The White House’s decision to call off the live broadcast of the first U.S. military execution in 65 years does not obscure the reality of American state, police, and imperial violence.
According to Atlas Diplomacy, an opinion piece titled “Canceling the Nidal Hasan Execution Livestream Leaves America’s Killing Machine Intact” by Hossam el-Hamalawy has been published in The New Arab. Examining the Trump administration’s plan to execute Nidal Hasan by firing squad and the Pentagon’s initial proposal to livestream it, the piece argues that lethal state violence in the United States—from execution chambers and police killings to structural poverty and foreign wars against countries like Iran and Venezuela—remains central to how U.S. elites exercise power. Below is a summary of the piece.
Following bipartisan backlash, Donald Trump canceled the Pentagon’s plan to livestream the execution of former U.S. Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan, though he remains scheduled to face a firing squad on December 3—which would mark the U.S. military’s first execution since 1961 after a 65-year hiatus. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, known for his crusader tattoos and ties to patriarchal Christian nationalism, sought an audience for the killing, but removing the cameras does not represent a retreat from state violence.
Official data shows that the machinery of death across the U.S. judicial and policing systems remains fully operational. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, executions in the United States rose from 25 in 2024 to 47 in 2025. Beyond execution chambers, Campaign Zero’s Mapping Police Violence project reported that U.S. police killed at least 1,314 people in 2025—an average of 3.6 per day—with Black people 2.6 times as likely to be killed as white people.
Structural violence inside the United States also claimshundreds of thousands of lives without warrants or guns. A 2023 study in JAMA Internal Medicine linked poverty to approximately 183,000 U.S. deaths in 2019, while another study found that unhoused individuals under 65 face 3.5 times the mortality risk of housed people. Researchers also estimated that more than two million U.S. deaths during the 2020 and 2021 pandemic years could have been avoided had U.S. mortality rates matched those of 21 other wealthy nations.
This domestic cruelty—accompanied by masked immigration raids and crackdowns on protesters—takes on imperial proportions abroad. U.S. forces seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, Trump floated taking Greenland by force before ruling it out at Davos, and the United States and Israel launched another war against Iran in February—demonstrating that Washington’s rulers preside over a lethal apparatus at home and abroad that continues to operate regardless of whether the livestream camera is turned off./ Source
