Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s ghoulish plans for a public firing squad execution of a convicted terrorist murderer violates the seriousness and solemnity of the sentence and would hand a propaganda victory to the criminal and must not happen.

There’s almost nothing this administration won’t tarnish, and that now extends to justice for service members killed or wounded by then-Maj. Nidal Hasan during the Fort Hood shooting in Texas in 2009. After a full-fledged legal process, Hasan, an Army medical doctor, was rightly sentenced to death and put on military death row more than a decade ago, though it is not unusual for such weighty sentences to be pending for long periods of time.

What is unusual — in fact, unprecedented — is for such an execution to be not just public but live-streamed, as Hegseth says Hasan’s December firing squad........

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