Nidal Hasan Execution Will Not Be Livestreamed, Trump Says

The Army’s execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan will not be livestreamed after all, President Donald Trump said Thursday, reversing a plan the Pentagon announced a week earlier.

“He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed,” Trump wrote. Immediate family members of the victims may watch in person “if they so choose,” he said, according to Reuters.

Trump said a stream might have deterred others around the world, but that many people would not want to watch Hasan die, on a stream or any other way.

The execution remains set for Dec. 3 at 1 p.m. Central time at Fort Hood, Texas, where Hasan, then an Army psychiatrist, killed 13 people and wounded 32 in November 2009. It would be the first U.S. military execution since 1961 and the first by an Army firing squad since 1945.

The livestream plan, which a Pentagon official confirmed to Reuters on Oct. 8 and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth promoted on a podcast, drew criticism from across the political spectrum. Vice President JD Vance said the next day that he doubted it would happen and would not watch if it did. Republican Sens. Thom Tillis, Lisa Murkowski and John Curtis urged the Pentagon to reconsider, as did Democratic Sen. Mark Warner. Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, called it “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death,” the Associated Press reported. Recent polls showed most Americans opposed it.

Death penalty experts had told Reuters that a livestream would have been the first known broadcast of a lawful execution anywhere.

The Army has not said publicly how the firing squad will be chosen. Hasan could still challenge the execution in civilian federal court, which military law experts have said could push the date back.