The December 24 drone strike hit a dock that U.S. officials believe was used by members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang. No people were on the dock at the time of the attack and no one was killed, according to the official. The details of the strike, which were first reported by CNN, offer a clearer picture of an attack first disclosed by President Donald Trump in a series of vague statements over several days.

“Now we’re going after the land,” Trump said during a Christmas Eve phone call to troops aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford, which is deployed to the Caribbean Sea as part of the campaign against Maduro. “They have a big plant or a big facility where the ships come from,” Trump then told John Catsimatidis, a billionaire and Trump donor who owns New York’s WABC radio station, on Friday. “Two nights ago, we knocked that out. We hit them very hard.”

On Monday, Trump provided more detail, explaining that the United States had “hit” an “implementation area” in Venezuela. “There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs,” Trump told reporters at his residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. “That’s where they implement, and that is no longer around.”

Trump has publicly acknowledged he authorized CIA operations in Venezuela. Asked if the CIA had carried out the Christmas Eve attack, Trump said: “I don’t want to say that.”

The government official, who spoke with The Intercept on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified information, said they had been briefed on the CIA’s role in the attack.

A spokesperson writing from a CIA email and identified only as Ryan declined to comment on the Christmas Eve strike in an email to The Intercept.

“Days after it took place, the U.S. public is finally learning about a CIA airstrike on foreign soil for which there is no legal justification or congressional authorization. This is the lawless Trump administration in action,” Win Without War policy director Sam Ratner told The Intercept. “The only way forward is for Congress to stop Trump’s illegal strikes and hold those in the administration who have so flagrantly broken the law to account.”

The CIA regularly conducted drone strikes during the early years of the war on terror, beginning in Yemen in 2002 and in Pakistan in 2004. During the Obama administration, the U.S. military largely took over such attacks, and since then, the armed forces have conducted the overwhelming majority of drone strikes. Heavily armed MQ-9 Reaper drones have recently been spotted in the region as part of a ramp-up of U.S. forces.

The CIA also has a long tradition of fanning violence, fomenting regime change, and conducting acts of sabotage in Latin America. A 2023 analysis of the effects of CIA-sponsored regime change in five Latin American countries found the interventions caused “large declines in democracy scores, rule of law, freedom of speech, and civil liberties.”

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The United States has been attacking boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific since September, killing at least 107 civilians in 30 attacks. Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, have said the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

The Intercept was the first outlet to report that the U.S. military killed survivors of the September 2 boat attack in a follow-up strike. That attack, Trump wrote at the time, killed “Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists.” Most boat attacks since have targeted members or affiliates of unspecified “designated terrorist organizations,” but the CIA dock attack specifically aimed to weaken the Venezuelan gang, according to the U.S. official.

The Trump administration has made outlandish claims about Tren de Aragua throughout 2025. Earlier this year, the administration claimed the gang had invaded the United States, which it cited as justification to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to fast-track deportation of people the government says belong to the gang. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals eventually blocked the government from using the wartime law. “We conclude that the findings do not support that an invasion or a predatory incursion has occurred,” wrote Judge Leslie Southwick.

In September, Trump claimed that U.S. troops engaged in combat with members of Tren de Aragua on the streets of Washington, D.C., during the summer or early fall — an apparent fiction that the White House press office refuses to address.

While the Trump administration claims that Tren de Aragua is acting as “a de facto arm of” Maduro’s government, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence determined earlier this year that the “Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.”

The U.S. also maintains that Tren de Aragua is both engaging in irregular warfare against and in a non-international armed conflict with the United States. These are, however, mutually exclusive designations which cannot occur simultaneously.

The Trump administration also claims that another criminal organization, Cártel de los Soles, is “headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking Venezuelan individuals,” despite little evidence that such a group exists. Maduro denies that he heads a cartel.

The Trump administration’s current campaign against Maduro is an extension of long-running efforts to topple the Venezuelan president which failed during Trump’s first term. Maduro and close allies were indicted in a New York federal court in 2020 on federal charges of narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine. Earlier this year, the U.S. doubled its reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest to $50 million.

Trump told Politico this month that Maduro’s “days are numbered.” When asked if he might order an invasion of Venezuela, Trump replied, “I wouldn’t say that one way or the other.”

Experts say that regime change in Venezuela would be complex and problematic. A 2023 study by the RAND Corporation warned that “overt military intervention in Venezuela is likely to become messy very quickly and is likely to become protracted.”

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The Long History of Lawlessness in U.S. Policy Toward Latin America

The U.S. intervened to oust governments in Latin America a total of at least 41 times — about once every 28 months from 1898 to 1994 — including 17 cases of direct intervention by the U.S. armed forces, intelligence agencies, or locals employed by U.S. government agencies, according to ReVista, the Harvard Review of Latin America. Washington attempted at least 18 covert regime changes in the region during the Cold War alone, Foreign Affairs noted earlier this year, which included deposing nine governments that fell to military rulers in the 1960s, about one every 13 months.

In 1954, the U.S. helped overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected government, ushering in a military junta that jailed political opponents, igniting an almost two-decade long civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. In 1973, a U.S.-backed coup in Chile, led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, ousted and led to the death of Salvador Allende, that country’s democratically elected president. A brutal, 17-year dictatorship marked by state torture, enforced disappearances, and killing followed, leaving a toll of more than 40,000 victims. In 1961, the U.S. also backed the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and fomented a coup in the Dominican Republic, which sparked years of unrest and U.S. election meddling. This, in turn, led to a 1965 invasion of the island nation by U.S. Marines. The U.S. also supported coups in Brazil in 1964, Bolivia in 1971, and funded the Contra rebels in Nicaragua throughout the 1980s. None of these interventions produced a stable, pro-American democracy and often, instead, installed authoritarian regimes that set off cycles of violence.

A 2025 study of all U.S.-led coups d’état and regime change operations from 1893 to 2011 found that that “while short-term strategic objectives were occasionally achieved, the majority of interventions resulted in regional instability, anti-American sentiment, and failed democratic transitions.” Earlier investigations have shown that foreign regime change schemes either fail to reduce or actually increase the likelihood of military disputes between interveners and targets; result in more human rights violations and declines in democracy; lead to a greater likelihood of civil war; and increase the chances of igniting an international armed conflict.

Even regime-change schemes that appeared successful at the time often sets off long-term blowback. The 1953 ouster of Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh fueled anti-American sentiment that contributed to the 1979 revolution and set in motion decades of turmoil and conflict. America’s “mission accomplished” moment, just after the 2003 invasion of Iraq to remove autocrat Saddam Hussein from power devolved into a endless spiral of violence and suffering. That conflict — which eventually spilled into neighboring Syria — has killed more than half a million people directly, and three or four times that number due to indirect causes such as displacement, a lack of potable water, health care, and preventable diseases, according to calculations by Brown University’s Costs of War Project. The costs to U.S. taxpayers are expected to exceed $2.89 trillion by 2050.

The post CIA Was Behind Venezuela Drone Strike, Source Says appeared first on The Intercept.

“They have a big plant or a big facility where the ships come from,” Trump told John Catsimatidis, a billionaire and Trump donor who owns New York’s WABC radio station, on Friday, seeming to reference a facility involved in the drug trade or boat building. “Two nights ago, we knocked that out. We hit them very hard.”

Trump initially did not provide further details about the supposed attack on the “big plant,” which if true would be the first known U.S. attack on Venezuelan soil.

On Monday, Trump said that the United States had “hit” an “implementation area” in Venezuela. “There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago, Florida, residence. “That’s where they implement, and that is no longer around.”

It was not clear what target was hit nor which U.S. government agencies were involved. Asked if the CIA had carried out the attack, Trump said: “I don’t want to say that. I know exactly who it was but I don’t want to say who it was.”

Trump has publicly acknowledged he authorized CIA operations in Venezuela.

“We don’t have any guidance for you,” CIA spokesperson Lauren Camp told The Intercept.

During a Christmas Eve phone call to troops aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford, which is deployed to the Caribbean Sea as part of the campaign against Maduro, Trump seemed to reference the strike. “I’m tremendously grateful for the work that you’re doing to stop drug trafficking in our region,” he said. “Now we’re going after the land. The land is actually easier.”

One U.S. official who spoke with The Intercept on the condition of anonymity confirmed that the target was a “facility,” but would not disclose its location or if it was actually attacked by the U.S., much less destroyed. The official cast some doubt on Trump’s initial public statement. “That announcement was misleading,” said the official without providing any clarification.

There has been no public report of an attack from the Venezuelan government.

The Pentagon did not reply to repeated requests for comment on the strike. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt did not respond to a request for comment on the U.S. official’s contention that Trump’s claim was “misleading.”

If a strike did occur on December 24, it was the night before Trump attacked Nigeria. The president will have made war in Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, and the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean in 2025, despite claiming to be a “peacemaker.”

The United States has been attacking boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific since September. U.S. forces have conducted almost 30 attacks that have killed more than 100 civilians.

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Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies arrested suspected drug smugglers.

During the summer, Trump signed a secret directive ordering the Pentagon to use military force against certain Latin American drug cartels. In August, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth signed an execute order, or EXORD, directing Special Operations forces to sink suspected drug smuggling boats, destroy their cargo, and kill their crews, according to government officials.

“Every time I knock out a boat, we save 25,000 American lives,” Trump claimed to Catsimatidis. The statement is untrue. Between May 2024 and April 2025, some 77,000 people died in the U.S. from drug overdoses. If Trump’s claim were accurate, the 30 attacks would have saved almost 10 times the number of lives lost to overdoses in the U.S. in a single year.

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles recently indicated that the boat strikes are specifically aimed at toppling Maduro. “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” Wiles said.

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Upon entering office a second time, Trump renewed long-running efforts, which failed during his first term, to topple Maduro’s government. Maduro and several close allies were indicted in a New York federal court in 2020 on federal charges of narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine. Earlier this year, the U.S. doubled its reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest to $50 million. (Meanwhile, Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the right-wing former president of Honduras who had been convicted of drug trafficking.)

Trump told Politico that Maduro’s “days are numbered.” When asked if he might order an invasion of Venezuela, Trump replied, “I wouldn’t say that one way or the other.”

Since the summer, the Pentagon has built up a force of more than 15,000 troops in the Caribbean and the largest naval flotilla in the region since the Cold War. That contingent now includes 5,000 sailors aboard the Ford, the Navy’s newest and most powerful aircraft carrier, which has more than 75 attack, surveillance, and support aircraft.

Military contracting documents revealed by The Intercept show that the War Department has plans to feed a massive military presence in the Caribbean until almost to the end of Trump’s term in office — suggesting the recent influx of American troops to the region won’t end anytime soon.

In recent weeks, the War Department had specifically surged into the region air assets necessary for a sustained campaign of combat operations over hostile territory including F-35 fighters, EA-18G Growler electronic attack jets, KC-135 aerial refuelers, KC-46 tankers, HC-130J combat search and rescue planes, and HH-60W search and rescue helicopters.

“Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before,” Trump confusingly announced on his Truth Social platform earlier this month, without explaining how a naval armada can surround a country that is not an island. “I am ordering A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela.” The White House did not respond to a request for clarification.

The White House has ordered U.S. military forces to focus almost exclusively on enforcing a “quarantine” of Venezuelan oil for at least the next two months, a U.S. official told Reuters last week.

One former U.S. official with continued ties to the defense establishment speculated that the U.S. might be involved in a sabotage campaign in Venezuela, referencing past U.S. efforts in Latin America, specifically plans and operations to overthrow Fidel Castro before and after the CIA’s disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. He specifically mentioned the covert campaign of bombing Cuban sugar mills and burning cane fields, among other acts of sabotage.

The full extent of U.S. covert warfare in Cuba may never be known, but in the wake of the Bay of Pigs debacle, the Pentagon also began preparing top-secret plans. In the spring of 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff offered up a document titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba.” The top-secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to conduct false-flag operations to justify a U.S. invasion. These proposals included staging assassinations of Cubans living in the U.S.; developing a fake “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area … and even in Washington”; a plot to “sink a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated)”; faking a Cuban air attack on a civilian jetliner filled with “college students”; and even staging a modern “Remember the Maine” incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters — and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage.

Update: December 29, 2025, 2:59 p.m. ET
This article was updated to include more recent comments from President Donald Trump, and a response from a CIA spokesperson.

The post Did Trump Just Confess to Attacking Venezuela? appeared first on The Intercept.

The spring 2024 debate was over forcing the feds to get a warrant to search foreign communications for intelligence on Americans. Doing so would cost crucial time, Goldman said, citing his own tenure as a federal prosecutor.

“Based on that experience, I can say with confidence that requiring a warrant would render this program unusable and entirely worthless,” he said last year. “Even if it were possible, the time required to obtain a search warrant from a judge would frequently fail to meet the urgency posed by a terrorist or other national security threat.”

Goldman’s argument won the day.

Progressives had been rallying around the warrants provision but, under heavy pressure from the Biden administration, enough of them retracted their support and sided with Democrats like Goldman to doom the measure. It lost by a single vote.

With his election victory last November, Donald Trump would inherit the warrantless surveillance powers.

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The April 2024 vote still stings for civil liberties advocates, who thought they could count on progressives as they sought to build a bipartisan coalition with libertarian-minded Republicans. Now they are girding for another battle next April, when the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, is up for reauthorization.

The vote will happen in the middle of a primary season where many incumbents — including Goldman — are trying to burnish their progressive bona fides as they face challenges from the left. Already, some Democrats on a key committee are citing the Trump administration’s approach to privacy to explain their renewed support for a warrant provision.

Whether enough of them flip back could decide the future of one of the most controversial post-September 11 spying programs.

In a statement to The Intercept, Goldman did not commit to supporting a warrant requirement.

“Donald Trump’s blatant weaponization of the federal government makes accounting for potential abuses of power critically important,” Goldman said. “As we work through the FISA reauthorization process next year, I will be especially focused on those concerns, as I have been since Trump took office in January.”

Tie Goes to the Spy

The vote last year capped a monthslong period of intense lobbying pitting the Biden administration against privacy advocates.

Congress passed Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 2008 to give its legal blessing to a massive spying program the administration of George W. Bush had already launched without authorization.

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Under the law, the government was allowed to search through reams of surveillance conducted abroad for information on U.S. citizens and permanent residents. The Fourth Amendment did not apply, supporters of the law said, because those communications had been collected from wiretaps and hacks directed abroad by the cyber spies of the NSA.

Critics said that even surveillance directed abroad inevitably hoovers up the emails and text messages of Americans. The FBI, for example, conducted 200,000 “backdoor searches” of American communications in 2022 alone.

In a series of reauthorization battles, civil liberties advocates have squared off against administrations from both parties trying to force government agencies, including the FBI, to get a warrant before they rooted through foreign surveillance for information on Americans.

Advocates have won some procedural reforms but, on the biggest question of a warrant, they have fallen short every time. Last year, the House voted 212–212 on an amendment offered by a conservative Republican that would have added a warrant requirement. Under House rules, a tied vote fails.

The party breakdown showed how much surveillance scrambles typical partisan divides. Eighty-four Democrats and 128 Republicans voted for a warrant requirement, compared to 126 Democrats and 86 Republicans opposed.

Numerous Democrats flipped their vote at the last minute under heavy lobbying from the Biden administration, which took a traditional, centrist view of the need for expansive spying powers to ward off terrorists and other foreign foes.

“It was top-to-bottom — pretty much every single person in the Biden administration was lobbying pretty hard,” said Kia Hamadanchy, a senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “There was a lot of fearmongering, which I don’t think was substantiated.”

Supporters of the Biden administration offered some cover to the lawmakers who switched their way by including modest, procedural reforms in the legislation.

The last-minute flippers included several members of the House Judiciary Committee, which traditionally has favored privacy protections more than members of the Intelligence Committee, who have overlapping jurisdiction over foreign surveillance.

It was hardly surprising that Democrats buckled under pressure from the Biden administration, but it was shortsighted, civil liberties advocates say.

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“In 2024, it was already clear that Donald Trump and the people around him might well return to power,” said Sean Vitka, executive director of the progressive group Demand Progress. “Some Democrats refused to install guardrails when they had the chance.”

Even worse from the perspective of civil liberties advocates, many Democrats voted to further expand the foreign spying law with a new provision that would allow the government to force “electronic communication service providers” — including, potentially, nonprofits, political campaigns, or news organizations — to help it spy.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., warned that that power will “inevitably be misused.”

House Judiciary Firms Up

With Trump in the White House, some of the Democrats who voted against a warrant provision seem to be warming up to the idea, according to their comments at a recent House Judiciary Committee hearing on FISA reform.

Several Democrats who advocates were counting on last time — including now-ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., who eventually voted against the warrant requirement — spoke in favor of passing further reforms next year.

Democrats at the hearing put the Section 702 program, named for the law that gives the surveillance power, in the larger context of the Trump administration’s erasure of privacy safeguards, including efforts to combine previously siloed Social Security, IRS, and student loan databases.

They also pointed out that, when it came to Section 702, Trump has gutted the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, and FBI Director Kash Patel has eliminated an office tasked with auditing the FBI’s use of the surveillance program.

Raskin said the results of a two-year “experiment” with modest FISA reforms have been “alarming.”

“For years, the leaders of this committee have warned of how executive branch surveillance powers could be abused by a president who didn’t care about protecting civil liberties, who used cutting-edge technology to spy on Americans, and who ignored basic principles of due process and constitutional freedom to achieve their own ends,” he said. “In 2025, we no longer have to wonder if we were right to worry.”

Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., voted against a warrant requirement last year but spoke in broad favor of reforms at the hearing. His office did not comment on whether that includes a warrant requirement.

Moskowitz’s primary challenger Oliver Larkin, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, said in a statement that he supports forcing the government to get a warrant.

“Rep. Moskowitz has put civil society, political opponents, minority and undocumented communities, and journalists at risk of the Trump administration’s privacy abuses and political targeting of dissent,” Larkin said.

Another Judiciary Committee member who voted against a warrant requirement, Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., did not respond to a request for comment. His left-leaning primary challenger, Tennessee state Rep. Justin J. Pearson, said in a statement that he supports a warrant provision.

“Democrats should be opposed to warrantless government surveillance no matter which party the president represents,” he said. “It should not have taken Donald Trump’s second election for some members of our party to finally stand up for their constituents’ basic civil liberties.”

Will GOP Cave?

The problem for civil liberties advocates going into the April reauthorization is that they now face losing some of the Republicans who rallied to their side the last time.

“People tend to be more skeptical about executive authority when the president is a president from the different party,” Hamadanchy said.

They are also unclear on two key questions: Just how many Democrats will flip back, and where Trump will land on the issue.

Some Democrats seem to be holding firm on their opposition to a warrant requirement despite challenges from the left. During an April committee hearing, Goldman said the FISA debate “pales in comparison” to the privacy violations being committed under the auspices of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Goldman, who is positioning himself as a progressive in his primary race, citing his support for the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, is facing a challenge from New York City Comptroller Brad Lander.

“Brad would vote to add a warrant requirement,” said a spokesperson for the Lander campaign. “The Trump administration’s abuse of power has highlighted the need for stronger 4th Amendment protections and now more than ever the House should take action to protect people’s privacy.”

Lander’s entry into New York’s 10th Congressional District race gives civil liberties advocates a vessel to challenge Goldman on the issue. Another Democrat who spoke on the House floor against the warrant requirement, Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., has not drawn a primary challenger yet.

Trump is a bigger enigma. In 2018, his first administration opposed a warrant requirement, but last year he briefly urged Republicans to “KILL FISA” — apparently because he confused the 702 surveillance program with another that was used to spy on an adviser to his 2016 presidential campaign.

In support of the current law, surveillance hawks will likely cite the findings of a recent report from the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General.

Based on internal oversight reports from the DOJ’s National Security Division, the inspector general said, “it appears that the FBI is no longer engaging in the widespread noncompliant querying of U.S. persons that was pervasive just a few years ago.”

The report came with a crucial caveat. The inspector general relied on the FBI’s audits rather than conducting its own reviews of agents’ searches. The April 2024 to April 2025 period the report covered also meant that it tracked only a few weeks of Patel’s tenure.

The post Dan Goldman Supported Warrantless Spying on Americans. Now His Primary Opponent Is Hitting Him for It. appeared first on The Intercept.

The review of Kelly’s comments has since blossomed into a full-scale inquiry. “Retired Captain Kelly is currently under investigation for serious allegations of misconduct,” a War Department spokesperson told me.

Kelly issued a statement after Hegseth’s office announced it was escalating its case. “It wasn’t enough for Donald Trump to say I should be hanged, which prompted death threats against me and my family. It wasn’t enough for Pete Hegseth to announce a sham investigation on social media. Now they are threatening everything I fought for and served for over 25 years in the U.S. Navy, all because I repeated something every service member is taught,” said Kelly. “It should send a shiver down the spine of every patriotic American that this President and Secretary of Defense would so corruptly abuse their power to come after me or anyone this way.”

That Hegseth is targeting a sitting senator is all but unheard of. But what most surprised me was his apparent willingness to recall a former member of the military for punishment. I was shocked because, for two decades, the Pentagon has failed to respond to questions about the potential recall of veterans accused of heinous illegality by Army investigators.

In the mid-2000s, I provided the Pentagon with the names of dozens of former service members implicated in crimes against civilians and prisoners during the Vietnam War: massacres, murders, assaults, and other atrocities. The Defense Department never recalled any to active duty. Years later, a defense official laughed when I asked if anyone even looked at the spreadsheet of names that I provided. In the wake of Hegseth’s threats against Kelly, I again asked his office if they want that list.

While working for the Los Angeles Times, I helped expose 320 atrocities that were substantiated by Army investigators, including seven mass killings from the 1960s and 1970s, in which at least 137 civilians died. This tally does not include the 1968 My Lai massacre during which U.S. troops slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese civilians. The records chronicled 78 other attacks on noncombatants in which at least 57 were killed, 56 wounded, and 15 sexually assaulted; and 141 instances in which U.S. troops tortured civilian detainees or prisoners of war.

Murder, torture, rape, abuse, forced displacement, home burnings, specious arrests, and imprisonment without due process were a daily fact of life throughout the years of the American war in Vietnam. But the great majority of atrocities by U.S. troops never came to light — and almost never resulted in criminal investigations, much less courts-martial. These records — compiled in the early 1970s by a secret Pentagon task force known as the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group — represent some of the exceedingly rare instances that resulted in official inquiries.

Army criminal investigators determined that evidence against more than 200 soldiers accused of harming Vietnamese civilians or prisoners was strong enough to warrant charges, according to the records. These “founded” cases were referred to the soldiers’ superior officers for action. Ultimately, 57 of them were court-martialed, and just 23 were convicted.

Fourteen soldiers received prison sentences ranging from six months to 20 years, but most won significant reductions on appeal. The stiffest sentence went to a military intelligence interrogator convicted of committing indecent acts against a 13-year-old girl held in detention. He served seven months of a 20-year term, according to the files. Many substantiated cases were closed with a letter of reprimand, a fine, or, in more than half the cases, no action at all.

In the early 2000s, many veterans who had escaped justice were still alive, including members of Company B of the 1st Battalion, 35th Infantry, 4th Infantry Division. That unit committed a litany of atrocities, culminating in a massacre in a tiny hamlet in South Vietnam.

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On February 8, 1968, a medic, Jamie Henry, sat down to rest in a Vietnamese home, where he was joined by a radioman. On the radio, he heard 3rd Platoon leader Lt. Johnny Mack Carter report to Capt. Donald Reh that he had rounded up 19 civilians. Carter wanted to know what should be done with them. As Henry later told an army investigator: “The Captain asked him if he remembered the Op Order [Operation Order] that had come down from higher [command] that morning which was to kill anything that moves. The Captain repeated the order. He said that higher said to kill anything that moves.”

Hoping to intervene, Henry headed for Reh’s position. As he neared it, though, the young medic saw members of the unit drag a naked teenage girl out of a house and throw her into the throng of civilians, who had been gathered together in a group. Then, Henry said, four or five men around the civilians “opened fire and shot them. There was a lot of flesh and blood going around because the velocity of an M-16 at that close range does a lot of damage.”

Henry repeatedly reported the massacre, at peril to himself, and spent years attempting to expose the atrocities. Army investigators looked into the allegations for more than three years before closing the case and burying the files. They determined that evidence supported murder charges in five incidents against nine “subjects,” including Carter. Investigators concluded that there was not enough evidence to charge Reh with murder, because of conflicting accounts “as to the actual language” he used in giving the orders. But Reh could be charged with dereliction of duty for failing to investigate the killings, the report said. The military did not court-martial any members of the unit — either in the 1970s or the 2000s. Some are still alive today and could, theoretically, face some modicum of justice.

Hegseth has been on the hot seat since major media outlets picked up on The Intercept’s reporting of a double-tap strike that executed survivors of an attack on a supposed drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean in September. Military legal experts, lawmakers, and confidential sources within the government who spoke with The Intercept say Hegseth’s actions could result in the entire chain of command being investigated for a war crime or outright murder.

Hegseth said Kelly’s “conduct brings discredit upon the armed forces and will be addressed appropriately.” I asked Hegseth’s office if the crimes detailed in the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group’s files also brought “discredit upon the armed forces.” A spokesperson acknowledged that and other questions but offered no answers.

“Nick, we received your earlier message and haven’t forgotten about you,” she said last month. “Our response time is going to be delayed due to the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.” That response has, weeks later, still yet to arrive.

Hegseth has previously derided “academic rules of engagement which have been tying the hands of our warfighters for too long,” and, during President Donald Trump’s first term — before he became the Pentagon chief — successfully lobbied for pardons on behalf of soldiers convicted of crimes against noncombatants.

“This just shows their total distain for the rule of law,” Todd Huntley, who was an active-duty judge advocate for more than 23 years, serving as a legal adviser to Special Operations forces, said of Hegseth and Trump. “They view the law as a political tool to support their positions and help them get what they want.”

Hegseth took his post focusing on lethality at all costs, while gutting programs designed to protect civilians and firing the Air Force’s and Army’s top judge advocates general, or JAGs, in February to avoid “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.” Military operations under Hegseth have since killed civilians from Yemen to the Caribbean Sea.

The Former JAGs Working Group — an organization made up of former and retired military judge advocates which was founded in February — issued a statement condemning Hegseth’s order and the execution of it “to constitute war crimes, murder, or both.” The group also called out the war secretary for targeting Kelly. “The administration’s retaliation against Senator Kelly violates military law. We are confident the unlawful influence reflected in the press reports will ultimately disqualify all convening authorities except possibly the president himself from actually referring any case to a court-martial,” they wrote in a statement provided to The Intercept.

Huntley said the War Department wasn’t following its typical investigative process in its case against Kelly.

“There was no way that was unlawful. It doesn’t even come close to undermining good order and discipline of the military,” said Huntley. “Under normal circumstances, an investigating officer would be appointed. They’d look into it and then the report would come back, it would be reviewed by a JAG, and it would say there was nothing unlawful, no charges warranted. But these aren’t normal times.”

Huntley also noted that Kelly’s video was likely to sow confusion among low-ranking enlisted personnel and officers concerning determinations about whether an order is lawful.

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Huntley clarified that the Pentagon doesn’t have to bring Kelly back to active duty to charge him under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. “All that’s required is that you get permission of the service secretary. In this case, I’m guessing that Hegseth himself could probably give permission to do that,” he explained. When I asked why the War Department would have announced that it might recall Kelly despite not needing to do so, Huntley had a simple assessment: “Because they don’t know what the law is.”

Hegseth’s office and Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson failed to reply to repeated questions about the Vietnam-era personnel who might still be sanctioned for their crimes against Vietnamese civilians, as well as questions about the jeopardy troops today might be in for following Hegseth’s orders.

A Pentagon spokesperson also seemed to foreclose the release of additional information concerning the War Department’s persecution of Kelly. “Further official comments will be limited to preserve the integrity of the proceedings,” she said.

The post My Quest to Make the Pentagon Care About the Crimes It Covered Up appeared first on The Intercept.

“Tonight, at my direction as Commander in Chief, the United States launched a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria, who have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians, at levels not seen for many years, and even Centuries!” Trump wrote Thursday on Truth Social.

Africa Command conducted the strikes in northwest Nigeria’s Sokoto State, according to the War Department. “The command’s initial assessment is that multiple ISIS terrorists were killed in the ISIS camps,” a Pentagon spokesperson told The Intercept.

Trump has spent the first year of his second term touting his efforts to end conflicts and claiming to be a “peacemaker” even as he has recently made war in Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean in 2025.

“I have previously warned these Terrorists that if they did not stop the slaughtering of Christians, there would be hell to pay, and tonight, there was,” wrote Trump. “The Department of War executed numerous perfect strikes, as only the United States is capable of doing.”

Over two terms, the Trump administration has repeatedly killed noncombatants, from Somalia to Yemen. Most recently, the Trump administration has been killing civilians in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean. The military has carried out 29 known attacks at sea since September, killing at least 105 civilians whom it claims are narco-terrorists.

The War Department did not reply to questions about the numbers of enemy forces and civilians killed in the Christmas attack in Nigeria. “Specific details about the operation will not be released in order to ensure operational security,” said the Pentagon spokesperson.

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In November, Trump ordered the Defense Department to prepare for a military intervention in Nigeria to protect Christians from attack by Islamic militants. War Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed Thursday’s strikes in a post on social media, writing that the U.S. was “Grateful for Nigerian government support & cooperation.”

“U.S. Africa Command is working with Nigerian and regional partners to increase counterterrorism cooperation efforts related to on-going violence and threats against innocent lives,” said Gen. Dagvin Anderson, the chief of U.S. Africa Command.

The U.S. military has a long relationship with Nigeria and has played a role in airstrikes that have killed civilians. Between 2000 and 2022, the U.S. provided, facilitated, or approved more than $2 billion in security aid — including weapons and equipment sales — to Nigeria, according to a report by Brown University’s Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies and the Center for International Policy’s Security Assistance Monitor, a Washington think tank. This includes the delivery of 12 Super Tucano warplanes as part of a $593 million package, approved by the State Department in 2017, that also included bombs and rockets.

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Over that same period, hundreds of Nigerian airstrikes killed thousands of Nigerians. A 2017 attack on a displaced persons camp in Rann, Nigeria, killed more than 160 civilians, many of them children. A subsequent Intercept investigation revealed that the attack was referred to as an instance of “U.S.-Nigerian operations” in a formerly secret U.S. military document.

The post War on Christmas: Trump Announces Wave of Airstrikes Targeting ISIS Militants in Nigeria appeared first on The Intercept.

Minutes ticked by. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. As the men bobbed along, drifting with the current, for some 45 minutes, Adm. Frank Bradley — then the head of Joint Special Operations Command — sought guidance from his top legal adviser. At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on September 2, he turned to Col. Cara Hamaguchi, the staff judge advocate at the secretive JSOC, The Intercept has learned.

Could the U.S. military legally attack them again?

How exactly she responded is not known. But Bradley, according to a lawmaker who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a classified briefing, said that the JSOC staff judge advocate deemed a follow-up strike lawful. In the briefing, Bradley said no one in the room voiced objections before the survivors were killed, according to the lawmaker.

Five people familiar with briefings given by Bradley, including the lawmaker who viewed the video, said that, logically, the survivors must have been waving at the U.S. aircraft flying above them. All interpreted the actions of the men as signaling for help, rescue, or surrender.

“Obviously, we don’t know what they were saying or thinking,” one of the sources said, “but any reasonable person would assume that they saw the aircraft and were signaling either: don’t shoot or help us.”

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Raising both hands is a universal sign of surrender for isolated members of armed forces. Under international law, those who surrender — like those who are shipwrecked – are considered hors de combat, the French term for those out of combat, and may not be attacked. The Pentagon’s Law of War Manual is explicit in this regard. “Persons who have been incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack,” reads the guide.

But that’s not how Bradley — now the chief of Special Operations Command, or SOCOM — saw it. Bradley declined to comment to The Intercept, but a U.S. official familiar with his thinking said he did not perceive their waving to be a “two-arm surrender.”

Some 45 minutes after the men had been plunged into the water, a second missile screamed down from the sky on Bradley’s order. Two more missiles followed in rapid succession, sinking the remnants of the boat.

Nothing remained of the men.

Special Operations Command refused to make Hamaguchi available for an interview and declined to answer questions about Hamaguchi’s legal guidance or Bradley’s statements to the member of Congress.

“We are not going to comment on what Admiral Bradley told law makers in a classified hearing. He did inform them that during the strike he sought advice from his lawyer and then made a decision,” Col. Allie Weiskopf, the director of public affairs at Special Operations Command, told The Intercept. Multiple military officials attempted to dissuade The Intercept from naming Hamaguchi in this article, citing safety concerns.

Four former judge advocates — better known in the military as JAGs, as they are lawyers within the judge advocate general’s corps — blasted the supposed defense that the survivors’ waving hands did not constitute a two-arm surrender. Two used the word “ridiculous” to describe it.

“Waving is a way to attract attention. There was no need to kill them,” said Eugene Fidell, who served as a judge advocate in the Coast Guard and is now a senior research scholar at Yale Law School focused on military justice. “We don’t kill people who are doing this. We should have saved them. None of it makes any sense.”

The lawmaker who watched the video footage of the attack expressed skepticism about the U.S. official’s claim. “My impression is that these were two shipwrecked individuals,” they said after viewing the video. “I do think at least one of them used two arms.”

The Intercept was the first outlet to report that the U.S. military killed survivors of the September 2 boat strike in a follow-up attack. Since then, questions have swirled around the exact roles of President Donald Trump, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and Bradley in the operation, and how they arrived at the conclusion that their monthslong campaign of killings in the Caribbean and Pacific is lawful. Military and legal experts have said the strikes are tantamount to murder. But until now, less attention has been paid to the legal guidance Bradley sought.

The legal underpinnings for the campaign of extrajudicial killings that have so far taken the lives of at least 105 civilians began taking shape over the summer, when Trump signed a secret directive ordering the Pentagon to use military force against certain Latin American drug cartels.

A classified opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel claims that narcotics on supposed drug boats are lawful military targets because their cargo generates revenue for cartels whom the Trump administration claims are in a “non-international armed conflict” with the United States. Government officials told The Intercept that the memo was not actually signed by Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser until days after the September 2 attacks. Attached to that secret memo is a similarly secret list of designated terrorist organizations, or DTOs, and an annex containing pertinent findings from the U.S. intelligence community.

In August, Hegseth, the “target engagement authority,” signed an execute order, or EXORD, directing Special Operations forces to sink suspected drug smuggling boats, destroy their cargo, and kill their crews, according to government officials. Pentagon briefers have told U.S. officials that they do not need to positively identify all of those killed in strikes and only need to show a connection to a DTO or affiliate. Those sources say the affiliate label is “quite broad” and some of those killed may have only a tenuous link to a drug smuggling cartel.

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Hegseth gave the go-ahead order to Bradley, who presided over the September 2 mission from the JSOC joint operations center at Fort Bragg, according to four government sources. Present with him was Hamaguchi and other JSOC personnel, including his top deputies, and specialists in intelligence, targeting, and munitions. “I wish everybody could be in the room watching our professionals … Adm. Mitch Bradley and others at JSOC. … The deliberative process, the detail, the rigorous, the intel, the legal … that make sure that every one of those drug boats is tied to a designated terrorist organization,” said Hegseth later.

Before the initial strike, Bradley consulted with Hamaguchi, then gave the order to elite SEAL Team 6 operators to attack the four-engine speedboat, according to government sources. Some 45 minutes after that strike, Bradley issued the order for the follow-up attacks after again consulting with Hamaguchi.

Hamaguchi has been present in the JSOC war room for all the boat strikes, unless she delegated to a deputy, according to a SOCOM official. Most of the campaign has been conducted since Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga took command of JSOC in September.

During a recent briefing, Bradley explained that the JSOC staff judge advocate specifically said that the second strike on September 2 was lawful, according to the lawmaker. Bradley said that after initial debate, there was no dissent in the room before the follow-up strike that killed the survivors, that member of Congress told The Intercept.

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Trump posted edited footage of that strike on his Truth Social account on September 2. He wrote that the attack was conducted “on my Orders.” After the killings sparked a congressional firestorm, however, Trump and Hegseth distanced themselves from the attack on the survivors. “I wouldn’t have wanted that. Not a second strike,” said the president. The war secretary claimed that he “did not personally see survivors” amid the fire and smoke and had left the room before the second attack was ordered.

Bradley apparently has no reservations about having ordered the attacks. “He’s happy to take responsibility for those decisions,” a SOCOM official told The Intercept.

Hamaguchi, a former communications officer who served in the Army for nine years before she became a judge advocate, is well known within the small group of lawyers who advise special operations units. She was publicly identified as JSOC’s staff judge advocate in materials published by the U.S. Naval War College earlier this year.

Hamaguchi boasts an impeccable reputation according to seven former colleagues, who praised her as “sharp,” “smart,” and “a good person and attorney.” Only two years into her career as an attorney and days after being promoted to major, Hamaguchi found herself providing legal advice concerning a 16-count homicide in Afghanistan. Back in the U.S., she acted as a prosecutor at the sentencing proceedings of Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales. A military jury handed Bales the stiffest sentence possible for his massacre: life in prison without parole.

Most former colleagues of Hamaguchi who spoke with The Intercept expressed surprise or dismay at the prospect of her playing a role in the boat strikes.

It’s possible Hamaguchi voiced some objection or wrote a memorandum delineating her concerns about the September 2 attacks or subsequent strikes. “Without hearing directly from the JAG, it’s impossible to know to a certainty what she said or did,” said Todd Huntley, a former Navy judge advocate who served as a legal adviser on Joint Special Operations task forces conducting drone strikes in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and called Hamaguchi “fantastic, very smart, experienced and professional.”

JAGs are expected to speak up when they have legal concerns. But Huntley said that if someone repeatedly disputed the legal underpinnings of a monthslong campaign, they would not remain in that post long. “When the relationship between a commander and his JAG has broken down to the point where the commander no longer trusts or listens to the JAG’s advice, that JAG would typically be reassigned to a different unit or role within the command. Such a situation might arise if the JAG is seen as always saying ‘no’ to the commander,” he told The Intercept.

Former colleagues also told The Intercept that Hamaguchi is scheduled to retire when her JSOC tour ends in 2026 — but stressed her departure was not premature.

“I would be completely shocked if she thought these strikes were lawful,” said one former Defense Department colleague. “I’m sure she knows this is illegal. She knows that you can’t summarily execute criminal suspects in peacetime and can’t summarily execute criminal suspects during war. Any JAG worth their salt knows this.”

That colleague and four others said specifically that they were saddened to hear Hamaguchi was involved in attacks that all said were extrajudicial killings. Another former colleague said Hamaguchi had previously exhibited a “strong moral compass.” That person added: “I can’t tell you how sad this makes me.”

Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., the chair of the House Armed Services Committee, apparently called for a briefing by the judge advocate present with Bradley during the strike. “I want the lawyer there, too,” Rogers said earlier this month. Rogers’s office did not respond to questions by The Intercept about whether a briefing with Hamaguchi ever occurred.

Six other lawmakers or congressional staff said they were unaware of any briefings by Hamaguchi. Most did not know her by name.

Lawmakers are growing frustrated with what they describe as the War Department’s consistent failure to disclose key information about the attacks. “For months, in multiple briefings, the Department omitted the fact that there were two survivors in the initial September 2^nd strike,” said Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, last week. “We learned the circumstances of the strike from press reports.”

Reed called for the committee to be provided EXORDs; unedited video of all boat strikes; and all audio, transcripts, and chat logs of communications between commanders, aircraft, and others involved in the September 2 strike, among other pertinent information.

Since the execution of the men on September 2, the U.S. has appeared to refrain from killing survivors of subsequent boat strikes. Following an October 16 attack on a semisubmersible in the Caribbean Sea that killed two civilians, two other men were rescued by the U.S. and quickly repatriated to Colombia and Ecuador, respectively. Following three attacks on October 27 that killed 15 people aboard four separate boats, a survivor of a strike was spotted clinging to wreckage, and the U.S. alerted the Mexican Navy. Search teams did not find the man, and he is presumed dead.

“This tells you all you need to know,” said one government official briefed on the strikes. “They didn’t kill the later survivors because they know it was wrong. The first strike was obviously bad. They know it was not just immoral, it was illegal.”

The post U.S. Military Killed Boat Strike Survivors for Not Surrendering Correctly appeared first on The Intercept.

The news offers an answer to a mystery that had puzzled the Air Force community since April, when Green was removed from his position as the top enlisted leader of AFSOC “due to a loss of confidence in his ability to fulfill his duties,” according to a press release put out at the time. The Air Force did not publicly elaborate on the reasons for his removal, leaving service members and observers to speculate.

The upcoming February 10, 2026, hearing follows a formal investigation by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, the service’s criminal investigative agency responsible for probing serious offenses. It will determine whether Green faces a general court-martial, and an Air Force spokesperson confirmed to The Intercept that Green has already been formally charged. According to a notice the Air Force quietly posted on its website Wednesday, without issuing a press release or broader disclosures to the force, Green faces charges of “indecent recording” and “obstruction of justice” in addition to “possession, viewing, and producing child pornography.”

Cases involving senior military leaders are rare, and criminal allegations of this magnitude draw scrutiny of former leaders’ decisions, particularly in opaque military environments where Green directly led some of the Air Force’s most lethal warfighters.

As command chief of AFSOC, Green held one of the most powerful positions within one of the Air Force’s most sensitive major commands. He advised commanding officers on enlisted troop matters, including discipline and readiness within special operations units. AFSOC encompasses several major personnel wings across bases such as Cannon Air Force Base, New Mexico; Royal Air Force Mildenhall, United Kingdom; and Kadena Air Base, Japan.

Green’s position placed him at the top of the enlisted structure for the major command, giving him significant influence over special operations culture. According to the Air Force, the term “Air Commando” honors a lineage of Air Force units performing unconventional, combat-oriented operations, reflecting the elite mission and ethos over which Green had authority. In 2023, he became the 11th command chief of AFSOC, overseeing about 22,000 total force and civilian Air Commandos worldwide.

The Air Force spokesperson confirmed Green was still on active duty, working a desk job as a special assistant at the 96th Test Wing at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. He could not be reached individually for comment.

The child sexual abuse material allegations against him violate multiple articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which govern legal conduct for military personnel, as well as several federal and state criminal statutes. The alleged offenses occurred at Hurlburt Field, Florida, home of Air Force special operations.

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Green joined the Air Force in 1995 and spent much of his career in C-130 maintenance, a career field The Intercept previously covered for rampant hazing, troop abuses, and suicides. Interviews with former maintainers often cite inappropriate sexual conduct or conversation by senior leadership while on duty. His rise from the operational maintenance ranks to a top enlisted leadership role underscores the range of his authority and the reach of his influence over enlisted personnel in the Air Force.

While Green was under investigation, members of the Air Force were left in the dark about why he was removed, with some taking to Air Force social media pages to question whether the removal was a political move under the Trump administration, for which there is currently no evidence.

At the preliminary hearing, conducted under Article 32 of the UCMJ, a hearing officer will review evidence and evaluate witnesses, allowing the accused to be represented by counsel, and recommend whether the case should proceed. AFSOC said no further court documents or updates will be made public before the hearing.

The post Ousted Air Force Special Ops Command Chief Faces Child Sexual Abuse Material Charges appeared first on The Intercept.

Democrats sponsoring the measures were able to peel off only two Republicans on the first vote and three on the second as the GOP rallied around the White House.

On Tuesday, Trump announced a partial blockade — considered an act of war in international law — against Venezuela after weeks of threatening military action.

The votes Wednesday may have been lawmakers’ last chance to push back on Trump before Congress’s end-of-year break. A vote on a bipartisan measure in the Senate blocking land strikes is pending.

The House voted 216-210 against the drug boats measure and 213-211 against the land strikes measure. Both would have required Trump to seek congressional authorization for further attacks.

The lead sponsor of the measure blocking an attack on Venezuela, Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said Trump seemed to be rushing headlong into a war without making the case for it.

“Americans do not want another Iraq. If we intensify hostilities in Venezuela, we have no idea what we’re walking into,” McGovern said. “At least George Bush had the decency to come to Congress for approval in 2002. Don’t the American people deserve that respect today?”

Bush in 2002 sought and received a formal authorization for his attack on Iraq. Without taking any similar steps, Trump has massed thousands of American service members in the Caribbean without formal approval.

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Rumors began to swirl in right-wing circles before the vote that Trump would use a Wednesday evening televised address to announce U.S. attacks targeted directly at Venezuela — strikes that could be salvos in a regime-change war against President Nicolás Maduro.

In the absence of outreach from the White House, Democrats forced votes to block unauthorized strikes on both the boats and Venezuelan land under the War Powers Resolution, a 1973 law meant to limit the power of U.S. presidents to wage war without congressional approval.

Trans-Partisan or Not?

Earlier attempts in the Senate to stop both the drug boat strikes and an attack on Venezuela under the war powers law have failed on mostly party-line votes. Wednesday represented the first instance that representatives have faced similar questions, making it a key public test.

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The vote on a measure banning attacks on alleged drug boats came first. From the start, it was poised to earn less support from Republicans, whose base widely supports the strikes at sea. Few GOP lawmakers wavered despite renewed criticism of the Trump administration over a second attack, first reported by The Intercept, that killed the survivors of an initial strike on an alleged drug boat on September 2.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Brian Mast, R-Fla., argued Wednesday that Trump has the legal authority to act against the “imminent threat” of illegal drugs.

“Every drug boat sunk is literally drugs not coming to the United States of America,” he said. “Democrats are putting forward a resolution to say the president cannot do anything about MS-13 or Tren de Aragua” — two Latin American gangs frequently invoked by drug war hawks — “and every other cartel. That is giving aid and comfort to narco-terrorism.”

The debate grew heated at one point, with Mast suggesting that Foreign Affairs ranking member Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., did not care about the nearly 200 overdoses in his district last year.

In response, Meeks noted that Venezuela is not a major source of the drug that has driven the overdose crisis, fentanyl. He also asked over and over again why Trump had pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of drug trafficking, as well as the founder of the darknet drug network Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht.

“I’m still waiting to hear why major drug dealers — two major drug dealers — were pardoned by the president of the United States. I’ll wait,” Meeks said at one point, taking a long pause. “Nothing?”

Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Don Bacon, R-Neb., were the only Republicans to vote in favor of halting the boat strikes. Democratic Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, who represent Texas districts near the southern border, broke with their party to vote against it.

Land Attack?

The other measure, blocking attacks on Venezuelan land without approval from Congress, seemed poised to draw more GOP support. Massie and Bacon co-sponsored the proposal.

The White House has failed to ask Congress for a declaration of war as the Constitution requires, Massie told his colleagues.

“Do we want a miniature Afghanistan in the Western hemisphere? If that cost is acceptable to this Congress, we should vote on it, as the voice of the people, and in accordance with our Constitution,” Massie said.

Advocates’ hope for a cross-partisan coalition between Democrats and MAGA Republicans opposed to regime-change wars was dashed, however, under pressure from GOP leaders who said the measures were nothing more than a swipe at Trump.

“This resolution reads as if Maduro wrote it himself. It gives a narco-terrorist dictator a free pass to keep trafficking drugs,” Mast said of McGovern’s measure. “Because it appears Democrats hate President Trump more than they love America.”

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Ultimately, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia was the only other Republican who joined Massie and Bacon to vote in favor of the measure. Cuellar was the only Democrat to vote against it.

The votes came a day after Trump announced a blockade of Venezuela, which depends on trade using sanctioned oil tankers for a large share of its revenue.

Blockades are acts of war, according to the Center for International Policy, a left-leaning think tank.

“Trump was elected on a promise to end wars, not start them,” Matt Duss, the center’s executive vice-president, said in a statement. “Not only is he breaking that promise, his aggression toward Venezuela echoes the worst moments of American imperialist violence and domination in Latin America. We should be moving away from that history, not rebooting it.”

The post Congress Squanders Last Chance to Block Venezuela War Before Going on Vacation appeared first on The Intercept.

Gen. Gregory Guillot of U.S. Northern Command, a four-star general who takes his orders from War Secretary Pete Hegseth, made clear his position in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week. When asked about his willingness to attack DTOs within U.S. borders by Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., he replied: “If I had questions, I would elevate that to the chairman and the secretary. … And if I had no concerns and I was confident in the lawful order, I would definitely execute that order.”

Guillot’s openness about the potential for unprecedented military action within U.S. borders comes as the White House, Pentagon, and Justice Department continue to refuse to rule out summary executions of Americans on Trump’s secret enemies list, after weeks of requests for clarifications from The Intercept.

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The military has carried out 25 known attacks in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September, killing at least 95 civilians whom it claims are narco-terrorists affiliated with DTOs. The most recent strikes, three on Monday in the Pacific Ocean against “vessels operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations,” killed a total of eight people, according to U.S. Southern Command.

The questionable legal justification for these attacks makes Guillot’s response all the more concerning, said Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Brennan Center’s liberty and national security program.

“The problem with General Guillot’s answer is that it elides the concerns that have already been raised about the lawfulness of conducting military attacks against drug trafficking operations,” Goitein told The Intercept.

When The Intercept asked if Guillot would be willing to refuse orders if, after elevating his concerns to the chair and the secretary, he was still not confident in the legality of the orders, Teresa C. Meadows, the U.S. Northern Command Media and Plans chief, replied: “NORTHCOM does not designate terrorist organizations.”

“That is one of the concerns with the administration asserting that the President essentially has a license to kill outside the law based on his own say so,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is a specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war. “That prerogative might be wielded elsewhere — including inside the United States.”

“After the military has conducted 95 summary executions of civilians in the Caribbean at the direction of Trump and Hegseth, it is not sufficient anymore for commanders to say to lawmakers that they will run any legal concerns up the chain — at the top of which are those who would be giving the order,” said Sarah Harrison, who previously served as associate general counsel at the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel, International Affairs. “Rather, to make clear they will uphold the rule of law, they should be definitive in saying that they will disobey patently unlawful orders, which include the scenario Senator Reed laid out for Gen. Guillot.”

Trump told reporters last week that terrestrial strikes are imminent. “Now we’re starting by land, and by land is a lot easier, and that’s going to start happening,” he said. “It’s land strikes on horrible people.”

When asked if the land strikes would be limited to the administration’s regime-change project for Venezuela, Trump offered a much broader threat. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be in Venezuela,” he said. The White House did not respond to a request for clarification if such attacks would occur in the United States.

Guillot attended an address in September by Trump and Hegseth at which the president told the NORTHCOM chief and hundreds of other generals and admirals that the United States was involved in a “war from within” and that a “major part” in it would be played by “some of the people in this room.” Guillot pleaded ignorance when questioned about who he might be ordered to attack. “I do not have any indications of an enemy within,” he said last week.

NORTHCOM, which provides command and control of “homeland defense” and manages military activity in North America, has overseen troop deployments in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon, that federal judges have ruled were illegal because Trump administration claims of rampant civil unrest were found to be overblown or fictional. Trump has even falsely claimed, for example, that members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua have engaged in hand-to-hand combat with U.S. troops on the streets of D.C. The White House has, for weeks, failed to address this falsehood.

“The founders designed our government to be a system of checks and balances. Defendants, however, make clear that the only check they want is a blank one,” U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer wrote in a 35-page opinion last week, ordering Trump to end the Los Angeles troop deployment. “It defies the record — and common sense — to conclude that risks stemming from protests — in August, October, or even present day — could not have been sufficiently managed without resorting to the National Guard.”

“Within the context of the Federal Protection Mission, forces under the command and control of NORTHCOM protect federal property and federal personnel as they enforce federal law,” said Meadows, despite the statement having little to do with questions posed by The Intercept.

The Pentagon refused to say if DTOs are operating in America, directing The Intercept to the White House and Justice Department.

The Justice Department pointed The Intercept to comments made on Monday by Bill Essayli, who leads the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, as he announced the weekend arrests of members of what he called “a far-left, anti-government, domestic terror cell,” known as the Turtle Island Liberation Front, for allegedly planning a series of bomb attacks across Southern California on New Year’s Eve.

“This investigation was initiated in part due to the September 2025 executive order signed by President Trump to root out left-wing domestic terror organizations in our country, such as Antifa and other radical groups,” he explained, referencing National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, under which Trump instructed his administration to target U.S. progressive groups and their donors as well as political activists who profess undefined anti-American, anti-fascist, or anti-Christian sentiments.

NSPM-7 also directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to compile a list “of any such groups or entities” to be designated as “domestic terrorist organization[s]” and Bondi has ordered the FBI to “compile a list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism,” according to a December 4 Justice Department memo, “Implementing National Security Presidential Memorandum-7: Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” which the Justice Department shared with The Intercept. Essayli also referenced that memo, stating that it mobilized “federal law enforcement to prioritize and counter domestic terrorism and political violence investigations.” He added, “As a result of those directives, we built this case.”

Justice Department spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre did not respond to repeated requests for clarification about whether the Turtle Island Liberation Front and a supposed more militant faction known as the Order of the Black Lotus were on either the domestic or designated terrorist lists.

Senior White House adviser Stephen Miller issued an ominous pronouncement about the administration’s crackdown on dissent in America on Monday. “Following the issuance of NSPM-7 vast government resources have been unleashed to find and dismantle the violent fifth column of domestic terrorists clandestinely operating inside the United States,” he wrote on X.

The post U.S. Military Willing to Attack “Designated Terrorist Organizations” Within America, General Says appeared first on The Intercept.

Now, more than 80 years of precedent may be coming to an end.

On Thursday, lawmakers in the House approved a “pilot program” in the pending Pentagon budget bill that could eventually open the door to sending billions to big contractors, while providing what critics say would be little benefit to the military.

The provision, which appeared in the budget bill after a closed-door session overseen by top lawmakers, would allow contractors to claim reimbursement for the interest they pay on debt they take on to build weapons and other gadgets for the armed services.

The technical-sounding change has such serious implications for the budget that the Pentagon itself warned against it two years ago.

One big defense contractor alone, Lockheed Martin, reported having more than $17.8 billion in outstanding interest payments last year, said Julia Gledhill, an analyst at the nonprofit Stimson Center.

“The fact that we are even exploring this question is a little crazy in terms of financial risk for the government,” Gledhill said.

Gledhill said even some Capitol Hill staffers were “scandalized” to see the provision in the final bill, which will likely be approved by the Senate next week.

Pilot to Where?

For most companies, paying interest on a loan they take out from the bank is a cost of doing business. The pilot program buried in the budget bill, however, is one of many ways in which the federal government would give defense contractors special treatment.

Contractors can already receive reimbursements from the Defense Department for the cost of research and development. Under the terms of the legislation, they would also be allowed to receive reimbursements for “financing costs incurred for a covered activity.”

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The legislation leaves it up to the Pentagon to design the program. While it’s billed as a pilot, there is no hard spending cap in the pending legislation. The total amount dedicated to the program would be determined by the House and Senate appropriations committees.

The bill tasks the Defense Department with releasing a report in February 2028 on how well the pilot program worked. As approved by Congress, however, the bill does not explain what metrics, if any, the Pentagon is supposed to use to evaluate the program.

“I don’t see any clear parameters for what success looks like,” Gledhill said. “Are there new entrants? Are we building weapons production capacity? Or are new entrants on the way?”

The chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate armed services committees who oversaw the closed-door conference process that produced the final draft of the National Defense Authorization Act did not respond to requests for comment.

In a document posted online, the committee leaders said that similar provisions were included in House and Senate drafts of the bill.

Big Spending at Stake

The switch to covering financing costs seems to be in line with a larger push this year to shake up the defense industry in light of lessons learned from Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine and fears of competition with China.

“The generous view of this provision is: Look, we have industrial capacity constraints and perhaps if we make borrowing essentially free, then maybe — big maybe — contractors will invest in capacity,” Gledhill said.

She is skeptical that will happen, and the Pentagon itself was dubious in a 2023 study conducted by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment. The Pentagon found that policy change might even supercharge the phenomenon of big defense contractors using taxpayer dollars for stock buybacks instead of research and development.

“Higher interest rates or increased borrowing only increase Revenue and Profits further,” the report found. “This creates the real risk of a ‘moral hazard’ as it pertains to interest.”

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The sums at stake are enormous. The “five primes” — the big defense contractors who claim the lion’s share of Pentagon contracts — each reported spending massive amounts of money on interest payments last year. The companies all disclose their debt loads in slightly different ways in their annual reports, but the scale is nonetheless massive in each case.

Lockheed Martin said it had $17.8 billion in outstanding interest payments.

RTX, formerly known as Raytheon, said it had $23.3 billion in future interest on long-term debt.

Northrop Grumman paid $475 million on interest payments in 2024, and General Dynamics, for its part, paid $385 million.

Meanwhile, Boeing said that it had $38.3 billion in long-term interest on debt. The company did not break down specifically how much of that debt related to its defense business, which accounted for 36.5 percent of its revenue in 2024.

Along with the “five primes,” Silicon Valley firms such as Anduril and Palantir are increasingly moving into defense contracting.

It’s unlikely that the contractors’ interest payments would ever be fully reimbursed by the Defense Department, Gledhill said, but even getting a fraction covered would amount to a huge giveaway.

She said, “I don’t think a single dollar should go toward interest payments for contractors.”

The post Lawmakers Pave the Way to Billions in Handouts for Weapons Makers That the Pentagon Itself Opposed appeared first on The Intercept.

Are Americans that the federal government deems to be members of domestic terrorist organizations subject to extrajudicial killings like those it claims are members of designated terrorist organizations? The White House, Justice Department, and Department of War have, for more than a month, failed to answer this question.

Lawmakers and other government officials tell The Intercept that the pregnant silence by the Trump administration has become especially worrisome as the death toll mounts from attacks on alleged members of “designated terrorist organizations” in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, and as Trump himself makes ever more unhinged threats to imprison or execute his political adversaries.

In early September, The Intercept revealed that elite Special Operators killed the shipwrecked victims of a September 2 attack on a suspected drug smuggling boat. They have since struck more than 20 other vessels. The administration insists the attacks are permitted because the U.S. is engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations” it refuses to name. Experts and lawmakers say these killings are outright murders — and that Trump could conceivably use similar lethal force inside the United States.

“The Trump Administration is trying to justify blowing small boats out of the water by arbitrarily calling them ‘designated terrorist organizations’ — a label not grounded in U.S. statute nor international law, but in solely what Trump says,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., told The Intercept. “If Trump is using this justification to use military force on any individuals he chooses — without verified evidence or legal authorization — what’s stopping him from designating anyone within our own borders in a similar fashion and conducting lethal, militarized attacks against them? This illegal and dangerous misuse of lethal force should worry all Americans, and it can’t be accepted as normal.”

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For almost a quarter century, the United States has been killing people — including American citizens, on occasion — around the world with drone strikes. Beginning as post-9/11 counterterrorism operations, these targeted killings in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and other nations relied on a flimsy legal rationale that consistently eroded respect for international law. Details of these operations were kept secret from the American people, and civilian casualties were ignored, denied, and covered up. The recent attacks on alleged drug boats lack even the rickety legal rationale of the drone wars, sparking fear that there is little to stop the U.S. government from taking the unprecedented step of military action against those it deems terrorists within the nation’s borders.

The military has carried out 22 known attacks in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September, killing at least 87 civilians. Last week, footage of the September 2 double-tap strike shown to select members of Congress ignited a firestorm. Trump announced, on camera, that he had “no problem” with releasing the video of the attack. This week, he denied ever saying it, in another example of his increasingly unbalanced behavior.

“The public deserves to know how our government is justifying the cold-blooded murder of civilians as lawful and why it believes it can hand out get-out-of-jail-free cards to people committing these crimes,” said Jeffrey Stein, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, on Tuesday, as the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit for the immediate release of a classified Justice Department’s opinion and other documents related to the attacks on boats. “The Trump administration must stop these illegal and immoral strikes, and officials who have carried them out must be held accountable.”

Since October, The Intercept has been asking if the White House would rule out conducting summary executions of members of the list “of any such groups or entities” designated as “domestic terrorist organization[s]” under NSPM-7, without a response. Similar questions posed to the Justice and War departments have also been repeatedly ignored, despite both departments offering replies to myriad other queries. The Justice Department responded with a statement that did not answer the question. “Political violence has no place in this country, and this Department of Justice will investigate, identify, and root out any individual or violent extremist group attempting to commit or promote this heinous activity,” a spokesperson told The Intercept.

“The Trump administration should answer all questions about the terrorist lists,” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., told The Intercept. “The American people have a right to answers about who is on them and what that means for all of us.”

Rebecca Ingber, a former State Department lawyer, notes that while the designated terrorist organization label as a targeting authority is “entirely manufactured,” the administration is relying on it to summarily execute people in the boat strikes, making their application of the terrorist label on the domestic front especially concerning. “Many of us have warned that there seems to be no legal limiting principle to the Administration’s claims of authority to use force and to kill people,” Ingber, now a law professor at Cardozo Law School in New York, told The Intercept. “This is one of the many reasons it is so important that Congress push back on the President’s claim that he can simply label transporting drugs an armed attack on the United States and then claim the authority to summarily execute people on that basis.”

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Last month, members of Congress spoke up against Trump’s increasingly authoritarian measures when a group of Democratic lawmakers posted a video on social media in which they reminded military personnel that they are required to disobey illegal orders. This led to a Trump tirade that made the White House’s failure to dismiss the possibility of summary executions of Americans even more worrisome.

“This is really bad,” the president wrote on Truth Social, “and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP???” A follow-up post read: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” Trump also reposted a comment that said: “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!”

“What’s most telling is that the President considers it punishable by death for us to restate the law,” the six lawmakers — Sens. Elissa Slotkin, Mark Kelly, and Reps. Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, and Chrissy Houlahan — all of them former members of the armed forces or the intelligence community — replied in a joint statement. “Every American must unite and condemn the President’s calls for our murder and political violence.” Trump later claimed he did not call for the lawmakers’ executions.

For decades, Trump has called for violence against — including executions of — those he dislikes, including a group of Black and Latino boys were wrongly accused of raping a white woman jogger in New York’s Central Park in 1989; immigrants at the southern border, those who carry out hate crimes and mass shootings; demonstrators protesting the death of George Floyd; the chief suspect in the fatal shooting of a Trump supporter in Portland, Oregon; former chair of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley; and former Rep. Liz Cheney. In August, Trump also called for “Capital capital punishment,” explaining: “If somebody kills somebody in the capital, Washington, we’re going to be seeking the death penalty.”

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In January, immediately after being sworn in, Trump also signed an order to expand the death penalty, and Attorney General Pam Bondi has spent the year carrying out orders to put more Americans to death. Eleven states have executed 44 people since January, according to the Death Penalty Information Center — the highest annual total in more than a decade.

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers failed to answer questions about Trump’s history of threatening to kill people and his recent unhinged behavior.

As Trump lobs threats at political foes and his administration seeks to put convicted and supposed criminals to death at home and abroad, NSPM-7 directs hundreds of thousands of federal officials to target U.S. progressive groups and their donors as well as political activists who profess undefined anti-American, antifascist, or anti-Christian sentiments. The memorandum harkens back to past government enemies lists and efforts that led to massive overreach and illegal acts of repression to stifle dissent. That includes the House Un-American Activities Committee, which began in the 1940s, the FBI’s secret Counter Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, which began in the 1950s, and the Patriot Act, enacted in the wake of 9/11, which led to abuses of Black, brown, and Muslim communities, along with racial, social, environmental, animal rights, and other social justice activists and groups.

“Trump’s NSPM-7 represses freedom of speech and association. Investigating any organization with anti-capitalism or anti-American views is anti-American. NSPM-7 is a greater infringement on freedoms than the Patriot Act,” said Khanna. “We’re seeing the greatest erosion of civil liberties and human rights in our modern history.”

NSPM-7 directs Bondi to compile a list “of any such groups or entities” to be designated as “domestic terrorist organization[s]” and Bondi has ordered the FBI to “compile a list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism,” according to a Justice Department memo disclosed by reporter Ken Klippenstein on Saturday. The department also shared the December 4 memo, “Implementing National Security Presidential Memorandum-7: Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” with The Intercept.

The Justice Department memo notes that under Section 3 of NSPM-7, “the FBI, in coordination with its partners on the [Joint Terrorism Task Forces], and consistent with applicable law, shall compile a list of groups or entities engaged in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism” and “provide that list to the Deputy Attorney General.” (The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces are located in each of the FBI’s 56 field offices and specifically “support President Trump’s executive orders,” according to a top FBI official.)

The Justice Department memorandum offers a fictitious apocalyptic vision of urban America which the Trump administration has previously employed to justify its military occupations, including “mass rioting and destruction in our cities, violent efforts to shut down immigration enforcement, [and] targeting of public officials or other political actors.” While Trump has even falsely claimed, for example, that members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua have engaged in hand-to-hand combat with U.S. troops on the streets of Washington, D.C., state attorneys general have repeatedly and successfully argued that troop deployments in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon, were illegal because Trump administration claims of rampant civil unrest were found to be overblown or fictional.

The December 4 Justice Department memo also claims that “certain Antifa-aligned extremists” profess “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment” and “a willingness to use violence against law-abiding citizenry to serve those beliefs.” Over the last decade, Republicans have frequently blamed antifa for violence and used it as an omnibus term for left-wing activists, as if it were an organization with members and a command structure.

In September, Trump signed an executive order designating antifa as a “domestic terror organization,” despite the fact that it is essentially a decentralized, leftist ideology — a collection of related ideas and political concepts much like feminism or environmentalism.

Last month, the State Department designated four European groups — Antifa Ost, based in Germany; Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front, a mostly Italian group; and Armed Proletarian Justice and Revolutionary Class Self-Defense, both Greek organizations — as “foreign terrorist organizations” because of their alleged threats and attacks against political and economic institutions in Europe. The State Department announced that the FTO designation specifically supports NSPM-7. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control also designated the groups as “specially designated nationals.”

Michael Glasheen, a longtime FBI agent serving as operations director of the bureau’s national security branch, was flummoxed by questions about antifa while testifying on Thursday before the House Committee on Homeland Security. He said antifa was the “most immediate violent threat” facing the United States, but could not answer basic details about the movement, including its size or where it is headquartered. The FBI, Glasheen said, has conducted more than 1,700 domestic terrorism investigations this year, including “approximately 70 antifa investigations,” and logged a 171 percent increase in arrests. He also drew attention to a “concerning uptick in the radicalization of our nation’s young people,” specifically “those who may be motivated to commit violence and other criminal acts to further social or political objectives stemming from domestic influences.”

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Last month, a federal grand jury in Fort Worth, Texas, indicted nine alleged “North Texas Antifa Cell operatives” — one of them a former Marine Corps reservist — on multiple charges, including attempted murder, stemming from a shooting during a July 4 protest at the ICE Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado in which a local police officer was injured. The Justice Department claims that the North Texas Antifa Cell is “part of a larger militant enterprise made up of networks of individuals and small groups primarily ascribing to an ideology that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and the system of law.”

The December 4 Justice Department memo states that within 60 days, the FBI “shall disseminate an intelligence bulletin on Antifa and Antifa-aligned anarchist violent extremist groups,” including their “organizations’ structures, funding sources, and tactics so that law enforcement partners can effectively investigate and policy makers can effectively understand the nature and gravity of the threat posed by these extremist groups.”

The memo also calls for bounties and a network of informants. The “FBI shall establish a cash reward system for information that leads to the successful identification and arrest of individuals in the leadership of domestic terrorist organizations,” reads the document, noting that the bureau also aims to “establish cooperators to provide information and eventually testify against other members and leadership of domestic terrorist organizations.”

Neither NSPM-7 nor the December 4 memo mentions summary executions, and both speak explicitly in terms of “prosecution” and “arrest” of members of domestic terrorist organizations. Attacks on members of designated terrorist organizations are justified by another document — a classified opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — that claims that narcotics on supposed drug boats are lawful military targets because their cargo generates revenue for cartels whom the Trump administration claims are in armed conflict with the United States. Attached to that secret memo is a similarly secret list of designated terrorist organizations.

The December 4 memorandum directs Justice Department prosecutors to focus on specific federal crimes highlighted in NSPM-7 and flags more than 25 federal charges including crimes that may be capital offenses under specific, aggravating circumstances, such as killing or attempting to kill a federal officer and murder for hire.

It’s notable that the alleged members of designated terrorist organizations summarily killed in boat strikes would never, if tried in court, receive the death penalty.

“The administration is creating new categories of organizations outside of the law, creating immense uncertainty about who and what they intend to target and how,” Faiza Patel, the senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, told The Intercept, drawing attention to the administration’s invented term: designated terrorist organizations. “But drug trafficking is not war, and these actions are patently illegal in the absence of Congressional authorization,” she added. “At the same time, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 is aimed at ‘domestic terrorist organizations’ — another term that has no basis in U.S. law. It is designed to ramp up law enforcement scrutiny of groups espousing a broad swath of First Amendment-protected beliefs from anti-Christianity to anti-Americanism. NSPM-7 does not in any way, shape, or form authorize military strikes and using it for that would be plainly unlawful.”

The post White House Refuses to Rule Out Summary Executions of People on Its Secret Domestic Terrorist List appeared first on The Intercept.

The report, titled “Draining Defense,” took aim at the Trump administration for what it described as prioritizing hard-line border initiatives and political stunts at the expense of the military’s ability to protect the nation and respond to emergencies.

“It’s an insult to our service members that Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem are using the defense budget as a slush fund for political stunts. Stripping military resources to promote a wasteful political agenda doesn’t make our military stronger or Americans safer,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., one of the lawmakers who prepared the report, told The Intercept. “Congress needs to step in and hold the Trump Administration accountable for mishandling billions of taxpayer dollars.”

The report noted that the Pentagon’s requested budget for 2026 indicates that the Defense Department plans to spend at least $5 billion for operations on the southern border alone.

President Donald Trump has made a crackdown on immigration and closed borders the key policy of his second term, and has argued that decreasing immigration and deporting immigrants is a cornerstone of sovereignty and safety. But the lawmakers argued that the level of commitment of Pentagon funds and troops on immigration matters has passed any reasonable standard, hampering the overall readiness of the nation’s armed forces and contributing to wasteful spending in lieu of more efficient allocation of resources by civilian agencies.

“When the military is tasked with immigration enforcement — a role that is not consistent with DoD’s mission, and that servicemembers have neither signed up nor been trained for — those operations often cost several times more than when the same function is performed by civilian authorities,” the lawmakers wrote.

The report found that the Pentagon had allocated at least $1.3 billion for resources and troop deployment to the border; at least $420.9 million for the detention of immigrants at military installations at home and abroad; at least $258 million for the deployment of troops American cities like Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago; and at least $40.3 million for military deportation flights.

“As of July 2025, there were roughly 8,500 troops deployed to the southern border, with additional combat units in the process of relieving the troops who were deployed to the border earlier in the year,” the lawmakers wrote. “This deployment has meant making combat-certified units no longer available for their normal functions because they are assisting DHS with immigration enforcement — raising serious concerns about the implications for military readiness.”

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The report also singled out the cost of Trump’s deployments to U.S. cities over the past year and cited reporting by The Intercept on the steep cost of those deployments.

The lawmakers also raised concerns that, in addition to the financial costs, the Pentagon’s focus on anti-immigration policies has resulted in military service members “being pulled from their homes, families, and civilian jobs for indefinite periods of time to support legally questionable political stunts.”

They criticized the administration’s failure to adequately inform Congress and the public about the diversion of Pentagon funds. “The Trump administration’s secrecy leaves many questions unanswered,” they wrote. “The administration has failed to provide clarity on basic questions about DoD’s role in supporting DHS.”

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The White House responded that “spending allocated money on one mission does not mean other missions become depleted,” and said the use of Pentagon funds on immigration matters should be blamed on political adversaries.

“Operations with the Department of Homeland Security wouldn’t be necessary if Joe Biden didn’t turn the Southern Border into a national security threat, but this administration is proud to fix the problem Democrats started,” said Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson in an emailed statement.

The post Trump Administration Diverted $2 Billion in Pentagon Funds to Target Immigrants, Lawmakers Say appeared first on The Intercept.

Mentions of democracy are noticeably absent, however, from Anduril’s recent announcement of a new joint venture with a state-run bomb maker from an authoritarian monarchy that is facilitating a genocide.

Anduril is partnering with EDGE Group, a weapons conglomerate controlled by the United Arab Emirates, a nation run entirely by the royal families of its seven emirates that permits virtually none of the activities typically associated with democratic societies. In the UAE, free expression and association are outlawed, and dissident speech is routinely and brutally punished without due process. A 2024 assessment of political rights and civil liberties by Freedom House, a U.S. State Department-backed think tank, gave the UAE a score of 18 out of 100.

The EDGE–Anduril Production Alliance, as it will be known, will focus on autonomous weapons systems, including the production of Anduril’s “Omen” drone. The UAE has agreed to purchase the first 50 Omen drones built through the partnership, according to a press release, “the first in a series of autonomous systems envisioned under the joint venture.” The Omen drone was described as a “personal project” of Anduril founder and CEO Palmer Luckey, a longtime Trump ally and fundraiser.

EDGE Chair Faisal Al Bannai explained in a 2019 interview that EDGE was working to develop weapons systems tailored to defeating low-tech “militia-style” militant groups.

The UAE has been eager to sell its weapons around the world, both to generate profit and to exert political influence. This most recently and brutally includes Sudan, where the Emirates supply the Rapid Support Forces, an anti-government militia. Weapons furnished by the UAE have been instrumental in the ongoing civil war, now widely described as having descended into an RSF-perpetrated genocide. In October, video imagery emerged from Sudan showing RSF soldiers indiscriminately slaughtering civilians in Darfur. Reports of rape, torture, and other atrocities at the hands of the RSF are now widespread, and a current “low estimate” of people murdered by the RSF during its recent takeover of the Sudanese city of El Fasher is 60,000, according to a recent report by The Guardian. The Trump administration determined in January that the RSF’s massacres constituted a genocide, echoing assessments by the Biden administration and human rights observers.

The RSF has been able to rapidly overtake the Sudanese army with the help of weapons from Anduril’s new partner. An April investigation by France 24 found EDGE subsidiary International Golden Group funneled tens of thousands of mortar rounds into Sudan for use by the RSF.

Nathaniel Raymonds, who leads the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, told The Intercept mortars were among “three weapons systems that went into the hands of RSF that changed the course of the war.”

Raymonds, whose office at Yale previously partnered with the State Department to monitor atrocities in the Sudanese civil war, described Anduril’s joint venture as “mind-boggling” given the role Emirati drones and other weapons have played in facilitating the RSF’s genocide. “You have a DIA and [State Department] assessment that in a just world will trigger Leahy Act and shut this thing down from day one,” Raymonds said, referring to legislation that nominally prohibits the provision of assistance to foreign militaries that have committed major human rights violations.

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Neither Anduril nor EDGE Group responded to a request for comment. A November press release from both companies noted “EDGE and Anduril will work closely with U.S. and UAE authorities to ensure full compliance with applicable laws and regulations including trade compliance rules and regulations.”

A 2024 report by Human Rights Watch noted the use of drone-delivered thermobaric bombs sold by EDGE. In October, The Guardian reported the RSF’s use of armored personnel carriers manufactured by an EDGE subsidiary. In 2024, a United Nations panel of experts deemed the UAE’s backing of the RSF as “credible,” and this year a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers issued a statement criticizing “[f]oreign backers of the RSF and SAF–including the United Arab Emirates.” The Wall Street Journal reported in October that both the State Department’s intelligence office and the Defense Intelligence Agency agreed the UAE was supplying the RSF with a wide array of weapons, vehicles, and ammunition. The UAE has repeatedly denied this support despite ample evidence.

Jean-Baptiste Gallopin, a researcher at Human Rights Watch who has tracked the flow of arms into Sudan, told The Intercept that EDGE Group’s products have exacerbated the horror of the ongoing war. “The rapid support forces, which we found responsible for crimes against humanity across Sudan, has made widespread use of armored vehicles made by Nimr, a subsidiary of Edge Group,” he said. “The name of Adasi, another subsidiary of Edge Group which specializes in drone technology, appeared on crates of Serbian-made 120mm munitions that the RSF has been using and which equip some of their quadcopter attack drones.” Nan Tian, a senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, added that the Nimr vehicles are armed with “a gun that is made by KNDS which is a French-German arms maker. KNDS has a military partnership with EDGE Group.”

Raymonds argued that “not since Operation Cyclone,” the CIA effort to arm the Afghan mujahideen, “has there been a covert action by any nation state to arm a paramilitary proxy group at this scale and sophistication and try to write it off as just a series of happy coincidences.”

EDGE was launched at a 2019 inauguration ceremony overseen by Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, and consists of over 30 subsidiaries spanning bombs, drones, ammunition, and various military and intelligence software systems. EDGE’s chair of the board, Faisal Al Bannai, is a businessman and adviser to the prince.

EDGE isn’t the only Emirati weapons company, but the conglomerate represents the bulk of the country’s arms industry by volume and illustrates the amorality of its export policy, according to Sam Perlo-Freeman, a researcher with the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, which has advocated for an arms embargo against the UAE. “As a state-owned company, they will be used as an agent of Emirati state policy,” he said. “Arms supplies to allies and proxies across the Middle East, North, and East Africa has been for quite a while a major facet of Emirati state policy.” This has manifested beyond furnishing arms to the RSF, with the UAE arming militaries in Libya, Somalia, and the ongoing genocidal war in Tigray. “There’s very few conflicts in the in the wider region that the UAE haven’t had a hand in, and very often a rather malign hand.”

Reports of EDGE wares winding up in the hands of armed proxies stretches back over a decade.

A 2013 report by the United Nations Security Council found International Golden Group facilitated the import of hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition into Libya in violation of a global arms embargo.

In 2019, a report by Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism found UAE-backed combatants in the ongoing Yemeni civil war armed with pistols manufactured by Caracal, an EDGE subsidiary.

As in Sudan, a nominal civil war waged within the Tigray region of Ethiopia was exacerbated by foreign entanglement and a flood of outside weaponry. In 2023, Gerjon’s Aircraft Finds, an aviation analysis Substack, published imagery indicating the import of guided bombs manufactured by Al Tariq, another EDGE subsidiary, for use by the Ethiopian Air Force, responsible for widespread civilian death during the Tigray war.

Anduril, most recently valued by private investors at over $30 billion, has a wide array of weapons in the U.S. and with its allies, including Australia and Taiwan. It works closely with the Department of Defense and has operated surveillance towers along the U.S.–Mexico border for nearly a decade. Its business has surged as it has cast its products as a vital tool in a tech arms race between the West and China, matching the company’s rhetoric positioning it as a lethal bulwark against autocracy.

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Luckey has long cast his company as a defender of democracy. “Soldiers who defend western values should all be superheroes with superpowers,” he tweeted in 2019. In an interview that year, Luckey explained backing democratic allies against “rogue nations” around the world: “I like working with the British,” he said. “Everyone’s a little bit different but more or less we all believe in western values and democracy and universal human rights.”

Anduril co-founder Matt Grimm similarly advanced the company’s moral case for an arms race on human rights grounds, describing China in a 2024 interview as the world’s “greatest evil,” denouncing the Chinese state’s “basic approach to human rights.” Grimm added that “I think they’re conducting an ongoing genocide with their Uyghur population, I think their approach to free speech, to political speech, to religious freedom, are fundamentally antithetical to how the West values human life and how we think about human rights.”

“The fact of Anduril saying they’re an arsenal of democracy and partnering with EDGE Group, it’s obviously ridiculous,” said Perlo-Freeman, “but it’s part of the broader picture of Western democracies treating the UAE as a valued partner and ally and shielding them from consequences.”

The post Anduril Partners With UAE Bomb Maker Accused of Arming Sudan’s Genocide appeared first on The Intercept.

The capture comes after three months of U.S. military attacks on boats in the region, which have killed at least 87 civilians.

The U.S. government has not yet explained its justification for capturing the Venezuelan vessel.

The two government sources said the operation was led by the U.S. Coast Guard. “We would refer you to the White House for questions,” Lt. Krystal Wolfe, a Coast Guard spokesperson, told The Intercept in response to questions.

“We don’t have a comment,” said a Pentagon spokeswoman, who also referred questions to the White House.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

While the U.S. once bought much of Venezuela’s oil, that trade was halted in 2019 when the first Trump administration imposed sanctions on the country’s state-owned oil company. While shipments to the United States resumed in 2023, most of Venezuela’s oil is now exported to China. The U.S. has also imposed financial sanctions on the Venezuelan government.

“Congress and the international community should consider this as an illegal act of war, in the legal sense as well as for the surge in poverty and violence it could cause,” Erik Sperling of Just Foreign Policy, an advocacy group critical of mainstream Washington foreign policy, told The Intercept. “The Trump administration’s indiscriminate sanctions have increased hunger across the population but have failed to topple the government. It appears they’re now aiming to further tighten the economic noose, regardless of its impact on civilians, in pursuit of their regime change goal.”

The capture comes as the Pentagon has built up a force of more than 15,000 troops in the Caribbean since the summer — the largest naval flotilla in the region since the Cold War. That contingent now includes 5,000 sailors aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford, the Navy’s newest and most powerful aircraft carrier, which has more than 75 attack, surveillance, and support aircraft.

As part of a campaign of airstrikes on boats, the Trump administration has secretly declared that it is engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with 24 cartels, gangs, and armed groups including Cártel de los Soles, which the U.S. claims is “headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking Venezuelan individuals,” despite little evidence that such a group exists. Experts and insiders see this as part of a plan for regime change in Venezuela that stretches back to Trump’s first term. Maduro, the president of Venezuela, denies that he heads a cartel.

Since the attacks began, experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, have said the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

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Trump has pursued an abrasive and interventionist foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere during his second term. “[W]e will assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine,” reads the recently released U.S. National Security Strategy. It harkens back to President Theodore Roosevelt’s turn-of-the-20th-century “Big Stick” corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

President James Monroe’s 1823 announcement warned the nations of Europe that the United States would not permit the establishment of new colonies in the Americas. Roosevelt’s more muscular decree held that Washington had the right to interfere in the internal affairs of countries across the Americas. In the first quarter of the 20th century, that Roosevelt corollary would be used to justify U.S. occupations of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras, and Nicaragua.

What’s been called the “Donroe Doctrine” began to take shape with threats to seize the Panama Canal, acquire Greenland, and rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. The Trump administration also claimed the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had invaded the United States, allowing the government to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to fast-track deportation of people it says belong to the gang. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals eventually blocked the government from using the war-time law. “We conclude that the findings do not support that an invasion or a predatory incursion has occurred,” wrote Judge Leslie Southwick.

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More recently, Trump even claimed that U.S. troops engaged in combat with members of the gang on the streets of Washington, D.C., during the summer or early fall — an apparent fiction that the White House press office refuses to address.

While the Trump administration claims that Tren de Aragua is acting as “a de facto arm of” Maduro’s government, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence determined earlier this year that the “Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.”

The U.S. also maintains that Tren de Aragua is both engaging in irregular warfare against the United States and that it is in a non-international armed conflict with the United States. These are, however, mutually exclusive designations which cannot occur simultaneously.

Trump also renewed long-running efforts, which failed during his first term, to topple Maduro’s government. Maduro and several close allies were indicted in a New York federal court in 2020 on federal charges of narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine. Earlier this year, the U.S. doubled its reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest to $50 million. Meanwhile, Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the right-wing former president of Honduras who had been convicted of drug trafficking.

Trump recently told Politico that Maduro’s “days are numbered.” When asked if he might order an invasion of Venezuela, Trump replied, “I wouldn’t say that one way or the other,” before launching into a confusing ramble that devolved into insults about former President Joe Biden’s IQ, a tirade about Politico, and, in response to a follow-up question about his goals regarding Venezuela, his ownership of the Doral Country Club in Miami, Florida.

The post U.S. Realizes It Can Seize Boats After All appeared first on The Intercept.

In a post on X trumpeting the deployment of troops to the Caribbean, U.S. Southern Command, or SOUTHCOM, shared an image that prominently displayed a so-called Jerusalem cross on the helmet of a masked commando.

The Jerusalem cross, also dubbed the “Crusader cross” for its roots in Medieval Christians’ holy wars in the Middle East, is not inherently a symbol of extremism. It has, however, become popular on the right to symbolize the march of Christian civilization, with anti-Muslim roots that made it into something of a logo for the U.S. war on terror.

Tattoos of the cross, a squared-off symbol with a pattern of repeating crosses, have appeared on the bodies of people ranging from mercenaries hired by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to Hegseth himself.

Now, the symbol has reared its head again to advertise President Donald Trump’s military buildup against Venezuela — an overwhelmingly Catholic country — and boat strikes in the Caribbean.

“As with all things Trump, it’s a continuation, with some escalation, and then a transformation into spectacle,” said Yale University historian Greg Grandin, whose work focuses on U.S. empire in Latin America.

The social media post came amid rising controversy over a series of strikes on boats allegedly carrying drugs off the coast of Venezuela, dubbed Operation Southern Spear.

Hegseth is alleged to have ordered a so-called “double-tap” strike, a follow-up attack against a debilitated boat that killed survivors clinging to the wreckage for around 45 minutes. The U.S. has carried out 22 strikes since the campaign began in September, killing a total of 87 people.

The Pentagon’s press office declined to comment on the use of the Jerusalem cross, referring questions to SOUTHCOM. But in a reply to the X post on Monday, Hegseth’s deputy press secretary Joel Valdez signaled his approval with emojis of a salute and the American flag. In a statement to the Intercept, SOUTHCOM spokesperson Steven McLoud denied that the post implied any religious or far-right message.

“The graphic you’re referring to was an illustration of service members in a ready posture during Operation SOUTHERN SPEAR,” McLoud told The Intercept. “There is no other communication intent for this image.”

The original image of the masked service member appears to have come from an album published online by the Pentagon that depicts a training exercise by Marines aboard the USS Iwo Jima in the Caribbean Sea in October. The photo depicting the cross, however, was removed from the album after commentators on social media pointed out its origins.

Amanda Saunders, a spokesperson for the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, the Pentagon-run photo agency, said she was unable to comment directly but forwarded the request to the Marine unit involved in the exercise.

“Content on DVIDS is published and archived directly by the registered units,” she said, “so we don’t have control over what is posted or removed, nor are we able to comment on those decisions.”

Hegseth and the Cross

The Jerusalem cross’s popularity on the right has surged in part thanks to featuring in various media, including the 2005 Ridley Scott film “Kingdom of Heaven” and video games, according to Matthew Gabriele, a professor of medieval studies at Virginia Tech and a scholar of Crusader iconography.

“It supports the rhetoric of ‘defense of homeland,’” Gabriele told The Intercept, “because the crusaders, in the right’s understanding, were waging a defensive war against enemies trying to invade Christian lands.”

The symbol’s position of prominence in official military communications is just the latest example of a trollish extremism by the Trump administration’s press teams, which have made a point of reveling in the cruelty wrought on its perceived enemies at home and abroad, or “owning the libs.”

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Monday’s post may also be intended as Hegseth putting his thumb in the eye of the Pentagon’s old guard. Hegseth’s embrace of the symbol — in the form of a gawdy chest tattoo — once stymied, however temporarily, his ambitions in the military.

Folling the January 6 insurrection, according to Hegseth and reporting by the Washington Post, Hegseth was ordered to stand down rather than deploy with his National Guard unit ahead of the 2021 inauguration of Joe Biden. The decision to treat Hegseth as a possible “insider threat” came after a someone flagged a photo of a shirtless Hegseth to military brass, according to the Washington Post.

“I joined the Army in 2001 because I wanted to serve my country. Extremists attacked us on 9/11, and we went to war,” Hegseth wrote “The War on Warriors,” his 2024 memoir. “Twenty years later, I was deemed an ‘extremist’ by that very same Army.”

Hegseth was hardly chastened by the episode and has since gotten more tattoos with more overt anti-Muslim resonance, including the Arabic word word for “infidel,” which appeared on his bicep sometime in the past several years. It’s accompanied by another bicep tattoo of the Latin words “Deus vult,” or “God wills it,” yet another slogan associated with the Crusades and repurposed by extremist groups.

The use of the image to advertise aggressive posturing in a majority-Christian region like Latin America may seem odd at first glance. In the context of renewed U.S. focus on Latin America, however, it’s a potent symbol of the move of military action from the Middle East to the Western Hemisphere.

The post comes on the heels of the release of the Trump’s National Security Strategy, a 33-page document outlining the administration’s foreign-policy priorities that explicitly compared Trump’s stance to the Monroe Doctrine, the turn-of-the-century policy of U.S. dominance in Latin America in opposition to colonialism by other foreign powers. Grandin, the Yale historian, described the document as a “vision of global dominance” based on a model of great-powers competition that can lead to immense instability.

“They’re globalizing the Monroe Doctrine,” Grandin said. “I’m no fan of the hypocrisy and arrogance of the old liberal international order, but there’s something to be said for starting from a first principle of shared interests, which does keep great conflict at bay to some degree.”

The post Official Propaganda for Caribbean Military Buildup Includes “Crusader Cross” appeared first on The Intercept.

Lobbyists succeeded in killing part of the National Defense Authorization Act that would have given service members the right to fix their equipment in the field without having to worry about military suppliers’ intellectual property.

The decision to kill the popular proposal was made public Sunday after a closed-door conference of top congressional officials, including defense committee chairs, along with Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D.

Those meetings were secret, but consumer advocates say they have a pretty good idea of what happened.

“It’s pretty clear that defense contractors opposed the right-to-repair provisions, and they pressed hard to have them stripped out of the final bill,” said Isaac Bowers, the federal legislative director at U.S. PIRG. “All we can say is that defense contractors have a lot of influence on Capitol Hill.”

The idea had drawn bipartisan support in both the House and Senate, which each passed their own versions of the proposal.

Under one version, co-sponsored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Sen. Tim Sheehy, R-Mt., defense companies would have been required to supply the information needed for repairs — such as technical data, maintenance manuals, engineering drawings, and lists of replacement parts — as a condition of Pentagon contracts.

The idea was that no service member would ever be left waiting on a contractor to fly in from Norway to repair a simple part — which once happened — or, in another real-life scenario, told by the manufacturer to buy a new CT scanner in a combat zone because one malfunctioned.

Instead of worrying about voiding a warranty, military personnel in the field could use a 3D printer or elbow grease to fix a part.

“The military is a can-do operation,” Bowers said. “Service members can and should be able to repair their own equipment, and this will save costs if they can do it upfront and on time and on their schedule.”

“Contractor Profiteering”

Operations and maintenance costs are typically the biggest chunk of the Pentagon’s budget, at 40 percent. That is in large part because the military often designs new weapons at the same time it builds them, according to Julia Gledhill, a research analyst for the national security reform program at the Stimson Center.

“We do see concurrent development, wherein the military is designing and building a system at the same time,” Gledhill said on a webinar hosted by the nonprofit Taxpayers for Common Sense on Tuesday. “That, turns out, doesn’t work very well. It means that you do discover design flaws, what the DOD would characterize as defects, and then you spend a whole lot of money trying to fix them.”

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For the defense industry, however, the proposal threatened a key profit stream. Once companies sell hardware and software to the Pentagon, they can keep making money by forcing the government to hire them for repairs.

Defense lobbyists pushed back hard against the proposal when it arose in the military budgeting process. The CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association claimed that the legislation could “cripple the very innovation on which our warfighters rely.”

The contractors’ argument was that inventors would not sell their products to the Pentagon if they knew they had to hand over their trade secrets as well.

In response, Warren wrote an unusual letter last month calling out one trade group, the National Defense Industrial Association.

“NDIA’s opposition to these commonsense reforms is a dangerous and misguided attempt,” Warren said, “to protect an unacceptable status quo of giant contractor profiteering that is expensive for taxpayers and presents a risk to military readiness and national security.”

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As a piece of legislation, the right to repair has likely died until next year’s defense budget bill process. The notion could be imposed in the form of internal Pentagon policies, but it would be a less of a mandate: Such policies can be more easily waived.

The secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force have all expressed some degree of support for the idea, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has urged the branches to include “right to repair” provisions in new contracts going forward — though, for now, it’s just a suggestion rather than legal requirement.

The post Congress Quietly Kills Military “Right to Repair,” Allowing Corporations to Cash In on Fixing Broken Products appeared first on The Intercept.

“We will advocate relentlessly for programs like the F-47, Collaborative Combat Aircraft as well as nuclear force recapitalization through the Sentinel program and the B-21,” Wilsbach wrote in a memo dated November 3, referring to planned upgrades to nuclear missiles and stealth bombers.

Experts who spoke to The Intercept said the language signals a doctrinal pivot, prioritizing displays of strength and the buildup of nuclear weaponry over internal repair — an approach that may appeal politically to the Trump administration and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, but does little to ease the fatigue and distrust spreading among airmen.

“This memo of unity and warfighting spirit reflects current Department of War and Pete Hegseth language, but that language is also inadequate because it assumes U.S. military capability is the best in the world and getting better, a dangerous and flawed assumption,” said Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and former Pentagon analyst who exposed the politicization of intelligence before the Iraq War.

The Sentinel program Wilsbach referenced is intended to modernize the land-based leg of the nuclear triad, with new missiles, hardened silos, and updated command-and-control infrastructure across missile fields in Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota. It’s the Air Force’s planned replacement for aging Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile systems. The B-21 Raider is the next-generation stealth bomber designed to replace older strategic bombers like the B-2 and B-1, delivering both conventional and nuclear payloads.

Critics say framing these nuclear modernization efforts as “recapitalization” obscures the ethical and strategic implications of expanding U.S. nuclear capabilities amid declining morale and retention.

“The chief of staff’s emphasis on weaponry is disheartening. His description of nuclear weapon ‘recapitalization’ is an abomination of the English language. You don’t ‘recapitalize’ genocidal weaponry. Both the Sentinel missile program and the B-21 bomber are unnecessary systems that could cost as much as $500 billion over the next 20 years,” said William Astore, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and military historian.

John Gilbert, a member of the Scientists Working Group at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, noted “a very significant omission” in Wilsbach’s rhetoric.

“He basically ignored the U.S. Air Force’s role in maintaining our national intercontinental ballistic missile force as a day-to-day ready-to-launch deterrent,” meaning that it’s not supposed to be used for offensive purposes, said Gilbert, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel with decades of experience in strategic missile operations, inspections and arms control.

In a statement to The Intercept, an Air Force spokesperson denied that the memo reflected a change in strategy. “The Air Force will organize, train and equip its forces in support of the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy,” the spokesperson wrote.

Wilsbach has long been a proponent of bolstering U.S. nuclear capabilities. While leading Air Combat Command, he pushed to restore Pacific basing — including Tinian’s North Field, the Enola Gay’s departure point — to support nuclear-capable B-2 bombers. The effort underscores how current planning focuses on rapid strike and deterrence against China and other adversaries.

“Our main purpose has never changed: We fly and fix to fight and win our nation’s wars,” Wilsbach said during a speech at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland to senior Air Force leaders on November 18. He reinforced his message by referencing Operation Midnight Hammer, the controversial June airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities involving about 125 aircraft, including seven B-2 stealth bombers in a 36-hour global mission.

“It is our core responsibility as airmen to stay ready, be credible and capable every single day,” he said.

When he became chief of staff, Wilsbach made his first base visit to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, the headquarters of Air Force Global Strike Command and the center of the Air Force’s nuclear mission, suggesting that his initial focus was on the nuclear enterprise.

Analysts who spoke to The Intercept framed Wilsbach’s focus as part of a broader departure from the military’s stated apolitical role, aligning service culture with partisan priorities rather than institutional needs.

Wilsbach’s rhetoric “echoes the Trump administration’s emphasis on warrior culture and lethality,” said Astore, who has taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School. “What stands out is that the chief of staff does not mention the Air Force’s core values, integrity, service, and excellence, or the oath to support and defend the Constitution. He doesn’t address operations tempo, stress, or the rising suicides among maintainers. Instead, he reduces complex issues to jargon about ‘combat power’ and ‘full-spectrum readiness.’ He ends with ‘Fight’s on,’ but never explains who we are fighting or why.”

For five Air Force veterans and active-duty members, the rhetoric comes at the expense of addressing manpower shortages, aging aircraft, and a mental health and morale crisis within the Air Force. Many of the Air Force’s core aircraft date back to the Cold War, including KC-135 tankers and B-52H bombers that are more than 60 years old, and F-15C/D fighters first fielded in the 1970s. Their age demands costly maintenance and contributes to significant environmental harm through chronic fluid leaks and poor fuel efficiency.

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“The Air Force keeps repeating the same cycle. Leaders like this are too focused on pleasing Hegseth and his obsession with lethality and ‘warrior culture’ to deal with what is killing their people,” said retired Air Force Master Sergeant Wes Bryant, pointing to a previous story from The Intercept that revealed a suicide crisis within the Air Force. The previous story, published days before the memo was released, highlighted how the force failed to comply with a congressional mandate to release detailed death data.

The current leadership’s approach is “disgusting,” added Bryant, a defense and national security analyst who formerly worked at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence.

Adding to the stress is that weapons troops, who load bombs and missiles onto aircraft, are expected to load missiles without knowing target configurations — and with the knowledge that objecting would carry serious consequences.

“We simply follow orders. Now, on the bomber side of things, I can confidently say we are not informed about what an operation entails beyond loading configurations,” said an active-duty source with direct experience training new weapons troops at tech school.

Service members throughout the U.S. military carry out lawful orders without being briefed on strategic intent, but for weapons loaders, the consequences are stark due to the lethality of the munitions they are ordered to prepare. That arsenal includes Joint Direct Attack Munitions, used in strikes that have produced high civilian death tolls; cluster munitions, which scatter bomblets that often fail to detonate and later kill civilians; and, in some units, nuclear warheads — weapons whose potential consequences exceed anything a loader or pilot is ever told.

“If people don’t follow these orders, there are going to be consequences,” said former weapons troop Alan Roach.

At the top, even the naming of new airframes signals political alignment within the Air Force, Astore said. “The new F-47, yet another expensive fighter program, was apparently numbered ‘47’ to flatter President Trump,” he said.

In remarks praising Wilsbach, Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink said he “understands the criticality of current readiness on a personal level,” adding, “We must be ready at a moment’s notice to meet the most challenging adversary that we’ve seen in generations. That means our systems need to work — fly, fix, fight.”

But “‘Readiness’ to fight is not the Air Force’s first responsibility,” Astore said. “The first responsibility is to support and defend the U.S. Constitution. We are guided by the law of the land, not the beauty of our weapons or a warrior’s urge to use them.”

Update: December 8, 2025, 9:56 a.m. ET

This story has been updated with a statement from the Air Force sent after publication.

The post New Air Force Chief Boosts Nuclear Buildup, Moving Away From Deterrence, Experts Warn appeared first on The Intercept.

Two more missiles followed that finally sank the foundering vessel. Bradley, now the chief of Special Operations Command, claimed that he conducted multiple strikes because the shipwrecked men and the fragment of the boat still posed a threat, according to the sources.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth distanced himself from the follow-up strike during a Cabinet meeting at the White House, telling reporters he “didn’t personally see survivors” amid the fire and smoke and had left the room before the second attack was ordered. He evoked the “fog of war” to justify the decision for more strikes on the sinking ship and survivors.

Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, said Hegseth provided misleading information and that the video shared with lawmakers Thursday showed the reality in stark light.

“We had video for 48 minutes of two guys hanging off the side of a boat. There was plenty of time to make a clear and sober analysis,” Smith told CNN on Thursday. “You had two shipwrecked people on the top of the tiny little bit of the boat that was left that was capsized. They weren’t signaling to anybody. And the idea that these two were going to be able to return to the fight — even if you accept all of the questionable legal premises around this mission, around these strikes — it’s still very hard to imagine how these two were returning to any sort of fight in that condition.”

Three other sources familiar with briefings by Bradley provided to members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate and House Armed Services committees on Thursday confirmed that roughly 45 minutes elapsed between the first and second strikes. “They had at least 35 minutes of clear visual on these guys after the smoke of the first strike cleared. There were no time constraints. There was no pressure. They were in the middle of the ocean and there were no other vessels in the area,” said one of the sources. “There are a lot of disturbing aspects. But this is one of the most disturbing. We could not understand the logic behind it.”

The three sources said that after the first strike by U.S. forces, the two men climbed aboard a small portion of the capsized boat. At some point the men began waving to something overhead, which three people familiar with the briefing said logically must have been U.S. aircraft flying above them. All three interpreted the actions of the men as signaling for help, rescue, or surrender.

“They were seen waving their arms towards the sky,” said one of the sources. “One can only assume that they saw the aircraft. Obviously, we don’t know what they were saying or thinking, but any reasonable person would assume that they saw the aircraft and were signaling either: don’t shoot or help us. But that’s not how Bradley saw it.”

Special Operations Command did not reply to questions from The Intercept prior to publication.

During the Thursday briefings, Bradley claimed that he believed there was cocaine in the quarter of the boat that remained afloat, according to the sources. He said the survivors could have drifted to land or to a rendezvous point with another vessel, meaning that the alleged drug traffickers still had the ability to transport a deadly weapon — cocaine — into the United States, according to one source. Bradley also claimed that without a follow-up attack, the men might rejoin “the fight,” another source said.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., echoed that premise, telling reporters after the briefings that the additional strikes on the vessel were warranted because the shipwrecked men were “trying to flip a boat, loaded with drugs bound for the United States, back over so they could stay in the fight.”

None of the three sources who spoke to The Intercept said there was any evidence of this. “They weren’t radioing anybody and they certainly did not try to flip the boat. [Cotton’s] comments are untethered from reality,” said one of the sources.

Sarah Harrison, who previously advised Pentagon policymakers on issues related to human rights and the law of war, said that the people in the boat weren’t in any fight to begin with. “They didn’t pose an imminent threat to U.S. forces or the lives of others. There was no lawful justification to kill them in the first place let alone the second strike,” she told The Intercept. “The only allegation was that the men were transporting drugs, a crime that doesn’t even carry the death penalty.”

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The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel this summer produced a classified opinion intended to shield service members up and down the chain of command from prosecution. The legal theory advanced in the finding claims that narcotics on the boats are lawful military targets because their cargo generates revenue, which can be used to buy weaponry, for cartels whom the Trump administration claims are in armed conflict with the U.S.

The Trump administration claims that at least 24 designated terrorist organizations are engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with the United States including the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua; Ejército de Liberación Nacional, a Colombian guerrilla insurgency; Cártel de los Soles, a Venezuelan criminal group that the U.S. claims is “headed by Nicolas Maduro and other high-ranking Venezuelan individuals”; and several groups affiliated with the Sinaloa Cartel.

The military has carried out 22 known attacks, destroying 23 boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September, killing at least 87 civilians. The most recent attack occurred in the Pacific Ocean on Thursday and killed four people.

Since the attacks began, experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, have said the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

The post Boat Strike Survivors Clung to Wreckage for Some 45 Minutes Before U.S. Military Killed Them appeared first on The Intercept.

A small number of members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate and House Armed Services committees, as well as some staff directors, saw the recording during closed-door briefings Thursday with Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the head of Special Operations Command, and Gen. Dan Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“What I saw in that room is one of the most troubling scenes I’ve ever seen in my time in public service,” said Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “You have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion with a destroyed vessel who were killed by the United States.

Until Thursday, the only video of the attack that had been seen by lawmakers was an edited clip posted to the Truth Social account of President Donald Trump on September 2 announcing the strike. The edited clip captures the initial strike, showing a four-engine speedboat erupt in an explosion. It does not show the second strike on the wreckage of the vessel and the survivors — which was first reported by The Intercept.

Himes said the unedited video clearly shows the U.S. striking helpless people.

“Any American who sees the video that I saw will see the United States military attacking shipwrecked sailors — bad guys, bad guys, but attacking shipwrecked sailors,” he told The Intercept.

Himes said that Bradley — who conducted the follow-up strike as the then-commander of Joint Special Operations Command — “confirmed that there had not been a ‘kill them all’ order.” The Washington Post recently reported that Hegseth personally ordered the follow-up attack, giving a spoken order “to kill everybody.”

Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, also expressed dismay after watching the footage. “I am deeply disturbed by what I saw this morning. The Department of Defense has no choice but to release the complete, unedited footage of the September 2 strike, as the President has agreed to do,” he said on Thursday.

“This briefing confirmed my worst fears about the nature of the Trump Administration’s military activities, and demonstrates exactly why the Senate Armed Services Committee has repeatedly requested — and been denied — fundamental information, documents, and facts about this operation. This must and will be the only beginning of our investigation into this incident,” said Reed.

Trump has said he supports the release of the video showing the second boat strike that killed the remaining survivors of the initial September 2 attack. “I don’t know what they have, but whatever they have, we’d certainly release, no problem,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday.

Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is a specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war, told The Intercept that intense scrutiny needs to extend far beyond the first strike in the U.S. operation in the waters near Venezuela.

“Oversight needs to be broader than this one incident. It needs to cover the entire maritime bombing campaign. And it needs to go beyond the Department of Defense,” he told The Intercept. “We need to know how this policy was formulated in the first instance. What was the process by which some aspect of it got legal blessing from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel? That all needs to be drug out into the open.”

The military has carried out 21 known attacks, destroying 22 boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September, killing at least 83 civilians. The most recent strike on a vessel was November 15.

Since the attacks began, experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, have described the strikes as illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. Throughout the long-running U.S. war on drugs, law enforcement agencies have arrested suspected drug smugglers rather than relying on summary executions. The double-tap strike first reported by The Intercept has only made worse a pattern of attacks that experts and lawmakers say are already tantamount to murder.

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Sarah Harrison, who previously advised Pentagon policymakers on issues related to human rights and the law of war, cautioned against undue focus on the double-tap strike. “I can understand why the public and lawmakers are shocked by the second strike on Sept 2. The imagery of humans clinging to wreckage, likely severely injured, and then subsequently executed, is no doubt jarring. But we have to keep emphasizing to those who are conducting the strikes within DoD that there is no war, thus no law of war to protect them,” said Harrison, a former associate general counsel at the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel, International Affairs. “All of the strikes, not just the Sept 2 incident, are extrajudicial killings of people alleged to have committed crimes. Americans should have been and should continue to be alarmed by that.”

The Pentagon continues to argue it is at war with undisclosed drug cartels and gangs. “I can tell you that every single person who we have hit thus far who is in a drug boat carrying narcotics to the United States is a narcoterrorist. Our intelligence has confirmed that, and we stand by it,” Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said Tuesday.

“There is no such thing as a narco-terrorist,” Himes said on Thursday. “Apparently, we have enough evidence to kill these people, but we don’t have enough evidence to try them in a court of law. People ought to sort of let that sink in and think about the implications of that.”

Sources briefed about the video footage say it contradicts a narrative that emerged in recent days that intercepted communications between the survivors and their supposed colleagues demonstrated those wounded individuals clinging to the wreckage were combatants, rather than shipwrecked and defenseless people whom it would be a war crime to target.

The Pentagon’s Law of War Manual is clear on attacking defenseless people. “Persons who have been rendered unconscious or otherwise incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck, such that they are no longer capable of fighting, are hors de combat,” reads the guide using the French term for those out of combat. “Persons who have been incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack.”

“The notion that radioing for help forfeits your shipwreck status is absurd — much less than it enables them to target you,” said Finucane. “I don’t believe there’s an armed conflict, so none of these people are lawful targets. They weren’t combatants, they’re not participating in hostilities. So the whole construct is ridiculous. But even if you accept that this is some sort of law of war situation, radioing for help does not deprive you of shipwreck status or render you a target under the law of war.”

The post Video of U.S. Military Killing Boat Strike Survivors Is Horrifying, Lawmakers Reveal appeared first on The Intercept.

“I can tell you that every single person who we have hit thus far who is in a drug boat carrying narcotics to the United States is a narcoterrorist. Our intelligence has confirmed that, and we stand by it,” Wilson said on Tuesday during a pseudo Pentagon press briefing where attendance was limited to media outlets that have agreed to limits on the scope of their reporting.

“Our intelligence absolutely confirms who these people are,” she said. “I can tell you that, without a shadow of a doubt, every single one of our military and civilian lawyers knows that these individuals are narcoterrorists.”

In exclusive comments to The Intercept, Houlahan expressed her doubts and demanded proof.

“If there is intelligence that ‘absolutely confirms’ this — present it. Come before the House or Senate Intelligence committees and let Congress provide the proper oversight and checks and balances the American people deserve,” said Houlahan, who serves on the House Armed Services Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “Put the whispers and doubts to rest once and for all. If there is intelligence to ‘absolutely confirm’ this, the Congress is ready to receive it. Until we all see it, you can surely understand why we are skeptical.”

Both the House Armed Services Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, both of which Houlahan serves on, routinely receive classified briefings from the military.

Wilson — who touted a “new era” of working to “keep the American people informed and to ensure transparency” on Tuesday — did not respond to questions or requests for comment from The Intercept about Houlahan’s remarks or appearing before Congress.

In past classified briefings to lawmakers and congressional staff, the military has admitted that it does not know exactly who it’s killing in the boat strikes, according to seven government officials who have spoken with The Intercept.

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Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., also a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said that Pentagon officials who briefed her admitted that the administration does not know the identities of all the individuals who were killed in the strikes.

“They said that they do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessels to do the strikes,” Jacobs told The Intercept in October. “They just need to show a connection to a DTO or affiliate,” she added, using shorthand for “designated terrorist organizations,” the Trump administration’s term for the secret list of groups with whom it claims to be at war.

Twenty-One Attacks

The military has carried out 21 known attacks, destroying 22 boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September and killing at least 83 civilians. It has not conducted a strike on a vessel since November 15.

Since the strikes began, experts in the laws of war and members of Congress from both parties say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

The summary executions mark a major departure from typical practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, where law enforcement agencies arrest suspected drug smugglers.

A double-tap strike during the initial September 2 attack — where the U.S. hit an incapacitated boat for a second time, killing two survivors clinging to the wreckage — added a second layer of illegality to strikes that experts and lawmakers say are already tantamount to murder. The double-tap strike was first reported by The Intercept.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth has been under increasing fire for that strike. The Washington Post recently reported that Hegseth personally ordered the follow-up attack, giving a spoken order “to kill everybody.”

Hegseth acknowledged U.S. forces conducted a follow-up strike on the alleged drug boat during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Tuesday but distanced himself from the killing of people struggling to stay afloat.

“I didn’t personally see survivors,” Hegseth told reporters, noting that he watched live footage of the attack. “The thing was on fire. It was exploded in fire and smoke. You can’t see it.”

He added, “This is called the fog of war.”

Hegseth said Adm. Frank M. Bradley, then the commander of Joint Special Operations Command and now head of Special Operations Command, “made the right call” in ordering the second strike, which the war secretary claimed came after he himself left the room. In a statement to The Intercept earlier this week, Special Operations Command pushed back on the contention that Bradley ordered a double-tap attack.

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“He does not see his actions on 2 SEP as a ‘double tap,’” Col. Allie Weiskopf, the director of public affairs at Special Operations Command, told The Intercept on Tuesday.

Bradley and Gen. Dan Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are slated to go to Capitol Hill on Thursday to answer questions about the attack amid an ongoing uproar. Congressional staffers say that Bradley is currently slated to only meet with House Armed Services Committee Chair Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and ranking member Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., along with the Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and ranking member Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I.

“The Seditious Six”

Houlahan was one of six Democratic members of Congress who appeared in a video late last month reminding members of the military of their duty not to obey illegal orders. President Donald Trump called for the group to face arrest and trial or even execution, saying the video amounted to “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS.”

Wilson, during her faux press briefing — delivered to mostly administration cheerleaders after outlets from the New York Times to Fox News relinquished their Pentagon press passes rather than agree to restrictions that constrain reporters’ First Amendment rights — called out Houlahan and her fellow lawmakers in the video.

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“[T]he Seditious Six urged members of our military to defy their chain of command in an unprecedented, treasonous and shameful conspiracy to sow distrust and chaos in our armed forces,” said Wilson. She went on to call the video “a politically motivated influence operation” that “puts our warfighters at risk.”

Hegseth described the members of Congress’s video as “despicable, reckless, and false.” Hegseth himself, however, had delivered a similar message recorded in 2016 footage revealed by CNN on Tuesday.

“If you’re doing something that is just completely unlawful and ruthless, then there is a consequence for that. That’s why the military said it won’t follow unlawful orders from their commander-in-chief,” Hegseth told an audience in the footage. “There’s a standard, there’s an ethos, there’s a belief that we are above what so many things that our enemies or others would do.”

Wilson did not reply to a request for comment about Hegseth’s remarks.

Hegseth is also in the hot seat after the Pentagon Inspector General’s Office determined that he risked the safety of U.S. service members by sharing sensitive military information on the Signal messaging app, according to a source familiar with the forthcoming report by the Pentagon watchdog.

The report, which is expected to be released on Thursday, was launched after a journalist at The Atlantic revealed he had been added to a chat on the encrypted messaging app, in which Hegseth and other top officials were discussing plans for U.S. airstrikes in Yemen that also killed civilians.

The post Pentagon Claims It “Absolutely” Knows Who It Killed in Boat Strikes. Prove It, Lawmaker Says. appeared first on The Intercept.