On Monday’s CNN This Morning, host Audie Cornish aired a clip of UN human rights spokesperson Shabia Mantoo condemning the planned livestream of Nidal Hasan’s execution as “abhorrent” and incompatible with the prohibition on torture. Cornish then asserted that the broader debate has already been settled.
CNN’s decision to platform the UN statement as a serious contribution drew an immediate rebuttal from conservative panelist Tiana Lowe Doescher of the Washington Examiner.
“I could care less what the UN says. They had Iran on the women’s rights commission.”
Cornish quickly interjected, but Doescher’s point stood. An organization that seated a regime conducting public executions on its Commission on the Status of Women is not a credible arbiter of American capital punishment. The show treated the UN condemnation as weighty moral commentary; the conservative guest treated it as irrelevant given the organization’s record.
Cornish insisted: “The debate is actually turning out to be not at all about whether or not he should be executed. I have not, across the board, I’ve not heard anyone quibble with what the sentence was with his conviction.”
That claim does not match the record. Strong opposition to executing Hasan at all—not merely to the method or any broadcast—has existed since his 2013 sentencing and continues among liberal and human-rights voices.
In an August 28, 2013, New York Times Taking Note piece, Juliet Lapidos wrote that Hasan should not be put to death because “the state should not be in the execution business at all—the position of the Times editorial board.” Life imprisonment, she argued, already achieves the only legitimate ends.
Amnesty International has opposed the sentence on principle. Amnesty USA’s Justin Mazzola stated that “the death penalty constitutes a violation of Human Rights, under any circumstances,” and that the execution itself is “condemnable.”
Read Full Article: https://newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/mark-finkelstein/2026/10/13/cnns-cornish-treats-un-moral-authority-hasan-execution
