The Nidal Hasan Execution

President Trump, in our view, made the right decision against livestreaming the execution of Nidal Hasan. The president did so after apparently overruling the secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, who had announced last week that the execution would be aired publicly. Yet opposition emerged in the days following, particularly from the religious leadership, and the president announced his decision today. He put out a thoughtful and reasoned statement.Mr. Trump described Hasan, an ex-Army major “turned traitor,” as an “evil man” and noted that he killed 13 persons, “including a pregnant soldier, who died, along with her unborn son, and injured, very seriously, 32 more innocent people.” The FBI, Mr. Trump noted, had “intercepted electronic communications” between Hasan and a radical Yemeni-American cleric but “investigators concluded that Hasan’s emails were not a threat.”That assessment by the Obama administration, Mr. Trump noted, “was later considered to be a key intelligence failure.” Mr. Trump reckoned that “streaming the execution for all to see might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists.” Yet Mr. Trump concluded that “many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device.”Was Hasan a terrorist? The United States Army tried him for murder as opposed to terrorism. Yet the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service designates Hasan’s attack as an instance of “American Jihadist Terrorism,” an appraisal echoed by other scholars and researchers. The Fort Hood incident, per the CRS, reflected the risk that “some Americans — even if a tiny minority — are susceptible to ideologies supporting a violent form of jihad.”One reason to proceed with the execution is that there is no doubt about Hasan’s guilt. Hasan admitted it in the trial. Hasan, born in America to Palestinian immigrants, also stated that he had chosen to “switch sides” in what he called a “war on Islam.” This could be the seat of Mr. Trump’s claim that Hasan “turned traitor.” Treason, the Constitution ordains, can consist “only of levying war against the United States” or “adhering to their enemies.”No doubt this is all part of why Mr. Trump wrote that Hasan “will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed.” He said that the execution could be viewed in person by the immediate families of the victims, if that is their choice. “They deserve to witness JUSTICE,” the president wrote. By our lights the decision not to stream the execution adds to the solemnity that civilized countries attach to the question of capital punishment.

The Nidal Hasan Execution

The Nidal Hasan Execution

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