Washington DC - Condemnation of US plans for a public execution by military firing squad escalated Friday, as Vice President JD Vance cast doubt on whether it would be livestreamed as proposed and insisted he would not watch such an event.

Nidal Hasan's execution – scheduled for December 3 at Fort Hood, Texas, where he gunned down 13 people in 2009 – is set to be the first by a US military firing squad since 1945.

But Vance told journalists he does not "know that that's actually going to happen," and said if it is livestreamed, "I'm not going to be watching it."

Representative Austin Scott of President Donald Trump's Republican Party said he supported executing Hasan but that "livestreaming executions is what jihadists do. America is better than that."

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And Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said broadcasting the execution would be "a barbaric spectacle" that would give Hasan "a global platform to amplify his hateful, anti-American message."

"This is a gift to anti-American terrorist recruiters," Reed said.

Trump on Friday backed the execution – saying Hasan "deserves it" and branding him a "maniac" – but did not comment on the plan to publicize it.

A Pentagon official told AFP the previous day that the execution would be streamed live, after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, "We'll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it's public."

Later, Hegseth wrote "Correct" when retweeting a media report about the planned livestream.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights condemned the move, saying in a message sent to AFP on Friday that "the livestreaming of an execution is tantamount to a public execution and would breach the absolute prohibition of torture."

Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, said it was a "barbaric promotion of a culture of death and must be reconsidered."