Vance won’t watch livestreamed execution of Fort Hood mass shooter Nidal Hasan
by Kerry Picket, Mike Glenn · The Washington TimesVice President J.D. Vance said he does not plan to watch the firing-squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, which is scheduled to be livestreamed.
Hasan, a former Army psychiatrist, will be executed by firing squad on Dec. 3 at Fort Hood, the same Texas post where he killed 13 people and injured 32 others in a 2009 jihad-inspired shooting.
When asked by White House reporters if the public execution meshed with his Christian faith, Mr. Vance questioned whether the livestreamed event would take place.
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“I don’t know that that’s actually going to happen,” he said. “But what I try to remind people is … this is a guy who committed, in my view, the worst terrorist attack on American soil outside of 9/11.”
He said Hasan, who opened fire at the base’s Soldier Readiness Processing Center, “gunned down these people where they lived.”
“Whatever the controversy is about the method of the execution, I hope that people don’t forget that this is a guy who brutally murdered a lot of innocent people,” he said. “If it’s through live stream, I’m not going to be watching it.”
SEE ALSO: ‘Barbaric spectacle’ or ‘no-brainer’? Lawmakers split over livestreaming an execution
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Thursday that the public will be able to watch the execution of Hasan by livestream.
“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” he told the conservative news website Human Events. “People need to understand that there are serious consequences for these types of things.”
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Mr. Hegseth said the decision to recommend a firing squad as the means of execution was a “no-brainer,” and the choice of Fort Hood as the location for it was not a coincidence.
Acting Army Secretary Adam R. Telle announced the date and location Tuesday, after Mr. Hegseth’s recommendation and Mr. Trump’s approval of the death sentence.
Hasan was a major in the Army’s medical corps and self-identified as an Islamic jihadist. He carried out the attack on unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood under that ideology, officials said.
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Mike Glenn
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Kerry Picket
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