皮特·赫格塞斯“致命性”崇拜的最新想法，是直播一名坐轮椅的大规模杀人犯被行刑队处决。
The latest idea to come out of Pete Hegseth’s cult of “lethality” is to livestream the execution, by firing squad, of a mass murderer in a wheelchair.
唐纳德·特朗普总统仍需给他的国防部长亮绿灯——指的是直播，而非处决本身。副总统JD·万斯已经表示他不会观看。但必须在12月3日前做出决定，届时行刑队将开枪执行。
President Donald Trump still needs to give his secretary of defense the green light — on the livestreaming, that is, not the execution. And Vice President JD Vance has already said he wouldn’t watch it. But a decision must be made by Dec. 3, when the firing squad is slated to shoot.
该如何决定？即使伦理或人道主义理由打动不了你，国家安全的冷酷、硬性核算也决定了绝不能允许直播。
What should that decision be? Even if ethical or humane arguments don’t move you, the cold, hard calculations of national security dictate that the livestreaming must not be allowed.
为理清头绪，我们需要将几件事区分开来。首先，受惩罚的罪行极其恶劣：2009年在胡德堡，时任美国陆军精神科医生的尼达尔·哈桑拔出手枪，高呼“真主至大”并开火，造成13人死亡、数十人受伤。
For clarity, we need to disentangle several things. First, the crime being punished was heinous: In 2009 at Fort Hood, Nidal Hasan, then a psychiatrist in the US Army, drew a pistol, said “Allahu akbar” and opened fire, killing 13 and injuring dozens more.
其次，哈桑在军事法庭上被依法定罪并判处死刑。第三，行刑队处决仍属合法，最高法院裁定其不属于“残酷和非常规惩罚”（南卡罗来纳州去年刚刚采用过这种刑罚）。第四，美国过去曾有公开处决，尽管最后一次这种公开场面发生在1930年代。
Second, Hasan was properly convicted in a court martial and sentenced to death, as the law allows. Third, execution by firing squad remains legal and does not count as “cruel and unusual punishment,” as the Supreme Court has ruled. (South Carolina made use of this punishment just last year.) Fourth, some executions in the US used to be public, although the last such spectacle took place in the 1930s.
真正新颖且不同寻常的是，赫格塞斯计划对处决过程进行直播。（2001年，一名法官曾拒绝在另一起著名案件中对处决进行直播的请求。）每个人似乎都对这一新举措有着即时且强烈的直觉反应。一些人，包括一位现共同领导赫格塞斯五角大楼一个项目的军事技术企业家，本能地表示赞同，认为“处决应当公开且残酷，而非私下且医疗化。”
What’s genuinely new and different is Hegseth’s plan to livestream the execution. (In 2001, a judge denied a request to livestream an execution in another famous case.) Everyone seems to have an immediate and visceral reaction to this novelty. Some people, including a military-technology entrepreneur who now co-leads a project for Hegseth’s Pentagon, instinctively agree, feeling that “executions should be public and brutal, not private and medicalized.”
另一些人则认为这一想德在道德上令人憎恶。美国主教会议主席保罗·库克利总主教称其为“宣扬死亡文化的野蛮行径”。美国军队总教区（实际上相当于一个独立教区）总主教蒂莫西·布罗利奥反问：“我们真的要效仿这世界上的恐怖分子，把野蛮杀害对手变成一场公开的表演吗？”
Others find the idea morally repugnant. Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the US Bishops’ Conference, called it a “barbaric promotion of a culture of death.”Timothy Broglio, the archbishop for the American military (which is in effect its own diocese), asked rhetorically: “Do we really want to imitate the terrorists of this world and make a public spectacle of barbarically killing our adversaries?”
参议院情报特别委员会首席议员马克·沃纳延伸了这一观点，称公开处决“是伊朗和朝鲜等威权政权的标志性做法”。他说，直播“可能让恐怖组织获得宣传胜利，助长极端化，并让海外的美国军人、外交官和公民面临更大风险。”为了验证这一推测，我询问了布莱恩·奥尼尔。他在共和党和民主党政府时期均曾供职于中央情报局，并在国家反恐中心轮岗工作过。如今他在佐治亚理工学院萨姆·纳恩国际事务学院教授战略情报。
Mark Warner, the ranking member of the Senate select committee on intelligence, extended this thought, calling public executions “the hallmark of authoritarian regimes like Iran and North Korea.”A livestream, he said, “could hand terrorist organizations a propaganda victory, fuel radicalization, and put American service members, diplomats, and citizens overseas at greater risk.”To test this suggestion, I asked Brian O’Neill. He worked for the CIA under Republican and Democratic administrations and did a rotation at the National Counterterrorism Center. These days he teaches strategic intelligence at Georgia Tech’s Sam Nunn School of International Affairs.
他在反恐工作中的一项职责曾是监督一个小组，该小组必须观看实况处决视频，受害者通常是被圣战分子俘获的西方人。奥尼尔回忆说，那些画面大多显示“用大砍刀斩首”。
One of his jobs in counterterrorism used to be overseeing a team who had to watch videos of live executions, typically of Western victims captured by jihadists. Much of that footage showed “beheading with a machete,” O’Neill recalls.
他告诉我，那场面太残忍了，所以他总是先观看他期望团队成员观看的任何内容。“你不能让一名年轻的分析师长期这样做，”他说；“最终这会把他们吃掉。”但那些人是专业人士，而将视频流媒体化在互联网上的整个目的，就是让任何人、任何地方都能观看它。这些观众可能包括成年人和儿童、美国人和外国人、朋友和敌人、理智者和精神失常者。
It was so gruesome, he told me, that he always watched whatever he expected his team members to watch. “You can’t keep a young analyst doing that” for long, he said; “eventually it’s going to eat them up.”But those were professionals, whereas the whole point of streaming a video on the internet is to let anybody anywhere view it. Those audiences may include adults and children, Americans and foreigners, friends and foes, the sane and the ill.
奥尼尔过去用来观看的恐怖分子视频，其制作者本意是将其作为一种宣传形式，以招募他人加入他们一方并对抗美国。他们针对不同的受众，希望传递自己的力量和敌人的屈辱，并强化其支持者的身份认同。然而，一旦他们发布了这些画面，就失去了对其的控制。那些希望在西方激进化穆斯林的恐怖分子，往往最终反而让他们感到厌恶和反感。
The terrorists whose videos O’Neill used to view intended their footage as a form of propaganda to recruit others to their own side and against the US. They aimed for different audiences, hoping to telegraph their power and the humiliation of the enemy, and to reinforce the identity of their supporters. As soon as they released the footage, however, they lost control over it. Terrorists hoping to radicalize Muslims in the West often ended up abhorring and repelling them.
赫格塞思也“想要控制信息，但那张图像一旦出去，他就再也无法控制信息了，”奥尼尔说。这些画面将被不同目标和叙事的人们剪切和编辑。
Hegseth too “wants to control the message, but the minute that image goes out, he has no control of the message anymore,” O’Neill said. The footage will be cut and edited by different people with different objectives and narratives.
例如，赫格塞思认为，直播这种暴力惩罚能够威慑他人不再犯类似罪行。但威慑谁呢？普通人，甚至怀恨在心的罪犯，也不会因此而踏上杀戮之路。自杀式炸弹客之 definition 接受被杀害的事实。有些人，比如哈桑，之所以幻想杀人和死亡，正是因为他们想成为烈士。
For example, Hegseth assumes that livestreaming this violent punishment will deter others from similar crimes. Whom, though? Ordinary people, even criminals with a grudge, won’t go on murderous rampages anyway. Suicide bombers by definition accept being killed. Some, like Hasan, fantasize about killing and dying precisely because they want to become martyrs.
“我可以挑选任何恐怖分子组织——博科圣地、ISIS、基地组织，或者某些巴基斯坦恐怖分子组织，”奥尼尔告诉我。“他们会剪掉前后所有内容。他们只谈论处决过程，然后继续剪辑，它可能只是他们在一个激进化网站上发布的一张图片，而这张图片可能会病毒式传播。”这种扭曲的目的和效果，就是把哈桑从一个大规模杀人犯变成一个受害者，甚至英雄。
“I could pick any terrorist group — Boko Haram, ISIS, Al Qaeda, or some Pakistani terrorist group,” O’Neill told me. “They crop out everything before and after. They just talk about the execution, then they go ahead and clip it, and it could just be an image that they post on a radicalized website, and that can go viral.”The perverse goal and effect would be to turn Hasan from a mass murderer into a victim or even hero.
奥尼尔还指出，对美国国家安全的另一种威胁，只是稍微更隐蔽一些：其软实力、道德地位以及盟友信任的丧失正在加速。
O’Neill also points out a different and only slightly subtler threat to America’s national security: the acceleration of its loss of soft power, moral standing and trust by allies.
世界上大部分地区已经对此作出震惊的反应。澳大利亚总理安东尼·阿尔巴尼斯认为“直播任何人的死亡这一想法完全令人反感”，并承诺“无论付出什么代价，都要阻止这种事情发生。”（目前尚不清楚具体会采取什么措施。）联合国表示，直播将违反国际上禁止酷刑的规定。
Much of the world has already reacted with shock. Anthony Albanese, the prime minister of Australia, finds “the idea of livestreaming the death of anybody completely abhorrent” and pledged to “do whatever we can to stop that occurring.” (It’s unclear what that would be.) The United Nations has said the livestreaming would breach international prohibitions of torture.
美国将永远无法再谴责伊朗、朝鲜或任何国家因其公开处决的野蛮行为。它将放弃在国际政治中仍然拥有的任何道德制高点。而且它可能正在为下一代尼达尔·哈桑埋下种子，而这些人誓言要为他复仇。
The United States could never again condemn Iran, North Korea or anybody for the barbarism of their public executions. It would forfeit whatever moral high ground it still has in international politics. And it would do all that even as it might be seeding the next generation of Nidal Hasans, vowing to avenge him.
正如加拿大哲学家马歇尔·麦克卢汉所著名地所说：“媒介即信息。”在这种情况下，直播本身，甚至比处理更甚，将成为信息。
“The medium is the message,” the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously said. In this case, the livestreaming, more than the execution, would be the message.
而这一信息将无人能够控制。巴拉克·奥巴马在担任总统期间就已意识到这一点，当时他决定不公开奥萨马·本·拉登死亡的图像。现在，特朗普必须制止赫格塞思的计划。
This is a message over which nobody would have control. Barack Obama understood that when, as president, he decided not to release images of the dead Osama bin Laden. Now Trump must put a stop to Hegseth’s plan.