Live streaming of the firing squad: an unpublished piece that sums up the US Pentagon well

“People need to understand that there are serious consequences for this sort of thing,” said US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, announcing the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, a former soldier who killed thirteen people at the Fort Hood military base in Texas in 2009 and was sentenced to death by a court-martial in 2013. The Pentagon had already announced in recent days that the sentence would be carried out by a firing squad on 3 December, but whilst speaking with Jack Posobiec – an activist with neo-Nazi sympathies, an anti-Semite and a propagator of all manner of conspiracy theories – Hegseth said that the execution would be live-streamed. The use of a firing squad is permitted in only five states and is very rare; live streaming of such an event has never been seen before.

However, it comes as no surprise that such an obscene initiative should have originated from this Pentagon, from this minister, from this Trump administration. This Pentagon has renamed itself the Ministry of War rather than the Ministry of Defence; it has launched a war against Iran without knowing how to fight modern wars; it has depleted American arsenals in an inefficient and costly manner; it has had to recoup funds for production from purchases made by European allies defending the Ukrainians; it has mishandled its own soldiers on warships and – most cruelly of all, because cruelty is the common thread here – it has tampered with the figures for soldiers killed and wounded in the war against Iran, because if you are killed whilst a truce is in force, you are not counted; it’s not war, is it? It’s a truce.

The minister, Pete Hegseth, appears to have limited understanding of how to conduct a war (let alone how to win one), but he is extremely concerned with physical fitness – his own and that of the soldiers: he posts videos of himself running and doing push-ups, wearing tight-fitting T-shirts to display his muscles and thus present his ideal of the perfect soldier – beardless, toned, handsome, with testosterone tests to compensate for any perceived lack of masculinity – and to power – he has sacked generals and officials with decades of service whom he considered a threat – and to his own image; so if he isn’t wearing a T-shirt, he slips into a bright green uniform that makes him look like a dictator. This Trump administration wages one cultural war after another, increasingly imaginary ones; it abandons its allies, stirs up subversive political movements, puts business interests before any collective security interests, enriches itself beyond measure whilst riding the wave of corruption, and lashes out at every opportunity, because, as Adam Serwer wrote in less suspicious times – and we didn’t understand why back then, as it was 2018 – ‘cruelty is the point’.