Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Secretary of Defense Hegseth is inviting US military men and women to commit war crimes. “no matter what” he and Trump will have their back. No matter what? Part of being a professional in any profession is that you have ethics and rules, and if you act unethically, your leadership expects you to be punished or/and removed from your profession.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt4j77ZlhE0
US companies built software focused on price and features, not security.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwVa_L27G-g
The US will have much more difficulty projecting power without bases in Germany.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK42sboyBCk
After a war, the Secretary of Defense goes to the public, and repeatedly lies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNKRg9l7Avo
“While the expansive aboveground complex has drawn most of the attention, Trump revealed during a recent Cabinet meeting that there was another motivation for the construction.
He told Cabinet members there was a national security component to the project that was “supposed to be secret” and the military “wanted it more than anybody.”
“It was supposed to be secret, but it became unsecret because of people that are really unpatriotic saying things,” he said.
Shuffling through renderings of the project, Trump described the underground facility as having bulletproof glass and “drone-proof” roofs and ceilings.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/know-white-house-ballroom-bunker-200546113.html
Iran’s military is split up into regional commands that each have the resources to fight independently if they lose contact with leaders or the rest of the country.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBf3-opjhbk
Hegseth’s speech really did sound like an SNL version of a Hegseth speech.
The administration is claiming multiple goals to this war. Trump telling the Iranian people that this is their chance, and then also saying he is looking for someone to put in charge, shouldn’t give the Iranians confidence to risk their lives and rebel. Although, I’m not sure they are seeing his comments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nemxoSVj5w0
“Back in early September, he declared that the newly renamed Department of War would favor “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”
The secretary of war clearly meant it, judging from a story in The Washington Post. The paper reports that Hegseth issued verbal orders to the military forces striking suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean and Pacific to “kill everybody.”
When the inaugural strike in this campaign against a boat off the Trinidadian coast left two survivors clinging to the wreckage of the craft, the commander in charge of the operation, in accordance with Hegseth’s spoken directive, ordered a second strike to take them out too.
…
The administration’s officially secret legal justification for these strikes asserts that “narco-terrorists” are using the money earned from trafficking drugs to finance their war against the United States and its allies. Suspected drug smugglers are therefore, it claims, a legitimate counter-terrorism target.
Many international law experts have retorted that the boats themselves pose no imminent threat to Americans, and that the people on board the boats are not combatants but suspected criminals who one would normally expect to be arrested, not executed.
The administration’s position “can justify almost anything the government wants to do to anyone,” wrote Reason’s Matthew Petti back in September.
…
Even if one accepts the dubious idea that these strikes are legal, the second strike described in the Post report would violate the laws of war. More plainly, it would be murder.
An order to kill boat occupants no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations, told the Post.
…
The Trump administration is using the military to target people suspected of breaking criminal laws against drug trafficking. It’s choosing to kill these suspected criminals when they pose to immediate threat to anyone, instead of simply arresting them.”
https://reason.com/2025/12/01/kill-everybody/
“Eight days after the September 2 operation that inaugurated President Donald Trump’s lethal military campaign against suspected drug boats, The Intercept reported that people who survived the initial missile strike were “killed shortly after in a follow-up attack.” On Friday, The Washington Post confirmed that account, saying the commander overseeing the operation, based on an oral directive from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to “kill everybody,” ordered a second strike on “two survivors” who “were clinging to the smoldering wreck.”
If that report is accurate, Reason’s Christian Britschgi notes, “the second strike on helpless survivors would add a degree of barbarism to the administration’s anti-drug campaign.” It also would further complicate the arguments that Trump has deployed to justify his unprecedented policy of summarily executing suspected drug smugglers, which so far has involved 21 attacks that killed 83 people in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. Even if you accept Trump’s dubious claim that the United States is engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with “narcoterrorists,” which supposedly means U.S. forces can legally attack vessels believed to be carrying illegal drugs, deliberately killing survivors would be contrary to the law of war.
“Both the giving and the execution of these orders” would “constitute war crimes, murder, or both,” the Former JAGs Working Group, which consists of lawyers who previously served in the military, said on Saturday. “If the U.S. military operation to interdict and destroy suspected narcotrafficking vessels is a ‘non-international armed conflict’ as the Trump Administration suggests, orders to ‘kill everybody,’ which can reasonably be regarded as an order to give ‘no quarter,’ and to ‘double-tap’ a target in order to kill survivors, are clearly illegal under international law. In short, they are war crimes.”
The former military lawyers add that the situation is even graver “if the U.S. military operation is not an armed conflict of any kind.” In that case, they say, “these orders to kill helpless civilians clinging to the wreckage of a vessel our military destroyed would subject everyone from [the secretary of defense] down to the individual who pulled the trigger to prosecution under U.S. law for murder.””
https://reason.com/2025/12/01/hegseths-alleged-order-to-kill-everybody-complicates-trumps-defense-of-his-murderous-anti-drug-campaign/
If reports are true, the Secretary of Defense broke the laws of war according to U.S. law by ordering killed, people in the water whose vessels had already been destroyed.
Also, because this war has not been authorized by Congress and criminal suspects are entitled to due process, not killed on suspicion, even those killed on the boat were murdered.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV8-sYVMkmw