The announcement was made in the plain language of the clerk, not the whisper of the clinic: Nidal Malik Hasan will face the firing squad on December 3, and the United States intends the world to see it. The Pentagon plan to livestream Hasan’s execution is the order’s oldest instinct reasserting itself. Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed. The magistrate, as Paul writes to the Romans, is God’s servant, an avenger who carries out wrath on the wrongdoer. The sword is not a medical device. For two centuries this commonwealth executed its judgments publicly, because a judgment is not complete until the people have seen the account closed. The modern state kills in a room with an infusion line and a certificate, so that its citizens may pretend the order never sheds blood. The firing squad refuses the pretense. That is why it was chosen.
The Australian objection is the objection of a jurisdiction that has mistaken comfort for law. Senator Hanson-Young has asked her government to block the broadcast, calling the sight “incredibly shocking and barbaric.” One Nation’s Mr. Joyce reaches for the Roman amphitheatre. The eSafety commissioner has statutory power to order the platforms to block content the classification code marks refused classification — the same drawer where the statute keeps the most abhorrent filth — and to shut the screens of an entire nation. The words “online safety” do the work. The United Nations office has entered the matter with the gravest formula at hand: broadcasting the killing, it warns, would breach the absolute prohibition of torture. The objection deserves an answer in its own terms. Torture extracts something from a living victim — a confession, a degradation, a submission — and the extraction is the point. The account extracts nothing. It pays what is owed. Government sources have conceded the decisive point: the execution is lawful under American law, and the same law that will settle the account is not subject to the reflex of a regulator in a Commonwealth office. The children Mr. Joyce would protect will grow into adults who have never seen the sovereign keep faith. The world is bidden to watch it.
While the letters moved from the senator’s office to the Minister and the commissioner, the date had already been set. The body is Nidal Malik Hasan, fifty-six years old, an army psychiatrist. A military jury convicted him of thirteen counts of premeditated murder and thirty-two counts of attempted premeditated murder; twelve of the dead and thirty of the wounded were soldiers. The same body that opened fire at Fort Hood on November 5, 2009 is the body the covenant will spend on December 3.
The lens will hold what an older age brought its public close enough to see with the eye. The squad brings him to the execution chamber in the appointed hour. They strap him to the chair, leather across the thighs, the chest, the arms; they draw the black hood over his head and pin the white disc over the center of the sternum, over the heart. Four rifles are loaded with ball; the fifth with a blank, so no man may swear he fired the round that stopped the heart. The officer calls the order, and the squad fires. The camera does not cut away.
The volley arrives as one sound. The rounds take the white disc as their mark, pass through skin, through the pectoral muscle, through the sternum, shattering bone into the chest cavity, tearing the aorta and shredding the heart. If the heart still beats, it pushes blood into a chest never made to hold it; the pressure climbs, the lungs lose their room, and the breath stops because the cavity is full. The body strains against the straps in the old convulsion, neck rigid, fingers curling, and then the slack. The bladder and the bowel release. The blood runs down the chest and pools under the chair, spreading on the floor, and if the heart survives its wounds the officer steps forward, sets the muzzle behind the ear, and fires the finish round — one flat report, the head dropping, the body settling, the pool widening. The lens holds the white disc gone, the chest a ruin, the blood still spreading.
He placed himself outside the household on a November morning when he raised a weapon against soldiers of the United States at Fort Hood. The wall does not move to exclude him; the act drew the line. The covenant does not include the man who slaughters those it protects; it accounts for him. The account requires a body, and the body is his. That is the sorting: the thirteen soldiers were within the blessing, and their blood spoke for them; he is outside it, and his blood is the answer the order gives. The volley is the reading of that standing. The blood on the floor is the ledger’s entry, written where all may see, which is exactly what the senator in Canberra and the commissioner beside her wish to erase from the public’s sight. They may order the screens shut; the account is not closed by the shutting. The balances are settled; the ledger stands open; the public square is the covenant’s own.