I'm asking you to stop the Pentagon's plan to livestream the December 3 firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan. Please publicly urge Secretary Hegseth to cancel the broadcast, and support language in the defense bill or any spending measure that bars federal funds from being used to record or stream an execution.
Hasan murdered 13 people at Fort Hood, and this letter isn't about his sentence. It's about what our government chooses to show the world. Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, who supports executing Hasan, called the livestream beyond disgusting and said public executions belong to regimes like Iran and Afghanistan. The UN human rights office said broadcasting it would breach the ban on torture. The president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called it a barbaric promotion of a culture of death. Amnesty International counted at least 17 public executions last year, every one of them in Iran or Afghanistan. Is that the company America wants to keep?
I also don't understand the double standard. Lawmakers in many states passed laws to keep children away from drag shows because they believe kids need protection from adult content. Yet a government livestream of a man being shot can reach any child with a phone in seconds. The Army's own rules bar minors from witnessing an execution, and nobody can enforce that online. The American Academy of Pediatrics has warned for years that exposure to real violence harms children. Amherst College death penalty scholar Austin Sarat said a livestream won't educate anyone, it will terrorize them. If protecting kids matters in a theater, it matters on a screen.
Secretary Hegseth says the broadcast will show people there are consequences. A conviction and a carried-out sentence already do that. Turning a death into content does something else, and Sen. Jack Reed warned it would hand anti-American terrorist recruiters exactly what they want. Please tell me what you'll do before December 3.
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