Nidal Hasan, if President Trump has his way, will be the first person to be publicly executed in the US for 90 years. It will be the first US execution ever to be televised.

Four years ago, I co-authored a chapter examining Hasan’s on-line indoctrination into religious terrorism for the Oxford University Press book Lone-Actor Terrorism. Hasan was an army psychiatrist with the rank of major, who had trained at Walter Reed. In a blaze of fervor, Hasan murdered 13 people, including a pregnant woman, and injured 32 others at the military base at Fort Hood in cold blood on November 5, 2009.

Hasan admitted guilt and claimed he wanted to stop deployment of troops to Afghanistan. He was sentenced to death. His would also be the first US military execution for 60 years.

Public executions are banned under international law – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. The US is a signatory to both the Covenant and the Convention. Violation of these agreements is a crime. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insists that the execution will go ahead.

This is a shameful and barbarous act. If the execution goes ahead in public, then those who have ordered it should be tried for their capricious violation of US and international law.

ref: Lone-Actor Terrorism: Understanding Online Indoctrination, Steven Hassan, Jon Caven-Atack, Mansi J. Shah, and Simran Malhotra in Lone-Actor Terrorism: An Integrated Framework, eds. Holzer, Dew, Recupero, Gill, Oxford University Press, 2022.