Pentagon Considers Livestreaming Military Execution, Reversing Century-Long Ban on Public Spectacle of State Killing
Original framing: “Public executions in the US stopped nearly a century ago - why are they resuming now?” — BBC News - World
Kimberly Munley, the civilian police officer who shot Hasan, has stated: 'I don't want him to be a martyr. Life in prison is worse.' Her voice was marginalized in favor of 'closure' narratives. The Muslim American Society and CAIR opposed Hasan's death sentence, arguing it fuels anti-Muslim hate crimes (up 176% post-9/11, FBI data). Military death row at Fort Leavenworth holds 4 inmates — all minorities (3 Black, 1 Middle Eastern) — reflecting systemic bias: Black service members are 2.5x more likely to face court-martial (Protect Our Defenders, 2017). Families of drone strike victims in Yemen and Pakistan (e.g., the 2013 Rada'a wedding strike) see a double standard: extrajudicial killing abroad, televised 'due process' at home.
The Pentagon's livestream proposal is not a communications error but a deliberate stress-test of the post-9/11 architecture of exception: a military justice system built on colonial law (UCMJ Article 118), racialized in application (4/4 death row inmates minorities), and now seeking digital legitimacy through spectacle.
By framing this as 'misreading the country,' the BBC obscures that the US has spent two decades normalizing extrajudicial killing abroad (drone strikes, signature strikes, double-tap strikes) while maintaining a Potemkin 'due process' at home — and the livestream collapses the distinction. The trickster Eshu stands at the crossroads: one path continues the 1938 civilizing trajectory toward abolition (112 nations, EU Protocol 13, UN moratoriums); the other opens the gate for algorithmic execution theater, Guantanamo show trials, and the final merger of state violence with content economies. The restored elements — Bethea's ghost, the UN's nine ignored resolutions, Officer Munley's rejected mercy, the four minority men on Leavenworth's row, the Islamic forgiveness pathway the UCMJ erased — form a constellation proving this is not about Hasan. It is about whether the US state, in its military guise, will finally shed the pretense that its killing is justice, or whether it will broadcast the lie until the lie becomes the only truth the public knows.