Screengrab from a video posted on Truth Social by Donald Trump, showing the first missile strike on a boat allegedly hauling illegal narcotics on Sept. 2, 2025.
Getting away with murder must be quite easy, provided that your motive is sufficiently inscrutable.
– Tom Stoppard, The Real Inspector Hound
Pete Hegseth is a producer of snuff films. The media-obsessed, if not media-savvy, Hegseth has produced 21 of these mass murder documentary shorts in the last three months, featuring the killings of 83 people–if you take his word for it. Hegseth introduces these kill shots like Alfred Hitchcock presenting an episode of his old TV show–without the irony, of course. There’s no irony to Pete Hegseth. No intentional irony, that is. It’s all bluster and protein-powder bravado to titillate the Prime-time Fox audience as they nibbled at their TV dinners.
Who were the people being killed? What did they have in their boats? Where were they going? No one seemed to care. Pete certainly didn’t care. It was the explosion that mattered, the now you see it, now you don’t quality of the videos.
Pete’s snuff films have the mise en scène of a ’90s video game, the zombie slaughter games Pete grew up on, burning callouses onto his thumbs from obsessive use of this joystick.
The irony, lost on Hegseth, is that these are the precise kinds of videos that ethical whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning used to scrape from the secret vaults of the Pentagon and ship to Wikileaks. Videos of crimes committed by US forces. In his dipsomaniacal mind, Hegseth seems to believe these snuff films are proof of the power and virility of the War Department under his leadership. In fact, each video is a confession. The question is: will he be held to account and who will have the guts to do it?
As the Washington Post reported, the very first of Hegseth’s snuff films had a gory epilogue that he chose not to share. Shortly after the smoke cleared from the missile strike, the drone video footage showed that two people had survived the attack and were clinging to the smoking wreckage of the boat. The commander of the operation, Navy Adm. Frank Bradley, ordered two more missile strikes: one to kill the survivors and another to destroy the remains of the boat and the bodies of its crew. According to the Post, Bradley was acting under the orders of Hegseth to “kill everybody.”
But the crime that left survivors shouldn’t be obscured by the crime that killed the survivors. Calling them “war crimes” doesn’t seem right, since there’s no declared war, congressional authorization or legal justification for the strikes. Serial mass murder is a far more accurate description.
The Trump brain trust had a hard time getting its story straight. First, they denied the Post’s story of a second strike. It didn’t happen. Fake news. Complete fabrication. Trump came out to say he wouldn’t have supported a second strike and didn’t believe it happened. On Monday, they sent Karoline Leavitt out to admit a second strike had taken place, but that Hegseth knew nothing about it. Next, they blamed the second strike on Adm. Bradley. This was followed by a statement saying the second strike was perfectly legit and that Bradley was fully authorized to order the killing of the two survivors. By Thursday, they were telling Congressional leaders that the second strike wasn’t aimed at killing the survivors but sinking the remains of the boat. The survivors were just collateral damage.
Sept 2
Hegseth: “I watched it live. We knew exactly who was in that boat. We knew exactly what they were doing, and we knew exactly who they represented, and that was Tren de Aragua, a narco-terrorist organization designated by the United States, trying to poison our country with illicit drugs.”
Oct. 23, after reports that people had survived another attack…
Hegseth: “So the Department of War is not going to degrade, or just simply arrest. We’re going to defeat and destroy these terrorist organizations to defend the homeland on behalf of the American people.”
Trump: “We’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country.”
Nov. 28
Hegseth responded to the Post story: “Fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory.”
Nov. 30
Trump: “He (Hegseth) said he did not say that, and I believe him. I wouldn’t have wanted that. Not a second strike. The first strike was very lethal. It was fine, and if there were two people around, but Pete said that didn’t happen. I have great confidence.”
Hegseth mocking the murders he authorized…
+ I don’t know if this was ever a serious country, but once it pretended to be…
+ The response of Kids Can Press, Canadian publisher of Franklin the Turtle books for pre-schoolers, objecting to Pete Hegseth’s post depicting Franklin blasting people in a boat:
Franklin the Turtle is a beloved Canadian icon who has inspired generations of children and stands for kindness, empathy, and inclusivity. We strongly condemn any denigrating, violent or unauthorized use of Franklin’s name or image, which directly contradicts these values.
And the predictable snide, juvenile response from Hegseth’s Dept of War Crimes: “We doubt Franklin the Turtle wants to be inclusive of drug cartels … or laud the kindness and empathy of narcoterrorists.”
Dec. 1
Reporter: Does the administration deny that that second strike happened or did it happen and the administration denies that Hegseth gave the order?
Leavitt: The latter is true.
Reporter: Admiral Bradley was the one who gave that order for a second strike?
Leavitt: And he was well within his authority to do so.
Hegseth: “Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made—on the September 2 mission and all others since.”
Dec. 2
Karoline Leavitt: “Secretary Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes. Admiral Bradley worked well within his authority and the law directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated.”
In fact, the second strike, and any order to authorize one, is a clear violation of Section 5.4.7 of the DOD Law of War Manual:
Prohibition Against Declaring That No Quarter Be Given. It is forbidden to declare that no quarter will be given. This means that it is prohibited to order that legitimate offers of surrender will be refused or that detainees, such as unprivileged belligerents, will be summarily executed. Moreover, it is also prohibited to conduct hostilities on the basis that there shall be no survivors, or to threaten the adversary with the denial of quarter. This rule is based on both humanitarian and military considerations. This rule also applies during non-international armed conflict.
Dec. 3
Hegseth: “I watched that first strike live. I didn’t stick around for the hour and two hours or whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs. So I moved on to my next meeting. A couple of hours later, I learned that the commander had made the decision, which he had the complete authority to do. And by the way, Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat. He sunk the boat, sunk the boat and eliminated the threat and it was the right call. We have his back.”
“Two hours or whatever?” It was actually just a couple of minutes: “A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.” Where did Hegseth go, down to his private make-up studio to fix his face for an appearance on Fox News?
Reporter: “So you didn’t see any survivors, to be clear, after that first strike, you personally?”
Hegseth: “I did not personally see survivors, but I stand—because the thing was on fire. That was exploded (sic), and fire or smoke—you can’t see anything. You got digital. This is called the fog of war. This is what you and the press don’t understand. You sit in your air-conditioned offices or up on Capitol Hill and you nitpick and you plant fake stories in the Washington Post about ‘kill everybody’ phrases on anonymous sources, not based in anything, not based in any truth at all.”
Fog of war? Air-conditioned offices? Neither Hegseth nor Bradley was on a battlefield or in a Navy assault vessel. They weren’t being shot at. They were in offices watching real-time video feeds and calling down drone strikes on unarmed speedboats or fishing vessels.
Hegseth, sitting in front of a nameplate calling him, “Ssecretary of War” (emphasis on the SS, I suppose), showing no remorse and still in full-berserker mode: “We’ve only just begun striking narco-boats and putting narcoterrorists at the bottom of the ocean because they’ve been poisoning the American people.”
+++
+ There’s a chapter in Hegseth’s book, The War on Warriors, titled “More lethality, less lawyers,” where Hegseth calls JAG lawyers “Jagoffs” (take note, Lindsey Graham) and recounts telling the National Guard troops under his command in Iraq to ignore the rules of engagement.
Needless to say, no infantrymen like army lawyers – which is why JAG officers are often not so affectionately known as ‘jagoffs’….Most spend more time prosecuting our troops than they do putting away bad guys. It’s easier to get promoted that way.
After this briefing (by a JAG officer on the Rules of Engagement in Iraq), I pulled my platoon together, huddling amid their confusion to tell them, ‘I will not allow that nonsense to filter into your brains. Men, if you see an enemy who you believe is a threat, you engage and destroy the threat. That’s a bullshit rule that’s going to get people killed. And I will have your back – just like our commander. We are coming home, the enemy will not.’
+ The “kill them all” “double-tap” strike by SEAL Team 6 on alleged drug runners in the Caribbean has been a regular tactic in Israel’s military assault on Gaza for the last two years, often targeting not only the survivors of the initial attack but also those who come to rescue the wounded.
+ The Washington Post reported that even the CIA doubted the legality of the drugboat attacks:
Amid pushback on CIA action from lawyers in the late spring, the administration forged ahead with an alternative plan that was already under discussion: to use the U.S. military. And it came up with a legal justification that national security law experts inside and out of government have said does not stand up to facts: that the country was in a ‘non-international’ armed conflict with ‘designated terrorist organizations.
+ Sen. Jacky Rosen, the Nevada Democrat, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee: “Hegseth likely committed a war crime when he gave an illegal order that led to the killing of incapacitated survivors of the U.S. strike in the Caribbean. He should resign immediately.”
+ I repeat: the disgusting killing of the survivors, as they clung to the wreckage of a burning boat, should not be used to distract from the equally illegal killing of the other occupants of the boat.
+ This from Justin Amash, a Palestinian-American and former libertarian Member of Congress from Michigan…
The double-tap strikes are appalling and illegal, but Hegseth is merely following the bloody path Barack Obama blazed. Obama’s drone assassination team even had a name for wounded survivors they would target for a second kill strike: squirters. According to David Shedd, Obama’s former acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. “We used double-taps all the time. You would get the initial signature off of a target that’s been hit and if you saw that they ‘squirted’ and were injured … you hit them again.” Shedd told Washington Post columnist Mark Thyssen: “There was often a second predator ready to go … that was fully expected to be used if you didn’t have a 100 percent coming out of the first hit — and maybe a third hit…It was done routinely.”
+++
+ Marjorie Taylor Greene opposes regime change in Venezuela: “I don’t believe in regime change. I don’t believe we should be engaging in war, period. I believe in fully protecting our borders and our people, but I don’t think that we need to go out and attack other countries.”
+ As long as MTG was talking about “Jewish space lasers” causing climate change, Trump was all for her. But once she started opposing his wars and ties to Israel, she was expendable.
+ “Writes Elliott Abrams”…say no more!
+ Nicolas Maduro: “How could I be a dictator if I wasn’t trained at the School of the Americas, at Harvard? I was not trained at Langley, or West Point…I was trained in the high schools of Caracas, in the neighbourhoods of El Valle, 23 de Enero, Catia, Propatria, and El Cementerio.’
+ Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL) on Venezuela: “We’re about to go in … We need to go in … Venezuela for the American oil companies will be a field day.” You didn’t really think the drive for regime change in Venezuela is about drugs, did you?
+ Saagar Enjeeti: “I can buy how people fell for WMDs in the wake of 9/11, but if you buy Venezuelan fentanyl, you’re actually just an imbecile.”
+++
+ The UN resolution against torture had three votes against: Israel, Argentina and the US….
+ IDF Press Release: “The Air Force eliminated two suspects this morning in the southern Gaza Strip who crossed the yellow line, carried out suspicious activities… and approached the forces.” The two “suspects” were 8 and 11…
+ Francesca Albanese, the UN rapporteur on the Occupied Territories, on some of the dire consequences of being sanctioned by the US: “My medical insurance refused to reimburse me. I have a private medical insurance and they refused to reimburse me because I’m sanctioned by the US.”
+ Infanticide as “Test”…
+ Nearly 9,300 children under five in Gaza were diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition in October, warning that winter conditions are increasing the risk of illness and death among displaced families, UNICEF reported. The agency stated that large quantities of winter supplies remain stuck at Gaza’s borders and called for the safe and unobstructed delivery of humanitarian aid through all available routes.
+ A CNN investigation found that the IDF gunned down starving Palestinians trying to collect flour in Gaza. Then they bulldozed the corpses into unmarked graves, where they were left to rot and be scavenged by ravenous dogs. Their deaths were never recorded, the location of their bodies was never disclosed to their families.
+ 77% of Democratic voters say Israel is committing genocide and 75% want to cut off weapons to Israel. But HRC is out on the road claiming that TikTok and “totally made up” videos are the blame for young people’s opposition to genocide.
+ Here’s Hillary Clinton (at a summit in NYC hosted by the Israeli daily Israel Hayom on US/Israeli relations) once again blaming social media for perverting the minds of American youth about the genocide in Gaza:
Our own students, smart young people, from our own country, from around the world. Where were they getting their information? They were getting their information from social media, particularly TikTok. That is where they were learning about what happened on October 7th. What happened in the days, weeks and months to follow. That’s a serious problem. It’s a serious problem for democracy, whether it’s Israel or the United States. I was shocked about how little students knew about the history and the context…When you think about how to tell Israel’s story, it’s important. It’s not just looking internally. It’s looking externally and particularly at young people. Because it’s not just the USUAL SUSPECTS; it’s a lot of young Jewish Americans who don’t know the history and don’t understand.
+ Those smug, pursed lips say it all…She seethes arrogance out of every pore. It’s part of why she lost to Trump, of all people. Young people have a better understanding of what’s going on than she did as Secretary of State.
+ Why does Israel need Hillary’s help in “telling its story”? Haven’t they got the NYT, CNN and The Atlantic for that?
+ Shawan Jabarin, the longtime Palestinian Human Rights activist with Al-Haq, on the UN’s endorsement of the Trump “ceasefire” plan for Gaza, which gives Israel indefinite control over the Strip:
To seek, as a matter of supposed political compromise, to sideline international law would be to render the U.N. complicit in Israel’s violations, to fundamentally break the promise of the U.N. Charter and to fuel only ever intensifying human carnage.
+ Pete Hegseth is our Ben-Gvir…
+ Israel has finally consented to open the Rafah Crossing, a vital corridor for the transport of humanitarian aid into Gaza. But they’re only opening it for people leaving the Strip, most of whom Israel says it won’t allow to return. The October ceasefire agreement stipulated that the crossing must be open in both directions. So add another violation of the truce to the 500 previous ones Israel has committed in the last two months.
+ Amid senatorial uproar over the lopsided Ukraine deal, Sen. Mike Rounds, the Republican from South Dakota, told reporters that Marco Rubio had assured a bipartisan group of disgruntled senators that Trump’s Ukraine plan wasn’t really a Trump plan but was a Russian proposal:
He made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives. It is not our recommendation. It is not our peace plan.
But only a few hours later, Rubio fessed up on social media, admitting that the Trump administration had “authored” the plan. Was Rubio lying to his former colleagues or simply out of the loop? This week, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, but not the Secretary of State, went to Moscow to try to sell the plan to Putin.
+ You can’t really blame Trump for drifting off. Marco Rubio is the aural equivalent of swallowing five melatonin tablets…
Screengrab from C-Span coverage of Trump cabinet meeting.
+ Nearly every Trump appearance now eventually turns into a live reenactment of Warhol’s Sleep…the questions the predictive markets are laying odds on are: which way will he slump and whose voice will deliver the knockout punch?
+ Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump’s roving envoy Steve Witkoff has been trying to seduce Ukrainian leaders into accepting the lop-sided peace deal by pushing the ludicrous notion of soldiers “disarming to earn Silicon Valley-scale salaries operating American-built AI data centers.”
+++
+ The RFK Center for Human Rights has issued a
