HINDSIGHT - WRITE SOMETHING WORTH READING ABOUT OR DO SOMETHING WORTH WRITING ABOUT
Thursday, December 04, 2025
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.”
.jpg)
A sickening moral slum of an administration
A sickening moral
slum of an administration
Regarding
Venezuela, Ukraine and much more, Trump and his acolytes are worse than simply
incompetent.
December 2, 2025
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal.
Without a war. An interesting achievement.
In 1967, novelist Gwyn Griffin published a World War II
novel, “An Operational Necessity,”
that 58 years later is again pertinent. According to the laws of war,
survivors of a sunken ship cannot be attacked. But a German submarine captain,
after sinking a French ship, orders the machine-gunning of the ship’s crew,
lest their survival endanger his men by revealing where his boat is operating.
In the book’s dramatic climax, a postwar tribunal examines the German
commander’s moral calculus.
No operational necessity justified Hegseth’s de facto order
to kill two survivors clinging to the wreckage of one of the supposed drug
boats obliterated by U.S. forces near Venezuela. His order was reported by The Post from
two sources (“The order was to kill everybody,” one said) and has not been
explicitly denied by Hegseth. President Donald Trump says Hegseth told him that
he (Hegseth) “said he did not say that.” If Trump is telling the truth about
Hegseth, and Hegseth is telling the truth to Trump, it is strange that (per the
Post report) the commander of the boat-destroying operation said he ordered the
attack on the survivors to comply with Hegseth’s order.
Forty-four days after the survivors were killed, the
four-star admiral who headed the U.S. Southern Command announced
he would be leaving that position just a year into what is usually a three-year
stint. He did not say why. Inferences are, however, permitted.
The killing of the survivors by this moral slum of an
administration should nauseate Americans. A nation incapable of shame is
dangerous, not least to itself. As the recent “peace plan” for Ukraine
demonstrated.
Marco Rubio, who is secretary of state and Trump’s
national security adviser, seemed to be neither when the president
released his 28-point plan for
Ukraine’s dismemberment. The plan was cobbled together by Trump administration
and Russian officials, with no Ukrainians participating. It reads like a
wish-list letter from Vladimir Putin to Santa Claus: Ukraine to cede land that
Russia has failed to capture in almost four years of aggression; Russia to have
a veto over NATO’s composition, peacekeeping forces in Ukraine and the size of
Ukraine’s armed forces. And more.
Rubio, whose well-known versatility of convictions is
perhaps not infinite, told some of his alarmed former Senate colleagues that
the plan was just an opening gambit from Russia — although Trump demanded that
Ukraine accept it within days. South Dakota Republican Sen. Mike Rounds, a
precise and measured speaker, reported that, in a conference call with a
bipartisan group of senators, Rubio said the plan 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.” Hours later, however, Rubio reversed himself, saying on social media
that the United States “authored” the plan.
The administration’s floundering might reflect more than
its characteristic incompetence. In a darkening world, systemic weaknesses of
prosperous democracies are becoming clearer.
Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell’s 1976 book, “The Cultural Contradictions of
Capitalism,” argued that capitalism’s success undermines
capitalism’s moral and behavioral prerequisites. Affluence produces a culture
of present-mindedness and laxity; this undermines thrift, industriousness,
discipline and the deferral of gratification.
Today’s cultural contradictions of democracy are:
Majorities vote themselves government benefits funded by deficits, which
conscript the wealth of future generations who will inherit the national debt.
Entitlements crowd out provisions for national security. And an anesthetizing
dependency on government produces an inward-turning obliviousness to external
dangers, and a flinching from hard truths.
Two weeks ago, the chief of staff of the French army
said: “We have the know-how, and we have the economic and demographic strength
to dissuade the regime in Moscow. What we are lacking … is the spirit which
accepts that we will have to suffer if we are to protect what we are. If our
country wavers because it is not ready to lose its children … or to suffer
economically because the priority has to be military production, then we are
indeed at risk.”
Putin has surely savored the French recoil from these
words. And he has noticed that, concerning Ukraine and the attacks on boats
near Venezuela, the Trump administration cannot keep its stories straight. This
probably is for reasons Sir Walter Scott understood: “Oh, what a
tangled web we weave,/ when first we practise to deceive!” Americans are the
deceived.
TRUMP'S BRAIN IS IN THE TOILET
The clearest symptom
yet of Trump’s mental decline
His brain is turning into sh*t
Dec 04, 2025
.jpg){kind=link}
Friends,
After criticizing media coverage about him aging in office, Trump appeared to be falling
asleep during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Tuesday.
But that’s hardly the most troubling aspect of his aging.
In the last few weeks, Trump’s insults, tantrums, and
threats have exploded.
To Nancy Cordes, CBS’s White House correspondent, he said:
“Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person? You’re just asking questions because
you’re a stupid person.”
About New York Times correspondent Katie
Rogers: “third rate … ugly, both inside and out.”
To Bloomberg White House correspondent Catherine Lucey:
“Quiet. Quiet, piggy.”
About Democratic lawmakers who told military members to
defy illegal orders: guilty of “sedition … punishable by DEATH.”
About Somali immigrants to the United States: “Garbage” whom “we don’t want in our country.”
What to make of all this?
Trump’s press hack Karoline Leavitt tells reporters to
“appreciate the frankness and the openness that you get from President Trump on
a near-daily basis.”
Sorry, Ms. Leavitt. This goes way beyond
frankness and openness. Trump is now saying things nobody in their right mind
would say, let alone the president of the United States.
He’s losing control over what he says, descending into
angry, venomous, often dangerous territory. Note how close his language is
coming to violence — when he speaks of acts being punishable by death, or human
beings as garbage, or someone being ugly inside and out.
The deterioration isn’t due to age alone.
I have some standing to talk about this frankly. I was born
10 days after Trump. My gray matter isn’t what it used to be, either, but I
don’t say whatever comes into my head.
It’s true that when you’re pushing 80, brain inhibitors
start shutting down. You begin to let go. Even in my daily Substack letter to
you, I’ve found myself using language that I’d never use when I was younger,
like the word “sh*t” in this subtitle.
When my father got into his 90s, he told his friends at
their weekly restaurant lunch that it was about time they paid their fair
shares of the bill. He told his pharmacist that he was dangerously incompetent
and should be fired. He told me I needed to dress better and get a haircut.
He lost some of his inhibitions, but at least his
observations were accurate.
I think older people lose certain inhibitions because they
don’t care as much about their reputations as do younger people. In a way,
that’s rational. Older people no longer depend on their reputations for the
next job or next date or new friend. If a young person says whatever comes into
their heads, they have much more to lose, reputation-wise.
But Trump’s outbursts signal something more than the normal
declining inhibitions that come with older age. Trump no longer has any
filters. He’s becoming impetuous.
This would be worrying about anyone who’s aging. But a
filterless president of the United States who says anything that comes into his
head poses a unique danger. What if he gets angry at China, calls up Xi, tells
him he’s an asshole, and then orders up a nuclear bomb?
It’s time the media reported on this. It’s time America
faced reality. It’s time we demanded that our representatives in Congress take
action, before it’s too late.
Invoke Section 4 of the 25th Amendment.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)