Admiral McRaven: Public execution is shameless and ignoble
William H. McRaven, a retired United States Navy four-star admiral, writes:
A 62-grain, 5.56-mm round leaves the barrel of a standard-issue M4 rifle at approximately 2,900 feet per second. When it strikes a human being, the results are violent, traumatic, and unpredictable. If Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has his way, such images will soon be broadcast to the American people. The Pentagon has announced that the execution of Nidal Hasan, the Army officer convicted of killing 13 fellow service members in a 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, in Texas, will be livestreamed.
According to Amnesty International, 17 people were publicly executed in 2025. Eleven of these were in Iran and six in Afghanistan. Is this what we have become? Iran? Afghanistan? Are we so weak, so insecure, that we must convince the world that we are still powerful by making a public spectacle of an execution? Or maybe Secretary Hegseth and President Trump intend this as a spectacle for the American people: a show of just how much testosterone the two men have surging through their veins.
No one should shed a tear for Hasan. I certainly won’t. But if Hegseth thinks that this public display will somehow deter others from horrible acts of violence, he is mistaken. Terrorists seek attention above all. Publicizing Hasan’s death therefore could incite other extremists to do equally egregious acts. And it adds to the narrative, advanced by our enemies and ever more worrying to our allies, that the United States has lost its way. [Continue reading…]
Catholics serving in the US Army should not participate in the firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan that the Pentagon is planning to livestream in December, a prominent US archbishop said on Monday.
In an unusually strongly worded statement, Archbishop Timothy Broglio, who oversees the spiritual care of Catholic members of the US armed forces, raised a series of objections to the unprecedented plan to broadcast the execution of Hasan, who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, in a 2009 shooting spree.
Broglio said he presided at the funeral of one of Hasan’s victims, and lamented the shooting. But the Ohio-born archbishop asked whether the US wanted to “imitate the terrorists of this world and make a public spectacle of barbarically killing our adversaries.”
“I oblige any Catholics assigned to the firing squad to request to be excused from this action contrary to the teaching of the Church,” Broglio said. [Continue reading…]