Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin addressed concerns on Sunday about a proposal to broadcast the execution of Nidal Hasan — the former Army officer convicted in the fatal shooting of 13 people at Fort Hood in Texas — telling a news outlet he did not view the planned livestream as carrying an elevated radicalisation risk or as likely to confer martyr status on Hasan. Mullin added that those who act against the country should expect to face consequences in proportion to what they have done.

Hasan, who had served as an Army psychiatrist, was convicted of carrying out the 2009 attack at Fort Hood, which left 13 dead and wounded 32 others. He faces a firing squad execution set for December 3.

A proposal put forward by Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth the previous week to televise the execution live drew objections from members of both parties. No final decision has been made on whether the execution would air on television, though President Trump has indicated he is open to the idea.

Mullin told a television news outlet that the administration had weighed the potential risks involved, adding that viewership would remain a matter of personal choice rather than obligation.

Some observers have raised concerns that televising the execution could provide militant organisations with usable content for recruitment purposes while also elevating the threat level for Americans both domestically and overseas.

Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski wrote in a post on X that the proposal belonged to a tradition of governance more common in authoritarian states than in the United States, arguing that proceeding with it would hand Hasan a form of public standing he had long sought, and that the integrity of how justice is carried out matters as much as the verdicts it delivers.

Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, put forward the view that carrying out such an execution in public could provide extremist groups with a ready-made propaganda tool, accelerate the spread of radicalisation, and leave American personnel, diplomats, and civilians abroad more exposed to harm.

Hasan, left paralysed by gunfire during the attack and now confined to a wheelchair, testified in court that he had opened fire on service members who carried no weapons inside a packed medical building at Fort Hood. He told the court that his actions were driven by a conviction that he was acting in defence of Muslims and the Taliban in Afghanistan against the US military.

Were the execution to proceed, it would mark the first time the US military had carried out an execution since 1961, and the first time it had done so by firing squad since the Second World War. Such a broadcast would also place the event among the first executions carried out before a live public audience anywhere in the country in close to a hundred years.