Hillary Clinton branded a plan to let the public watch Nidal Hasan’s firing-squad execution “barbaric,” then watched critics dig up her 2011 celebration of Muammar Gaddafi’s death.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton posted a sharp rebuke of a plan tied to the coming execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, calling any public livestream “barbaric” and “beneath our dignity as a country.” The post quickly drew a wave of pushback that zeroed in on her own past reaction to the killing of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
At the center of the fight is Hasan, the former Army major who gunned down fellow service members at a domestic military installation in 2009. Thirteen people died. Thirty-two more were wounded. A court-martial jury found him guilty of all 42 counts on August 23, 2013, and sentenced him to death days later. He remains one of four inmates on the U.S. Army’s death row.
Daily Mail reporting laid out the sequence: President Donald Trump approved the death sentence, Acting Secretary of the Army Adam Telle directed that the execution proceed by firing squad, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the government would make the proceeding public and watchable.
In a Thursday interview with Real America’s Voice, Hegseth did not mince words about how the execution would be handled.
"We'll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it's public."
He added a second point aimed at anyone tempted to treat mass murder as abstract policy.
"People need to understand that there's serious consequences for these types of things."
Trump, speaking at a Wednesday political event in Texas, backed the firing-squad method and said of Hasan, “he deserves it.” Before travel to Syracuse, New York, on Friday, the president again endorsed the method and stayed noncommittal on any livestream, saying officials were “making a determination about that.”
He put the bottom line plainly.
"I really don´t care how he goes, as long as he goes. And I think the death penalty is a very worthy way of going for him."
Clinton’s social media response framed the livestream idea as a national disgrace and urged people to “Push back on this.” Critics immediately answered with her 2011 comment to reporters after Gaddafi’s death: “We came, we saw, he died,” delivered with a laugh as graphic images of the dictator’s capture and corpse circulated widely.
Jack Posobiec put the contradiction in blunt terms online.
"You cheered when Gaddafi was publicly sodomized to death."
Another critic joked that Clinton prefers her executions kept private. The contrast wrote itself for conservative readers: moral lectures about dignity after years of selective outrage do not land cleanly when the record shows delight at a foreign strongman’s bloody end.
Clinton usually shuts off replies on her posts. This time the old clip did the work for her opponents.
Vice President JD Vance, traveling to Lima, Ohio, for a campaign rally on Friday, said he would not tune in if a livestream happened. He also cast doubt on whether one would occur at all and indicated the execution would likely take place in December.
Vance described the 2009 attack as “the worst terrorist attack on American soil outside of 9/11.” He reminded listeners what Hasan did.
"He took them at their most vulnerable and gunned them down, these people where they lived."
On the method debate, Vance tried to keep the focus where it belongs.
"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."
Hasan told jurors he had “switched sides.” He admitted starting the rampage and said he wanted to stop American soldiers from deploying to kill fellow Muslims. Government lawyers said he did not want an impending Afghanistan deployment. The Department of Defense long labeled the massacre “workplace violence,” not terrorism, a framing that still rankles families and service members who watched comrades die at a U.S. base.
Not every objection came from the left. Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina wrote that public executions are “what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do,” called a planned livestream “beyond disgusting,” and said, “It should not be happening in America.”
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy accused Hegseth of mimicking terrorist groups such as ISIS by broadcasting an execution. The U.N. human rights office said Friday that broadcasting the killing “is tantamount to a public execution and would breach the absolute prohibition of torture.”
Those arguments treat the camera as the scandal. They say far less about the man who opened fire on unarmed soldiers where they lived and worked, left 13 dead and 32 wounded, and has sat on military death row for more than a decade after a full court-martial.
The Justice Department announced earlier this year that firing squads would become a permitted method of federal execution as the administration works to move capital cases forward. For Hasan, the path is military: the president alone can approve a death sentence for a military prisoner, Trump gave that approval, and Telle ordered the firing-squad execution.
Hasan was shot during the attack and left paralyzed from the waist down. He has been one of only four inmates on the Army’s death row. The 2009 slaughter remains the deadliest attack on a domestic military installation in U.S. history.
None of that history vanishes because officials discuss whether the public may watch the sentence carried out. The victims were real. The convictions were real. The death sentence has stood since 2013.
Clinton’s post asked the country to treat a livestream as uniquely beneath American standards. Her critics answered with the Gaddafi remark and the laugh that followed it. The public can hold both facts at once: a senior Democrat now lectures about dignity, and the same figure once celebrated a dictator’s violent end in real time.
Trump and Hegseth have treated Hasan’s sentence as unfinished business after years of delay. Vance has refused to turn the method fight into the main story. Tillis and Murphy object to cameras. The U.N. objects on torture grounds. Hasan’s jury already decided the core question in 2013.
Thirteen American lives ended on a U.S. post because a major decided his cause mattered more than theirs. A firing squad does not rewrite that record. Neither does a social media lecture from a former secretary of state whose own words on another killing still sit on tape.
Justice delayed is still justice owed, and the country does not owe the Fort Hood killer a quiet fade from memory.
