Outcry over US plans to livestream firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter

For more on this story, we can bring in our foreign affairs commentator, Douglas Herbert. Doug, good to see you. The death penalty has long divided the U.S. A planned public execution in December just sort of adds fuel to the fire. How did we get here? Yeah, well, how did we get here? Before I explain how we got here, let's hear the actual announcement itself. Just over a week ago, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of War, as he calls himself, Pete Hegseth talking to a right-wing TV personality. It was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks, and so he's going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be. And we'll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it's public, because people need to understand that there's serious consequences for these types of things. Last time you had this type of public execution by the military, you have to go back to 1961 in the United States. Last time it was by a firing squad, it was right after World War II. As far as a state-sanctioned public execution in the United States, nearly a century. You have to go back just over 90 years, August 1936 to Kentucky, where 20,000 people, spectators, gathered to watch the public hanging of a young black man who had been convicted of raping an elderly white woman. So over 90 years, this is not just exceedingly rare. This is a thing of the past in America. It's being resurrected now. You know, Donald Trump's Donald Trump's former director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Right. This is not some woke, shrinking, violent Democrat. This is Donald Trump's former terror counterterrorism director called this a, quote, propaganda win for both ISIS, the Islamic State group and for Al Qaeda. He says because they will use the optics from these videos and images to send, not just to justify, to recruit for recruitment drives because they will basically be able to co-opt the optics of the U.S. killing a Muslim man in a wheelchair because this army psychiatrist was shot in the process of his deadly rampage in 2009 and he was left paralyzed from the waist down. he's in a wheelchair, and using the optics of that to basically drive recruitment and to drive sympathy. This is exactly the type of thing that the terror groups have done. There are only two countries left, Delano, two countries that regularly do this type of thing, Iran, Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia seemed to have stopped in 2019. North Korea occasionally does it as well. But it is a very small short list of countries that do these types of public execution. I'm just curious, what are members of the military saying? Well, specific members there. They've just a group of 45 for former retired generals, plus admirals, plus high ranking military officers. You can see their letter that their letter there wrote an open letter to to the U.S. Congress, basically urging the Pentagon to back down from this sort of public execution aspect of this. They're not against the death penalty. They're not against putting this man to death. It's the manner in which it's being done. They say, A, it violates the U.S. Constitution's clauses against cruel and unusual punishment. And it is saying that you are basically doing this, it amounts to doing this as a public spectacle. It's like a bloodlust public spectacle that ends up being uniquely for the enjoyment and the bloodlust, if you will, of spectators who want to gather to actually watch this thing. It undermines actually the dignity of the U.S. military and it actually can boomerang right back and harm America's soldiers and national security because it is going to stoke hatred for America, but more specifically, a thirst for vengeance, perhaps specifically against American soldiers who will be seen as complicit in this action. And what about the U.S. president? Has he been listening to all this criticism to cancel this? Yes, he's been listening. Look, the U.S. president backs the death penalty. He backs this execution by firing squad. Now he seems to be I say seems to be because you never know with Trump. You never know with Trump until he says it. But he seems to be going back and forth. The other day, he says, well, he essentially said there's a school of thought that some people have thought for it. The live streaming, that is, some people are for live streaming this thing. Some people are against it. And he's basically holding us all in suspended animation here, waiting for his final decision, saying that he'll make that decision when it comes. He's clearly under pressure from within Trump world himself, which is aghast at the prospect of live streaming this, even if a lot of his supporters are staunch backbackers of the death penalty and do not oppose putting this man to death, even by firing squad. Doug, thank you very much for that.