It is odd for the US defense secretary to be laying the groundwork for an event that could be organized by Tehran

Pete Hegseth’s plans to stage a public execution resemble a grotesque Iran-imitation game.

Having failed over the past seven months to defeat the Tehran regime on the battlefield, the self-styled “secretary of war” now proposes to mirror its notorious practice of enforcing the death penalty as a grand public spectacle.

Warning follows Pete Hegseth announcement that firing squad execution of Fort Hood killer will be public

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Livestreaming an execution could cause post-traumatic stress disorder in the viewing public, mental health experts have said, after the US confirmed plans to broadcast the death by firing squad of a man who shot dead 13 unarmed soldiers.

The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, said on Thursday that Nidal Hasan, a former army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, would be executed by firing squad on 3 December. Officials later confirmed it would be livestreamed. It is believed it will be the first public execution in the US in almost a century.

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In a statement to the Guardian, Robin M Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said that her group is “not aware of any regulation or precedent for a military execution to be livestreamed on the internet or otherwise made widely available to the public”.

She added that “public executions are typically held in authoritarian countries to instil fear in the population, and to show the power and control of the government.”