SOOO SADLY TRUE

 

Howard A. Tullman

General Managing Partner

THE SCARIEST CARTOON EVER - AND ABSOLUTELY TRUE

 

The Pentagon’s original justification for killing two shipwrecked survivors in a second U.S. strike has now completely disintegrated.

 

BREAKING NEWS — The Pentagon’s original justification for killing two shipwrecked survivors in a second U.S. strike has now completely disintegrated. 

Here’s the distilled carnage: 

Military officials first claimed the survivors were “radioing for backup.” Except — and this is where the floor drops out — Adm. Frank Bradley just told Congress the men didn’t even have a radio. Nothing. Not a weapon. Not comms gear. Not so much as a damn paddle. 

They were unarmed, clinging to an overturned boat for 41 minutes, while U.S. commanders argued about whether rescuing them was too inconvenient. 

Bradley still ordered a second strike, insisting the floating debris might contain cocaine and that the drowning survivors might somehow “resume trafficking” if saved. 

Members of Congress who watched the video came away split in the most predictable way imaginable: Democrats called it horrifying. Republicans tied themselves in knots defending it. 

Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s story keeps morphing, collapsing under its own contradictions. And legal experts are openly warning: killing shipwrecked survivors may qualify as a war crime. 

Bottom line: The justification for that second strike is hanging by a thread, the facts are getting uglier by the hour, and the oversight hammer is coming.

Hegseth Defense Collapses as Dems Reveal Horrific Video Strike Details

Hegseth Defense Collapses as Dems Reveal Horrific Video Strike Details

The ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee tells TNR after watching the video: “This is a big, big problem.”

 

 

Members of Congress were just permitted to view the video of the second boat-bombing strike that’s consuming Washington in controversy, during a classified briefing with Admiral Frank Bradley, who oversaw the operation. What they saw was deeply unnerving. And it pushes Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s story closer to collapse.

Representative Adam Smith, ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in an interview that the video of the second strike—which killed two men who’d been clinging to the wreckage of a boat destroyed in an earlier strike—badly undermines Hegseth’s stance in this scandal.

“This did not reduce my concerns at all—or anyone else’s,” Smith told me. “This is a big, big problem, and we need a full investigation.”

Smith said the video shows two men, sitting without shirts, atop a portion of a capsized boat that was still above water. That portion, Smith said, could barely have fit four people.

“It looks like two classically shipwrecked people,” Smith told me. But in the briefing, lawmakers were told that “it was judged that these two people were capable of returning to the fight,” Smith added. He called it a “highly questionable decision that these two people on that obviously incapacitated vessel were still in any kind of fight.”

Lawmakers pressed Bradley for a “considerable period of time” on the obviously incapacitated nature of the two men, Smith says. And the response was deeply unnerving. “The broader assumption that they were operating off of was that the drugs could still conceivably be on that boat, even though you could not see them,” Smith said, “and it was still conceivable that these two people were going to continue on their mission of transmitting those drugs.”

To be clear on what this means: The underlying claim by Trump and the administration is that all of the more than 80 people killed on these boats are waging war against the United States. They are “narco-terrorists,” in this designation. But this very idea—that these people are engaged in armed conflict with our country—is itself broadly dismissed by most legal experts. They should be subject to police action, these experts say, but not summary military execution, and Trump has effectively granted himself the power to execute civilians in international waters.

Yet here it gets even worse. The laws of war generally prohibit the killing of people who are no longer “in the fight” in any meaningful sense, specifically including the shipwrecked. But these lawmakers were told in the closed-door briefing that the two men were still deemed to be “in the fight” by virtue of the fact that there could have been still-transmittable drugs in the capsized and wrecked boat, Smith says. And that those two men sitting atop the wreckage could have continued with their delivery of them.

“The evidence that I’ve seen absolutely demands a further and continued investigation,” Smith told me. “It strains credibility to say that they were still in the fight.”

This badly undermines the story Hegseth has told. He has said that he did not see the two men before the second strike was ordered, suggesting both that he’d gone off to do other things and that the “fog of war” had prevented a clear viewing of the two men.

Obviously what these lawmakers saw contradicts the latter suggestion: The two men were, in Smith’s telling, very visible, so the “fog of war” line appears to be nonsense. And Hegseth’s implication that the strike was justified due to confusion about the men’s status also appears to be in profound doubt.

Republicans who have seen the video have insisted this was all lawful. Senator Tom Cotton, for instance, said it showed the two survivors attempting to flip a boat “loaded with drugs bound for the United States.” But if Smith’s account of the video is correct, that’s in doubt: The boat looked incapacitated and the drugs weren’t in fact visible.

The military officials stressed in the briefing that Hegseth never directly ordered them to “kill them all,” meaning all the people on board, something that was implied by Washington Post reporting and that Hegseth denied to Trump. And they confirmed that Hegseth didn’t give the direct order for the second strike, Smith says.

But they did say that Hegseth’s declared mission was to kill all 11 people, Smith notes. “It was, ‘Destroy the drugs, kill all 11 people on board,’” Smith told me. “It is not that inaccurate to say that the rules of engagement from Hegseth were, ‘kill all 11 people on that boat.’” And so, by all indications, that second strike appears to have been ordered to comply with Hegseth’s command.

Smith did confirm that he’s “somewhat satisfied” by the intelligence he saw that the boat originally did have drugs on it. But again, the idea that any of these people, even if they were trafficking drugs, are “in the fight”—in the sense of waging war against the United States—is already indefensible to begin with.

“They have an unbelievably broad definition of what ‘the fight’ is,” Smith said, and in that context, the order to kill all 11 people on the boat, no matter what, looks even worse: “It’s bad.”

Another Democrat, Representative Jim Himes, seconds this interpretation. “You have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion with a destroyed vessel who were killed by the United States,” he said.

Importantly, Smith told me that he and others urged military officials to release the video. “I think that video should be public,” Smith said, adding that he also wants to see the much-discussed legal memo supposedly authorizing the strikes released as well. But the military officials said public release isn’t their call. So now the pressure should intensify on Trump and Hegseth to authorize release of both.

There’s also been some discussion of radio communications that the two men may have sent for help. The idea is supposed to be that if they could get assistance, they could get back “in the fight,” meaning they were legit targets. But Smith said the officials confirmed to lawmakers they have no recording of these communications. So this piece of support for the Hegseth-Trump stance may not really exist.

Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer, says the entire operation is illegal, but that a full investigation could establish more clearly whether this particular strike deliberately targeted the men or just targeted the boat. From what we’re now learning from Smith and others, it clearly seems like the former.

“Based on the descriptions of lawmakers, it does sound as if the men were shipwrecked, and targeting them would be a war crime,” Finucane told me. “It sounds like the men were the target.” He said the stories being told by Hegseth and others are now falling apart: “None of these narratives withstand scrutiny.”

The Trump-Epstein Emergency Isn't in the Files

  

The Trump-Epstein Emergency Isn't in the Files

Trump has distorted the political landscape so badly that it's warping the moral intuitions of people and institutions of account.

Todd Zwillich Dec 5

 

Donald Trump repeatedly skates past wrongdoing and scandal that would debilitate—if not destroy—any other public person. Pardoning violent rioters who assaulted police for him; granting trade concessions to countries when their officials send him billions; launching an openly racist diatribe against an entire community of Americans.

Any one of these examples…and there are many, many more…make those of us with normal moral impulses feel outrage. But taken together, the sprawling and relentless onslaught of Trump’s behavior is disorienting people and institutions in a funhouse of ethical distortion and collective blindness.

This surreal effect is maddeningly apparent in how the press is covering the Epstein files. Look at this week’s warning about Trump and the files from the New York Times editorial board. They rightly caution that Trump has manipulated the public at every step of the process, and that his manipulations will continue. You shouldn’t trust any information Trump clears for release, according to the Times, given:

·         Trump’s long friendship with Epstein and his jokey statements about Epstein’s perversions

·         The creepy cartoon birthday card Trump drew for his pal

·         Trump’s use of Epstein file conspiracy theories for campaign advantage, only to pretend the whole thing was a hoax once he was responsible for disclosure

·         Pam Bondi’s gleeful displays of fake transparency to MAGA podcasters, followed by her ham-fisted stonewalling after informing Trump that he’s in the files

·         And finally, Trumps machinations, intimidation and threats to (unsuccessfully) block a Congressional vote, and, thus, to keep the files secret

All of that, but not a single word about Ghislaine Maxwell. How is this possible?

Trump’s treatment of Maxwell—a convicted sex trafficker— is by far the most glaring, brazen, and openly corrupt part of the current moment involving the president. It should be a show-stopper. It should be sending reporters into the faces of every Trump ally and causing them to fall over each other with incredulity at every Oval Office press availability. But in the warped reality surrounding Trump, it’s being taken, by all of us, as some strange, lower-priority, given.

Ah Maxwell, What Can You Do?

When the politics of the Epstein fiasco began to tighten on Trump over the summer, he dispatched the Deputy Attorney General to Florida to privately interview Maxwell. We now know, thanks to Epstein’s emails, that Maxwell lied about how much Trump knew about Epstein’s and her own abuse. DAG Todd Blanche, formerly Trump’s personal attorney, left the receipts from the Epstein estate out of the chat.

 

Whether by intention or error, he failed to get the truth out of Maxwell.

(“Mr. President, when will you order Todd Blanche to re-interview Maxwell given the evidence contained in Jeffrey Epstein’s emails, and why haven’t your ordered it already? Don’t you want to know the truth?”)

 

Immediately after her jailhouse interview, someone in the Trump Administration moved Maxwell from a high-security federal prison in Florida to a much more comfortable one in Texas. Maxwell is a sex offender and under Bureau of Prison rules not eligible for minimum security incarceration. But she’s also getting special meals, private access to the gym, visit time with a dog, and other privileges like unlimited toilet paper, according to a whistleblower. According to experts, the only people authorized to issue the special waiver allowing Maxwell to be treated unlike virtually any other sex offender are the BOP director and the Deputy Attorney General.

(“Mr. President, you claim you didn’t know about Maxwell’s transfer. But now that you know, why haven’t your ordered the Bureau of Prisons to return her to maximum security?”)

 

(“If you won’t order her return, why not? Why should she stay in a prison the rules say isn’t fit for a sex offender?”)

 

(“Maxwell was your friend for many years. Sir, why is your Administration giving her special treatment?”)

In July, 2020, Maxwell was arrested and charged with six felony counts including conspiracy, perjury, and sex trafficking minors as young as 14. In the face of these alleged abominations, Donald Trump, the President of the United States, would only say of Maxwell, “I wish her well.”

 

(“Mr. President, in 2020 you said repeatedly that you wish Ghislaine Maxwell well. Why would you wish someone charged with trafficking 14-year-old girls well?”)

 

(“Sir, Maxwell said in her jailhouse interview that she likes you and admires your achievements. And you’ve said you wish her well. Why are you and a child sex trafficker saying such friendly things to each other through intermediaries?”)

One Right Answer

Ghislaine Maxwell, her appeals exhausted on a 20-year sentence, has been perusing a pardon from her longtime friend Donald Trump.

Then last month, aboard Air Force One, Trump was asked if he’d ruled out granting Maxwell clemency.

“I don’t rule it in or out. I don’t even think about it,” he said.

 

Outside the distortion field of Trump’s proudly and relentlessly amoral presidency, this answer would make the press pool, pundits, editors, and prime-time cable show executive producers simply crash out. If physics allowed Air Force One to screech to a halt mid-air, this would be the cause.

Because to anyone with intact moral architecture, the question “are you considering pardoning a person convicted of trafficking teenage girls for sexual abuse?” has one correct answer. Absent a clearly demonstrable, gross miscarriage of justice, it is, “No. Absolutely not, never.”

But here, the president, who in 2020 would only wish the (at the time) accused sex trafficker well; who rewarded with a cabinet post the engineer of the wrist-slap deal that allowed Epstein to terrorize more girls; and who permitted and hasn’t reversed obvious, open inducements for the case’s most important and well-informed fact witness, won’t say what everyone listening knows is the only right thing.

 

Why?

Why?

(“Mr. President, why can you not say that you would never pardon a child sex trafficker like Maxwell?”)

 

(“Sir, most people look at a sex trafficker and abuser of girls like Maxwell and say she should serve her full sentence behind bars. Why won’t you?”)

 

(“Mr. President, given Epstein’s emails and the vote on the files, the public wants to learn what Maxwell knows about your relationship with Epstein. What is the reason you appear not to want her to think a pardon is off the table?”)

 

I’ve complained to journalist colleagues about the relative non-reaction to Trump’s refusal to reject a pardon for the sex trafficker. At least two of them pegged “I don’t rule it in or out” simply as classic Trump, keeping his options open for the best deal. Forget about moral valence of childhood sexual abuse and what the “best deal” with a perpetrator actually means. Beyond writing up Trump’s response, there’s no real follow-on news value to the president, with all his maneuvers and history, refusing to say “no”?

I’m no genius journalist. I certainly have no special moral standing above other reporters, or the New York Times editorial board, whose list of Trump's abuses to watch out for fails to even mention Maxwell. I feel like the guy in every good sci-fi horror movie, who, having realized the terrible truth, races through the town square screaming it into his neighbors’ faces. But the world is upside down, so the zombified townfolk answer his desperate pleas only with vacant stares.

 

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Each of the Oval Office questions above has a version for GOP lawmakers ignoring this surreal insanity for political convenience; or for Democrats not holding a field hearing on it tomorrow; or for voters eating eggs and scrapple in a Western Pennsylvania diner. They’re also questions readers, viewers and scrollers should be asking themselves, and demanding answers to.

 

NYT is right, though. Trump will surely manipulate the Epstein files to impugn his enemies and protect himself.

 

Everyone one else should start here: The most urgent news isn’t the selective history recorded in the redacted Epstein files. It’s what the president is doing with his immense power, here, now, in public, apparently so that a child sex trafficker won’t tell what she knows.