Earlier this month,
Acting Secretary of the Army Adam R. Telle signed an
order
scheduling the execution of Nidal Hasan, a former Army major who was convicted of killing 13 people in a 2009 shooting at Fort Hood, Texas. Two days later, self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth made a startling announcement. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” Hegseth told the conservative Real America’s Voice News
network
, as the interviewer raised his eyebrows. The Department of War’s official “Rapid Response” Twitter account promptly
promoted
the clip.
Hegseth’s plan apparently won’t come to fruition. Amid outcry about the barbarity and optics of streaming the planned execution by firing squad — scheduled for December 3 at Fort Hood — President Donald Trump on Thursday called off the broadcast. “I think streaming the execution for all to see might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan but, many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device,” Trump
posted
on his social media website.
The Trump Administration’s Shameless Snuff-Film Fixation
Some news outlets, such as The New York Times,
framed
the planned killing as an aberration, claiming that “such a broadcast has little precedent, and releasing video of executions is most often associated with extremist militant groups like the Islamic State.” This narrative, however, overlooks a forgotten American cultural history in which filmed executions turned
government killings into spectacle
.
The practice of filming executions in America is effectively as old as cinema itself.
In 1897, a few years after the first motion pictures began to be exhibited in the United States, a Missouri farmhand named William Carr was convicted of murdering his daughter and sentenced to death by hanging. Filmmaker Frederick Guth, of the American Pho
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