution and she’s coming from one of the worst countries anywhere on the planet.” The crowd at the spectacle started on cue to chant “Deport, Deport, Deport….
The Hasan execution announcement and the execution of a search warrant at Omar’s residence within a week or so of each other is no accident. This is part of Trump’s mid-term strategy: Fear mongering and love of the spectacle. Create a sense of fear and revulsion towards American Muslims and prophesize the imminent collapse of American and western civilization through replacement by sub-human invaders. He is the patriarch, punisher and disciplinarian. It seems to work far too often on many Americans who succumb all too readily to Trump’s vile, racist, and misogynistic tropes and memes.
One word of advice to Hegesth, who said that there are consequences for one’s actions. Yes, there are Pete. For someone who ordered, organized, and directed the extrajudicial murder of over 200 men and young boys on boats suspected of drug smuggling, you are a mass murderer no better than Hasan, perhaps worse. Hasan murdered his colleagues for ideological reasons. You also murder men and young boys on the high seas for ideological reasons. You are a criminal and should be charged with conspiracy, murder, and piracy (18 USC 1658 et al and 2280).
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