Iran, Afghanistan, America?

A 62-grain, 5.56-mm round leaves the barrel of a standard-issue M4 rifle at approximately 2,900 feet per second.

When it strikes a human being, the results are violent, traumatic, and unpredictable.

If Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has his way, such images will soon be broadcast to the American people.

The Pentagon has announced that the execution of Nidal Hasan, the Army officer convicted of killing 13 fellow service members in a 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, in Texas, will be livestreamed.

According to Amnesty International, 17 people were publicly executed in 2025.

Eleven of these were in Iran and six in Afghanistan.

Is this what we have become? Iran? Afghanistan? Are we so weak, so insecure, that we must convince the world that we are still powerful by making a public spectacle of an execution? Or maybe Secretary Hegseth and President Trump intend this as a spectacle for the American people: a show of just how much testosterone the two men have surging through their veins.

No one should shed a tear for Hasan.

I certainly won’t.

But if Hegseth thinks that this public display will somehow deter others from horrible acts of violence, he is mistaken.

Terrorists seek attention above all.

Publicizing Hasan’s death therefore could incite other extremists to do equally egregious acts.

And it adds to the narrative, advanced by our enemies and ever more worrying to our allies, that the United States has lost its way.

When Osama bin Laden was killed, President Obama made a point of not releasing photographs of his body.