Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) said on Friday that carrying out a public execution would put the United States in the company of ISIS, al-Qaeda, or Russia, as the Pentagon prepares to livestream the execution of the soldier convicted in the 2009 Fort Hood massacre.
The congressman's criticism follows confirmation from the Defense Department that the execution of Nidal Hasan will be livestreamed — what CBS News reports would be the first public execution carried out by the United States in roughly 90 years. Hasan was convicted in the 2009 shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, that killed 13 people and wounded more than 30 others.
The Guardian reported that only two countries are known to systematically carry out capital sentences in public: Iran and Afghanistan. Citing Amnesty International figures, the outlet said the Taliban carried out six public killings in 2025 and Tehran 11, while Saudi Arabia appears to have ended the practice after decades of public beheadings in Riyadh. The Guardian also noted that ISIS, which controlled territory in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2019, conducted thousands of executions, many in public or on video.
Those comparisons are where Crow's argument lands. By his framing, a livestreamed American execution would place the country alongside regimes the United States has spent decades opposing.
Hegseth, for his part, has not framed the decision as entertainment or spectacle. The Defense Department has described the plan as a transparency measure — allowing the American public to witness the sentence carried out rather than reading about it after the fact. Supporters of the move argue that the families of Hasan's victims have waited more than a decade and a half for the sentence to be carried out at all, and that letting the country see it happen is a form of accountability, not brutality.
Hasan has been on death row at Fort Leavenworth since his 2013 conviction. His execution would be the first carried out by the U.S. military since 1961.
It is not yet known what technical format the livestream will take, who will be permitted to watch it, or what schedule the Defense Department is working toward. The department has not released those details publicly.
Crow is a Democrat representing Colorado's 6th Congressional District and has been a frequent critic of the Hegseth Pentagon. His remarks Friday are his most pointed yet on the execution plan, and they are likely to be echoed by other Democrats as the department moves forward.
Our Take
Let's be clear about what Jason Crow just did. A sitting member of Congress went on television and compared the United States of America — under a commander-in-chief elected by the American people — to ISIS and al-Qaeda. Not to a country that runs gulags. To the people who flew planes into the World Trade Center and publicly beheaded journalists.
If Crow thinks livestreaming the execution of a man who murdered 13 U.S. soldiers while shouting in Arabic is somehow equivalent to the savagery of the Islamic State, then he needs to spend an afternoon reading the criminal complaint from Fort Hood. Hasan shot unarmed soldiers at a processing center. He planned it. He did it for the cause. The comparison Crow is reaching for isn't just wrong — it's an insult to every family who buried someone that day.
And notice what Crow is really arguing. His side, not long ago, told us that executing terrorists at all was inhumane. Then they told us the military was too soft to fight. Now they're telling us that letting the American public see justice done is too hard. There is no version of the world in which a Democrat looks at Hasan and decides the real problem is Pete Hegseth.
September 11 happened because we didn't take the threat seriously enough. Fort Hood happened because the same ideology that drove those hijackers was sitting inside an American military base and nobody connected the dots. The least we can do, 17 years later, is let people watch the verdict get carried out.
Patriots, the Left is going to run with this one — expect "Hegseth's gulag" segments for weeks. So the question is simple: do you want a government that hides what it does, or one that lets you watch? Crow has made his choice. Have you?
