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.”

BOBBY BRAIN WORM

 

A sickening moral slum of an administration

 

Opinion

George F. Will

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.

 

NAP-OLEON

 

TRUMP'S BRAIN IS IN THE TOILET

 

The clearest symptom yet of Trump’s mental decline

His brain is turning into sh*t

Robert Reich

Dec 04, 2025

 

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.

 

FRENCH

 

December 3, 2025

Illustration by George Douglas; source photographs by Douglas Sacha and SENEZ/Getty Images

Pete Hegseth is doing something even worse than breaking the law

	By David French

In their military campaign in South America, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth aren’t just defying the Constitution and breaking the law. They are attacking the very character and identity of the American military.

To make this case, I have to begin in the most boring way possible — by quoting a legal manual. Bear with me.

Specifically, it’s the most recent edition of the Department of Defense Law of War Manual. Tucked away on page 1,088 are two sentences that illustrate the gravity of the crisis in the Pentagon: “The requirement to refuse to comply with orders to commit law of war violations applies to orders to perform conduct that is clearly illegal or orders that the subordinate knows, in fact, are illegal. For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.”

Here’s another key line: “It is forbidden to declare that no quarter will be given.” A no quarter order is an order directing soldiers to kill every combatant, including prisoners, the sick and the wounded. The manual continues, “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.”

Before we go any further, it’s important to define our terms. This newsletter is going to focus on the laws of war, not a related concept called rules of engagement. The laws of war reflect the mandatory, minimum level of lawful conduct, and all soldiers are legally obligated to obey them at all times and in all conflicts.

Rules of engagement are rules devised by commanders that are often more restrictive than the laws of war. For example, when I was in Iraq our rules of engagement sometimes kept us from attacking lawful targets in part because we wanted to be particularly careful not to inflict civilian casualties.

In my own service, we were often frustrated by the rules of engagement. We did not, however, question the laws of war.

There are now good reasons to believe that the United States military, under the command of President Trump and Hegseth, his secretary of defense, has blatantly violated the laws of war. On Nov. 28, The Washington Post reported that Hegseth issued a verbal order to “kill everybody” the day that the United States launched its military campaign against suspected drug traffickers.

According to The Post, the first strike on the targeted speedboat left two people alive in the water. The commander of the operation then ordered a second strike to kill the shipwrecked survivors, apparently — according to The Post — “because they could theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo.” If that reporting is correct, then we have clear evidence of unequivocal war crimes — a no quarter order and a strike on the incapacitated crew of a burning boat.

And, if it’s true, those war crimes aren’t the fault of hotheaded recruits who are fighting for their lives in the terrifying fog and fury of ground combat, but rather two of the highest-ranking people in the American government, Hegseth and Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the head of Special Operations Command — the man the administration has identified as the person who gave the actual order for the second strike.

My colleagues in the newsroom followed on Monday with a report of their own, one that largely mirrored The Post’s reporting, though it presented more evidence of Hegseth and Bradley’s potential defenses. Hegseth, our sources said, did not order the second strike, and the second strike may have been designed to sink the boat, not kill survivors.

But if that’s the explanation, why wasn’t the full video released? The administration released limited video footage of the first strike, which created the impression of the instant, total destruction of the boat and its inhabitants. Now we know there was much more to see.

At the same time, Hegseth and the Pentagon have offered a series of puzzling and contradictory statements. Sean Parnell, the Pentagon spokesman, told The Post that its “entire narrative was false.”

Hegseth weighed in with a classic version of what you might call a nondenial-denial. In a social media post, he said the Post report was “fabricated, inflammatory and derogatory,” but then rather than explain what actually happened (and make no mistake, he knows exactly what happened), he followed up with an extraordinary paragraph:

As we’ve said from the beginning, and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be “lethal, kinetic strikes.” The declared intent is to stop lethal drugs, destroy narco-boats, and kill the narco-terrorists who are poisoning the American people. Every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization.

“Biden coddled terrorists,” Hegseth wrote later in the same post. “We kill them.”

We shouldn’t forget that this incident occurred against the backdrop of Hegseth’s obvious disdain for military lawyers. He has called them “jagoffs” and — along with Trump — fired the senior military lawyers in the Navy and Air Force.

We also know that the commander of Southern Command, which is responsible for operations in Central and South America, Adm. Alvin Holsey, announced that he was stepping down after holding the position for less than a year. As our newsroom reported, two different sources “said that Admiral Holsey had raised concerns about the mission and the attacks on the alleged drug boats.”

He announced his departure in October, weeks after the September strike.

Unlike many wartime incidents, airstrike incidents can be rather easy to investigate. Unless an airstrike is in response to an immediate battlefield emergency, the intelligence justifying the strike and the orders authorizing it are frequently preserved in writing, and the video and audio of the strikes are typically recorded. If this Pentagon, which proudly calls itself the “most transparent” in history, were to release the full attack video and audio, it would help answer many questions.

It’s a mistake, however, to limit our focus to the legality of this specific strike — or even to the important question of the legality of the Caribbean strikes in general. We live in an era in which our nation’s first principles require constant defense.

In other words, as we dig into incidents like this one, we cannot presume that Americans are operating from a shared set of moral and constitutional values, or even a basic operating knowledge of history. We will have to teach the basic elements of American character anew, to a population that is losing its grasp on our national ideals.

The laws of war aren’t woke. They’re not virtue signaling. And they’re not a sign that the West has forgotten how to fight. Instead, they provide the American military with a number of concrete benefits.

First, complying with the laws of war can provide a battlefield advantage. Earlier this year I read Antony Beevor’s classic history of the end of Nazi Germany, “The Fall of Berlin 1945.” I was struck by a fascinating reality — Hitler’s troops fought fanatically against the Soviets not simply to preserve Hitler’s rule (most knew the cause was lost), but to slow the Red Army down, to buy more time for civilians and soldiers to escape to American, British and French lines.

In short, because of our humanity and decency, Germans surrendered when they would have fought. The contrast with the brutality of the Soviets saved American lives.

I saw this reality in Iraq. By the end of my deployment in 2008, insurgents started surrendering to us, often without a fight. In one memorable incident, a terrorist walked up to the front gate of our base and turned himself in. But had we treated our prisoners the way that prisoners were treated at Abu Ghraib, I doubt we would have seen the same response.

Men will choose death over torture and humiliation, but many of those same men will choose decent treatment in prison over probable death in battle.

Second, the laws of war make war less savage and true peace possible. One of the reasons the war in the Pacific was so unrelentingly grim was that the Japanese military never made the slightest pretense of complying with the laws of war. They would shoot shipwrecked survivors. They would torture prisoners. They would fight to the death even when there was no longer any military point to resistance.

We were hardly perfect, but part of our own fury was directly related to relentless Japanese violations of the laws of war. We became convinced that the Japanese would not surrender until they faced the possibility of total destruction. And when both sides abandon any commitment to decency and humanity, then the object of war changes — from victory to annihilation.

Even if only one side upholds the law of war, it not only makes war less brutal, it preserves the possibility of peace and reconciliation. That’s exactly what happened at the end of World War II. For all of our faults, we never became like the Soviets and thus have a very different relationship with our former foes.

Finally, the laws of war help preserve a soldier’s soul. We are a nation built around the notion of human dignity. Our Declaration of Independence highlights the worth of every person. Our Bill of Rights stands as one of the world’s great statements of human dignity. It is contrary to the notion of virtuous American citizenship to dehumanize people, to brutalize and oppress them.

We are also a quite religious society, and all of the great faiths that are central to American life teach that human beings possess incalculable worth.

If we order soldiers to contradict those values, we can inflict a profound moral injury on them — a moral injury that can last a lifetime. I still think about a 2015 article in The Atlantic by Maggie Puniewska. She described soldiers haunted by the experience of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Some of these soldiers describe experiences in which they, or someone close to them, violated their moral code,” she wrote, “hurting a civilian who turned out to be unarmed, shooting at a child wearing explosives, or losing trust in a commander who became more concerned with collecting decorative pins than protecting the safety of his troops. Others, she says, are haunted by their own inaction, traumatized by something they witnessed and failed to prevent.”

There are moral injuries that are unavoidable. I’m still haunted by decisions I made in Iraq, even though each one complied with the laws of war. Armed conflict is horrific, and your spirit rebels against the experience. But I can’t imagine the guilt of criminal conduct, of deliberately killing the people I’m supposed to protect.

In fact, when I first read the Washington Post story, I thought of the terrified pair, struggling helplessly in the water before the next missile ended their lives. But I also thought of the men or women who fired those missiles. How does their conscience speak to them now? How will it speak to them in 10 years?

I want to close with two stories — one from Iraq and one from Ukraine. There was a moment in my deployment when our forces were in hot pursuit of a known terrorist. We had caught him attempting to fire mortar rounds into an American outpost. Just when we had him in our sights, he scooped up what looked like a toddler and started running with the kid in his arms.

No one had to give the order to hold fire. There wasn’t one soldier who wanted to shoot and risk the toddler’s life. So we followed him until the combination of heat and exhaustion made him put the child down. Even then we didn’t kill him. We were able to capture him without using lethal force.

I’ll never forget that day — and the unspoken agreement that we would save that child.

Now, let’s contrast that moment of decency with the stories I heard in the town of Bucha, just northwest of Kyiv. It was the site of some of the most intense fighting in the first phases of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As I walked in part of the battlefield, I heard the stories of Russians soldiers looting and murdering their way across northern Ukraine.

One woman told me that the Russians shot a neighbor, a civilian, in his front yard, and then threatened his wife when she tried to leave her home to retrieve his body. So he just lay there, day after day, until the Russians were finally driven back. That’s the character of the Russian military, and it’s been the character of the Russian military for generations.

Something else happened when I first read the Washington Post story; I instinctively rejected it. The account was completely at odds with my own experience. There is not an officer I served with who would issue a no quarter order. There is not an officer I served with who would have given the order to kill survivors struggling in the water.

But I also knew that Hegseth is trying to transform the military. As The Wall Street Journal reported, he has been on a “decadeslong quest” to rid the military of “stupid rules of engagement” — even to the point of becoming a champion of soldiers convicted of war crimes. In one of his books, he wrote that he told soldiers who served under his command in Iraq to disregard legal advice about the use of lethal force.

I don’t think that all of our rules of engagement are wise. I have expressed profound doubts about many of the rules that were imposed in Iraq and Afghanistan that went far beyond the requirements of the laws of war. Not every soldier accused of crimes is guilty of crimes.

But there is a difference between reforming the rules and abandoning the law — or, even worse, viewing the law as fundamentally hostile to the military mission. There is a difference between defending soldiers against false accusations and rationalizing and excusing serious crimes.

The pride of an American soldier isn’t just rooted in our lethality. It’s rooted in our sense of honor. It’s rooted in our compassion. We believe ourselves to be different because we so often behave differently.

Hegseth, however, has a different vision, one of unrestrained violence divorced from congressional and legal accountability. If that vision becomes reality, he won’t reform the military — he’ll wreck it. And he’ll wreck it in the worst way possible, by destroying its integrity, by stripping its honor, and by rejecting the hard-earned lessons and vital values that have made the American military one of the most-trusted institutions in the United States.