Tableau synoptic des traits physionomiques: pour servir a l’étude du “portrait parlé” (1909)| Alphonse Bertillon / The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Public Domain
When US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth proposed livestreaming the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army major and psychiatrist convicted of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, he extended an invitation to the public: log on to your preferred device and watch the state kill. The invitation expanded the audience for state execution far beyond those normally permitted to witness it—state officials, lawyers, victims’ families, religious counsel—and was met with both political support and public revulsion. Indeed, even for proponents of the death penalty, the terrible banality of a death delivered live into the homes and devices of ordinary citizens seemed a bridge too far. As President Trump stated, while the execution “might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan … many very good and well-meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device.”
The state-executed body can be an anticlimactic one. Once dead, it can no longer offer the prospect of its annihilation as the material through which power might demonstrate its triumph. Broadening the audience for death and offering viewers a place alongside the state’s exercise of lethal power could, however, accomplish a political purpose whose effects would last far longer and travel much farther than the moment of killing. But what, precisely, were viewers being asked to see as spectators to Hasan’s execution? The consequences of mass murder? Justice at work—the righteous fulfillment of a deserved sentence? Or was the invitation asking viewers to share in the state’s account of what Hasan’s death, in particular, might mean?
Spectatorship is itself a political relationship. Michel Foucault famously opens Discipline and Punish with a description of thwarted French assassin Robert-François Damiens’s brutal 1757 public execution—his tortured limbs torn apart, his body burned, and his ashes scattered to the wind—presenting this killing, and its performance and spectacle, as exemplary of sovereign power. This is a power that affirms itself through both its capacity to exterminate and the spectacular, visible destruction of the most condemnable of bodies. The spectacle of killability—the politically produced condition in which certain people become available for killing through ways of seeing that render their destruction legitimate, necessary, or desirable— also positions viewers in specific ways: as participants in the expression of power, as intimate witnesses to a deserved retribution, and as encountering the destruction of another as reassurance of one’s own non-killability—of one’s security and belonging.
There is, in other words, a decidedly visual aspect to this sovereignty and the relationship it establishes: the claim of power to decide how state violence might appear and what this appearance means for both the recipients and viewers of its force. In modern execution, the state retains this impulse toward the visualization of its own violence. At the moment of death, it exercises an overwhelming capacity to dictate the surroundings and the minute actions of those authorized to kill, and to organize and display the body awaiting death. The livestream would have extended this intimate visual arrangement of power outward, embedding public spectatorship within the execution’s intended political effect: to make public viewing an affirmation of the state’s authority to kill, and to ask the public to understand a person’s death as something worth watching.
As others have pointed out, the outcry against the livestreamed execution obscures the extent to which this visual sovereignty already organizes death and dying in the American state. Despite condemnations that characterized the proposal as another signal of the headlong race toward authoritarianism, and despite suggestions that such an act belonged more properly to theocratic states like Iran and Afghanistan, American state killing—particularly of racialized populations—has long been a highly visible practice, one that is also regularly recorded, disseminated, and consumed by the public. Surrounding and informing Hasan’s proposed live execution is this wider network of visible death and the organized way of seeing that repeatedly marks some populations as more killable than others. From recordings of police killings to the inundation of footage of the increasingly brazen violence of ICE operations terrorizing neighborhoods across America, the public is repeatedly offered images of the violent subjugation of those whose captivity and murder are framed as necessary for collective security—even as these same images expose the naked brutality of the institutions responsible. To suggest that an officially livestreamed execution would have introduced an entirely unfamiliar relationship between spectators and state violence would be to ignore the pervasiveness of this reality.
The familiarity and visibility of death at the hands of the state also exist alongside its negation and obfuscation. Polling showed majority support for Hasan’s execution alongside overwhelming opposition to its broadcast: 53 percent supported executing Hasan by firing squad, while roughly 80 percent opposed livestreaming it. These numbers suggest that while we might be primed to accept someone’s killability, we reject the invitation to the spectacle of the dying and dead body. And yet, condemning the livestream while accepting the execution itself leaves the state’s authority to administer and deliver death largely intact. It might, to a certain degree, normalize and sanitize this authority as something unfolding in its proper domain, secreted away from a public that would rather not see its reality.
I began with the question of what the state wanted us to see in the livestreamed execution, but here, I want to pose a more specific question: what did the state propose we see with this particular death? What would seeing Hasan’s death, specifically, make both visible and possible? In my research on the visual politics of Guantánamo Bay and other sites of the war on terror, I have also returned repeatedly to a related question: why does a state deliberately produce and circulate images of violence and illegality that might expose it to condemnation? The answer to all these questions, I have found, requires attention to the violence such visibility justifies.
The visual politics of the war on terror has shown how the deliberate exhibition of Muslim bodies in the thrall of state power is central to the authorization and normalization of its forms of violence. Hegseth’s proposal to broadcast Hasan’s execution thus belongs within a longer history of the state making captive Muslim bodies publicly available as demonstrations of its authority and death-making capacities. Such images have long offered the viewing public an arranged and intimate encounter with Muslim captivity and subjection to state force and have encouraged a perception of this subjection as a natural and justifiable consequence. The familiar images of orange-clad men kneeling behind chain-link fences, shackled and deprived of sight and hearing, made bodily subjugation publicly recognizable as evidence of extraordinary danger. Such visual materials thus operate on several political levels: an image of a captive, bound, and insensate racialized “terrorist” body becomes at once visceral evidence of the state’s power, confirmation of this body’s presumed inherent danger, and a justification of the necessity for responding with extraordinary force.
Hasan’s positioning within this context also bears consideration. As a Muslim member of the American military who committed mass murder at an Army base, his case lends itself to a story of the enemy within, one imagined as having embedded himself to strike from the heart of the nation. His death thus becomes a broader demonstration of the military’s capacity to identify, subdue, and destroy such an enemy, and in the now-cancelled livestream, the audience was invited to recognize something larger, and more existential, than a single individual being defeated. In other words, the spectacle would have offered Hasan as both an individual and a type. While his crimes and conviction provide the legal justification for his punishment, the mode of killing—the antiquated firing squad—and the proposed staging of his death make it signify the destruction of a Muslim enemy more broadly, the vanquishing of the consummate Other. Making this particular death seeable thus continues the tradition of teaching viewers about whose destruction they may regard as legitimate, desirable, or satisfying: the state acts, the enemy dies, and the public recognizes the act as justice.
The connection between the force of this proposed spectacle and the wider exercise of American military violence informed by militant Christian ideologies should not be understated. The man who advanced the proposal, who wears a tattoo of “infidel” in Arabic on his arm and a Jerusalem cross on his chest, and who prays for the “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy,” has also overseen “unrelenting” bombing campaigns in Yemen and a war in Iran in which US forces struck a girls’ primary school in Minab—an attack a UN fact-finding mission found reasonable grounds to characterize as a war crime. He has authorized airstrikes in Somalia and championed the release of previously withheld heavy bombs to Israel. The livestream would thus have entered a political and visual world that is saturated not only with Muslim death, but also with images and livestreamed footage of Muslim death and killability. Of course, Hasan’s conviction of mass murder, the circumstances of Guantánamo detention, and the various imperial wars and genocidal campaigns against predominantly Muslim populations are materially different. Binding them together, however, is that broader visual field in which states offer dead bodies up for public viewing and consumption, and for the affirmation of power.
Hegseth’s proposal was rejected, and Hasan’s execution by firing squad is to proceed without the livestream, an apparent restoration of normalcy. But it would be a mistake to assume that withdrawing the livestream withdraws the relationship to killability that the proposal sought to establish. The broadcast sought to amplify the killability of the racialized Muslim subject as an object of both power and consumption. While its rejection reveals a limit, for now, to that invitation, the killable subject remains, awaiting his death.
