Outrage grows over plan to livestream US military firing squad execution

Condemnation of US plans for a public execution by military firing squad escalated Friday, as Vice President JD Vance cast doubt on whether it would be livestreamed as proposed and insisted he would not watch if it is. Nidal Hasan's execution -- scheduled for December 3 at Fort Hood, Texas, where he gunned down 13 people in 2009 -- is set to be the first by US military firing squad since 1945. Asked about the planned livestream, Vance told journalists he does not "know that that's actually going to happen." "This is a guy who committed, in my view, the worst terrorist attack on American soil outside of 9/11," Vance said, but added that if the execution is broadcast live, "I'm not going to be watching it." Representative Austin Scott of President Donald Trump's Republican Party said he supported executing Hasan but "livestreaming executions is what jihadists do. America is better than that." Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Hasan should "face justice" but that public executions are "the kind of thing Iran and the Taliban do. Is this who we want to be associated with?" A Pentagon official told AFP on Thursday that the execution would be streamed live, after US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said "we'll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it's public." But Trump on Friday contradicted Hegseth's confirmation, and said there has been no decision yet on whether to publicly broadcast the execution, which he supports. "They are making a determination about that, but he will be killed," Trump said. "I really don't care how he goes, as long as he goes." The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights condemned the move, saying in a message sent to AFP on Friday that "the livestreaming of an execution is tantamount to a public execution and would breach the absolute prohibition of torture." Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, said it was a "barbaric promotion of a culture of death and must be reconsidered." Twelve of the 13 people Hasan killed and 30 of those he wounded were soldiers. He was shot by a civilian police officer who responded to the attack and is paralysed from the waist down. Hasan chose to conduct his own defence during the trial but called no witnesses and gave no testimony, and made no attempt to deny the charges. He was sentenced to death by a military jury in 2013. Court-appointed defence attorneys expressed concern that he was seeking execution. The court that convicted Hasan was told he was opposed to the US military's occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and that he had spoken online with an alleged Al-Qaeda figure, Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen subsequently killed in a US drone strike in Yemen. Report by AFP