Guardian's Tait compares Hegseth execution plan to Iran's 2005 public hanging

Reporter recounts lashes, stabbing, and crowd chants at Pakdasht execution

A Guardian opinion piece published Friday by correspondent Robert Tait drew a direct comparison between Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to publicly execute Nidal Malik Hasan and a public hanging Tait witnessed in Iran in 2005.

Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009, is the subject of the planned execution, which Hegseth — described by Tait as the self-styled “secretary of war” — has said he envisions as a publicly staged firing-squad event. “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,” Hegseth said, with what Tait described as “barely concealed relish,” in remarks to the rightwing Real America’s Voice network.

Tait based his comparison on his experience as a newly arrived Guardian correspondent in Iran in March 2005, when he covered the public execution of Muhammad Bijeh in the town of Pakdasht, about 35 miles from Tehran. Bijeh, a convicted child serial killer who had reportedly murdered 17 children and three adults, was hanged from a crane after receiving 100 lashes as part of an Islamic punishment, with officials taking turns administering the blows, Tait wrote.

Drawing from his original 2005 report for the Guardian, Tait described Iranian police cars touring the town before the execution, with officers using loudspeakers to summon local residents to attend. Tait and a BBC colleague were stopped by authorities and taken to a municipal office, where a court official asked the correspondent what he thought of the proceedings. After the hanging, the same official returned to justify the public staging: “Look at the way the emotions of the people have calmed down. We had to hold it in public.”

Tait described the condemned man’s “muffled cries of agony” and bloody streaks on his bare back from the lashes. While Bijeh stood awaiting execution, a youth said to be the brother of one of the child victims rushed the platform and stabbed him, Tait wrote. Bijeh was then hoisted from the crane while the crowd chanted “Allahu Akbar” — “God is great” — and “marg bar Bijeh” — “death to Bijeh.” The father of one of the murdered children urged the crane operator to “turn him around, make him swing,” and the operator obliged, according to Tait’s account.

Tait wrote that he watched the scene with “rapt fascination, knowing I was witnessing a horror — yet also with a detachment that to this day gives me pause.” He took a photograph of Bijeh’s limp body hanging above the town square, asking himself whether it was morally the right thing to do. “Now, I am sure it was not,” he wrote.

The correspondent contrasted the Iranian spectacle with another execution he had covered: the 2001 lethal injection of Timothy McVeigh at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. McVeigh killed 168 people in 1995 with a truck bomb outside a federal building in Oklahoma City. That execution, Tait wrote, took place behind closed doors, although McVeigh’s high-profile crime had generated intense media and public interest in his death.

In Iran, Tait wrote, officials had “deliberately fanned voyeuristic impulses for what seemed like the purposes of flaunting authoritarian power.” The experience served as “something of a moral compass” in his subsequent reporting on the Iranian regime.

Tait’s piece framed the planned U.S. execution in those terms. “How odd it now seems, therefore, for the US defense secretary to be proudly laying the groundwork for an event that feels as though it could be organized by the authorities in Tehran,” he wrote. “It raises the question of whether, at least under Donald Trump, Washington and Tehran’s values are really so different after all,” Tait wrote.