President Donald Trump and his advisers are mulling whether to no longer livestream the execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
The discussions come amid a hesitancy over whether broadcasting the execution could super charge anti-American propaganda, particularly among Islamic-extremist groups, or simply turn the execution into a spectacle that reflects poorly on the U.S, the sources said.
Some officials, the sources said, have raised concerns about the optics of broadcasting an execution, particularly one in which a firing squad would shoot a paralyzed man confined to a wheelchair.
Hasan was paralyzed from the waist down during an exchange of gunfire with police during his 2009 rampage.
Last week Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth vowed to make the execution public and confirmed it would be livestreamed. The Pentagon maintains the livestream is moving forward, with a defense official saying Tuesday in a statement: “The Secretary is correct. It will be live streamed. Details will follow.”
Multiple people familiar with the planning described concerns behind the scenes about the video being used as propaganda by extremist groups.
Hasan told Army officials after his arrest that he had hoped to die during the attack and become a martyr and said he would still consider himself a martyr if he were executed, court records show.
The president has asked a number of advisers and allies to weigh in on whether the Pentagon should move forward with livestreaming the execution. During discussions, a range of ideas have been floated, sources said.
Among the options being weighed is broadcasting the period immediately before the execution and cutting away before the firing squad shoots Hasan, an official familiar with the planning described. Another option being discussed is positioning the camera outside the execution area, potentially showing Hasan being brought in without broadcasting his death.
When asked about the livestream last week, Trump said, “They’re making a determination about that,” but agreed either way Hasan should die.
The White House has not yet returned a request for comment.
Additionally, Vice President JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson have said they wouldn’t watch the execution. Opposition or hesitancy has been less focused on Hasan’s death sentence which has broad support among Republicans, but on the decision to broadcast it.
CNN was the first to report the debate among Trump and his advisers about whether to go through with the livestream.
On Nov. 5, 2009 Hasan, then an Army psychiatrist, opened fired on clusters of troops in a building at Fort Hood, killing 12 and wounding 32 others. He was sentenced to death in 2013 and has been incarcerated at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.
Hasan described his attack as an act of jihad against American troops for the wars being waged in Iraq and Afghanistan which he viewed as immoral.
The military has not executed a death-row prisoner since 1961, when the sentence was carried out by hanging.
The Army had been preparing since at least February for the possibility of executing one or more of its four death-row inmates, including Hasan, but those plans centered on lethal injection at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, where the Justice Department carried out a series of executions during Trump’s first term.
Hegseth’s announcement last week that Nidal Hasan’s execution would be livestreamed caught Army planners by surprise, according to three officials familiar with the preparations, adding another complication to an execution the service is already scrambling to organize.
The Army has not carried out an execution by firing squad since 1945 and is still developing procedures for doing so, including determining how many shooters would participate and what type of chair would be used to secure Hasan.
Lethal injection had been the service’s only authorized means of executions since the 1980s until a 2023 rule change granting the Army secretary broad authority over the methods which death row inmates are executed.
The last public execution in the U.S. was in 1936 in Kentucky.
Public executions were gradually outlawed by some states beginning in the 19th century and has long become taboo across much of the developed world. They remain in practice in North Korea, Iran and the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
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