Politics
Pentagon Books Firing Squad For 1pm, Requests Guests Arrive Early For Parking
By Mor Michael, . BSN Network. Satire.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Pete Hegseth announced Wednesday that the United States government will livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist who shot and killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, describing it as a public event the American people have earned the right to watch.
Hasan's death sentence, the first US military execution to be carried out in more than 60 years, is scheduled for 1pm on Thursday, December 3rd, at Fort Hood, Texas. The firing squad will conduct the sentence. Hegseth made the announcement on Real America's Voice, which is the correct venue for scheduling a public execution.
Pentagon officials later confirmed to the Associated Press that additional details, including presumably what the additional details would be, would follow.
"This is a moment of accountability," Hegseth said, in the way that people say 'accountability' when they mean 'something you are going to want to watch.' He added that the American people, particularly military families, deserve to see justice done, which is a different thing from saying that watching a man be shot by a squad is good television, though it is unclear how different.
The 1pm start time is specific. It implies preparation, a run of show, someone with a clipboard. It implies that someone, at some point this week, sat in a conference room at the Pentagon and said: okay, so, 1pm, and everyone in the room wrote it down.
Spokespeople were unable to confirm by press time whether Fort Hood would have sufficient cellular bandwidth to support a national livestream, which is the kind of sentence that has never appeared in the English language before.
Hegseth, who has described the event in terms that suggest he would like credit for the scheduling, called it a long time coming. Hasan was convicted in 2013. He has been on military death row for twelve years, which is a long time, though not longer than it has taken the Pentagon to figure out what it would like to do with its TikTok account.
"The families of the fallen have waited long enough," Hegseth said, which is true. The question of whether "long enough" ends at a livestream is a different question, and one Hegseth did not appear to be entertaining.
Pentagon officials noted the execution would be the first carried out by the US military since 1961. In 1961, there was no livestream. There was also no Real America's Voice. Both of these facts are available to anyone who would like them.
As of Wednesday evening, the Pentagon had not announced whether the event would be available on demand after the original air time, for viewers who had a conflict at 1pm.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/08/hegseth-fort-hood-shooter-public-execution