Daley urges Australian leaders to condemn livestreamed execution

Hegseth: firing squad ‘as it should be’ for radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks

Guardian Australia columnist Paul Daley called the planned livestream of Nidal Hasan’s firing-squad execution “a significant lurch in the US from civilisation towards savagery” and pressed Australian political leaders to condemn it. “A proposal to livestream the killing of Nidal Hasan by firing squad opens a window ever wider to the Trump administration’s complete moral vacuity,” he wrote.

Daley’s column, published Friday, responds to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s announcement that Hasan — the former Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at a U.S. Army base in 2009 — would face a firing squad of soldiers, with the execution broadcast publicly. The U.S. Defense Department later confirmed the execution would be livestreamed. Daley said viewers could “tune in to the livestream on Thursday 3 December to watch a military firing squad shoot the life out of Hasan.”

Daley opened the column with “More fool me!” and wrote that he had believed nothing the administration could do or say was capable of shocking him any longer. He described Hegseth as “one of the Trump cabinet’s bigger boofheads — the uber Christian nationalist, crusader-fantasist and ‘secretary of war’ Pete Hegseth.”

Announcing America’s decision to turn killing into a form of entertainment, Hegseth said: “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 there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”

“But now we have execution TV,” Daley wrote, describing a livestream that would let viewers “watch a military firing squad shoot the life out of Hasan.” He wrote that state-sanctioned killing as entertainment had brought “the world’s supposedly greatest (or formerly greatest) democracy” to “an horrific new moral nadir.” A country that “now wants to turn the execution of a human being – no matter what their crimes – into a live entertainment event,” he added, “promises to redefine depravity.” The fact that America remained “Australia and the west’s most relied-upon and trusted ally despite the global wrecking ball the second Trump administration has proved to be,” Daley wrote, “was already cause for deep concern.”

Given that American states continue to execute convicted criminals, Daley asked where the United States might “ultimately draw the line,” writing that “no doubt the ilk of Hegseth in American society – and elsewhere – will count down the days until they can tune in to the live coverage of Hasan’s execution in droves.” He asked whether audiences might “cry out for more – for livestream cameras in the death chambers across the land of the free?” and how the “populist administration” might respond. “If you think it’s a fanciful question,” he added, “consider how far American governance and presidential values have slid in the moral murk in the past two years alone.” It was, he wrote, “hard to contemplate a more audacious appeal to American society’s darker angels than this looming entertainment event.” “But there we are,” he concluded. “We have arrived.”

“It would be heartening today to hear political leaders the world over condemn Hegseth and Trump’s planned introduction of Ghoul TV,” Daley wrote.

Turning to Australia, Daley noted that federal governments there have “for a long time opposed capital punishment,” and asked whether the prime minister and his senior ministers would “stand up and condemn without qualification this depraved plan for America to livestream an execution.” He pressed leaders of other parties, “some of whom have, after all, supported capital punishment,” and wrote: “We’re waiting.”

He linked the question to the “$368bn (and counting) Aukus submarine deal,” asking “how much further into the moral quagmire must America wallow” before Australia rethinks what he called its “craven military dependence on Washington.”

The columnist placed the announcement alongside what he described as “reckless global militarisation including a threat at the UN to annihilate Iran, a litany of sexual misconduct allegations against the commander in chief, claims of blatant presidential corruption,” and wrote that “they have all ceased to surprise and shock us, so inured has the world become to Donald Trump’s monstrous narcissism and maladministration.”

“You can’t choose your family,” Daley wrote. “But you can choose your friends and allies. And you can also tell them firmly when they’ve careened off the ethical rails.” He added: “Actions speak louder than words.” The planned livestream, he wrote, “says it all about what is happening in America today, opening the window ever wider on the Trump administration’s moral vacuity and its paucity of human decency.”

He ended the column with a line addressed to Trump and Hegseth: “Pass the popcorn, Don and Pete!”

Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist.