Politics
Pentagon Assures Public Nidal Hasan Execution Will Be Watchable
By Mor Michael, . BSN Network. Satire.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced this week that the federal government intends to execute Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who killed thirteen people at Fort Hood in 2009, and that the event will be public, in the sense that people will be able to watch it, which is how Hegseth himself put it, apparently satisfied with that as a standard.
Hasan has been on death row for over a decade. The announcement that his execution would be made viewable is the part of this story Hegseth chose to emphasize personally, using the phrase "people are able to watch it" in a way that suggested he had given the viewer experience significant thought and had arrived, finally, at watchable.
Hegseth confirmed no timeline, no venue, no format, and no mechanism by which the public would actually gain access. What he confirmed is that it will happen and that you will be able to see it, which is the same level of detail a person gives when they have announced a party but not yet checked whether they own enough chairs.
"I want to make sure it's public," Hegseth told reporters, deploying the word public the way a streaming service deploys the word exclusive, meaning something that sounds expansive and turns out to describe a very specific arrangement for a very specific audience that has not been identified yet.
The Pentagon did not respond to questions about whether public means a designated viewing area, a live broadcast, a pool camera, or simply a promise that nobody will actively prevent witnesses from describing what they saw afterward.
Senior officials in the building, speaking on background because they had not cleared it with Hegseth's communications team and also because they found the question surprising, said the logistics of a public federal military execution had not been worked out to a degree they would describe as worked out.
Rep. Mike Waltz, reached for comment while being asked about an entirely different matter, said Hegseth's announcement reflected a new era of accountability and transparency at the Pentagon, which is a sentence that contains the word transparency and also the word execution in close proximity without anyone apparently noticing.
Hasan, who is representing himself in related civil proceedings and has previously attempted to be designated as an enemy combatant in apparent hopes of martyrdom, has not commented on whether he finds the proposed publicity arrangement satisfying. His preferences, in this specific area, are considered not particularly relevant.
The execution, when scheduled, will be the first military execution in the United States since 1961. The last one was also not televised, though in fairness the bar for watchable content was considerably lower and people made do.
Hegseth did not specify what channel.
The story we are making fun of: https://abcnews.com/Politics/hegseth-hasan-execution-public/story?id=137110734