Comrade Karoline claims war crime was legal even as she said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth knew nothing about it but Admiral Frank Bradley did

White House Throws Admiral Under the Bus on Boat Strike

S.V. Date, HuffPost

 

... Killing survivors of a destroyed vessel is literally an example of a war crime in the U.S. Department of Defense Law of War Manual. “For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal,” the manual reads.

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt, nevertheless, repeatedly stated that it was legal – even as she further claimed, as President Donald Trump did Sunday, that Hegseth was unaware that it had happened.

“On Sept. 2, Secretary Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes. Admiral Bradley worked well within his authority and the law, directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated,” she said.

At the time of the attack off the Trinidad coast, Frank Bradley was head of the Joint Special Operations Command. According to a Washington Post report about the incident, it was he who relayed the order from Hegseth to “kill everybody” by sending Navy SEALs back to the disabled boat to have them kill the two people clinging to the wreckage.

In October, Bradley was promoted to run the U.S. Special Operations Command. ...

Real Clear Politics is part of the problem, not the solution

 

Tom Bevan: Anonymous Sources, Convenient Timing, and Past Drone Strikes Undercut Caribbean Boat-Strike Outrage

 

Past drone strikes by Obama were also murder, making us the terrorists.

 

We don't have the guts to declare an actual war, so we pretend this is OK instead. That's the problem. 

No you don't

 

White House: "If Narco-Terrorists Are Trafficking Illegal Drugs To the U.S., We Have The Authority To Kill Them"

 

If you let these people get away with this, anything they call terrorism can be murdered.

 

It's not terrorism, and it is murder. 

Halloween terror case against two 20-year old and one 19-year old suspects in Michigan will center around protected free speech

 From the story here:

... Like other terrorism prosecutions, this case is expected to focus on protected free speech, with one side arguing the defendants were merely expressing their views, while the other maintains they were planning to do harm. So far, the government has not produced any anti-gay text messages, social media comments or conversations by the defendants, whose communications and movements were being monitored by undercover informants and agents. ...

The FBI, which started investigating the Dearborn men a year ago, used undercover informants and agents to monitor the defendants' communications. ...

To date, the government has charged eight individuals in this case: five from Michigan, including two juveniles who are being prosecuted in a confidential process because of their age; two from New Jersey, including one man who allegedly referred to himself as the biggest anti Semite in America, and said he wanted to kill his mother's Jewish friends; and one man from Washington, whose plans to travel overseas to join ISIS were cut short by the FBI raids in Michigan. He was arrested at his home in Seattle, one day before his plane was to leave, court records show.

The charging documents filed in all eight cases, so far, do not show how the New Jersey or Washington defendants were allegedly tied to the purported Michigan Halloween terror plot.

It sounds like the FBI worked pretty hard on these young fellas for a long time to get the statements they needed. 

The Uniparty sure does love it some terrorists!

 

Why isn't co-conspirator 1 charged in the crimes of Ali and Mahmoud? Why the discrepancy of 2 arrested in the one story, 3 in the other?

Is it because co-conspirator 1 is the FBI informant who suborned these two into plotting a terrorist act?

And how did these young men have all this money to buy, legally by the way, all the weapons and gear mentioned in the stories? 

2 US citizens arrested in alleged ISIS-inspired Halloween plot: DOJ

Two men were arrested on Friday for allegedly plotting an ISIS-inspired Halloween attack in Michigan, according to court records unsealed on Monday. ...

The FBI was first alerted to the men after a 2024 review of one of the unnamed co-conspirator's phones. When that person returned to the United States, a Customs and Border Protection officer searched the phone and found "Google searches related to 'ISIS' and the 'Islamic State,' and pictures of what appear to be Co-conspirator 1 in military-style clothing with weapons," documents said.

While the co-conspirator was traveling abroad, Ali and Mahmoud participated in a group call "discussed traveling overseas to join Co-conspirator 1 and then later traveling together to Syria to join ISIS," the documents said. ...

Michigan terrorism suspects were plotting to attack Ferndale, feds say

Three days after announcing their arrests on social media, the federal government brought criminal charges against two metro Detroit men, alleging they plotted to carry out a terror attack over Halloween weekend in Ferndale, except the FBI got to them first.

According to a criminal complaint filed on Monday, Nov. 3, Mohmed Ali and Majed Mahmoud, both 20, are charged with having AR-style rifles, shotguns and handguns that would be used in a conspiracy to commit a terror attack and provide material support to the Islamic State (ISIS) terror organization. ...

According to the complaint, the investigation into the defendants goes back a year, and includes an undercover FBI informant who secretly recorded conversations involving a group of Michigan men who the government says planned and trained for months to carry out an attack in Michigan over the Halloween weekend. ...

Mahmoud and Ali are among five men initially encountered by law enforcement on Oct. 31. Three of the men were arrested and two were questioned and released. The men — ages 16-20 — were arrested in predawn raids in Dearborn and Inkster that drew praise from Michigan's governor, the state attorney general and the president of the United States. ... 

So the FBI's great Michigan Halloween terror plot was a conspiracy among teenagers to get together to smash pumpkins?

BUT YOU SAID IT WAS ISLAMIC STATE EXTREMISM!

 

Michigan lawyer says a Halloween terror plot that FBI Director Kash Patel described never existed

A Michigan defense lawyer is disputing FBI Director Kash Patel’s allegations that his 20-year-old client and four other young suspects were planning to carry out a terror attack on Halloween weekend. ... 

The investigation involved discussion in an online chat room involving at least some of the suspects who were taken into custody, according to two people briefed on the investigation who could not publicly discuss details. They spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. The group allegedly discussed carrying out an attack around Halloween, referring to “pumpkin day,” according to one of the people. The other person briefed on the investigation confirmed that there had been a “pumpkin” reference. ...

Since the 9/11 terror attacks, the FBI has foiled several alleged attacks through sting operations in which agents posed as terror supporters, supplying advice and equipment.

As usual with the fictions the FBI fabricates in Michigan and the Midwest, the so-called Halloween terror plot Kash Patel says the FBI stopped in Dearborn looks like another nothing burger

Reported by The Detroit Free Press: 

A lawyer representing one of five young men arrested in an alleged Halloween terrorism plot says the suspects are merely video gamers who engaged in tough talk online and recreational gun activities — not radicalized terrorists, as the FBI has claimed.

"These kids are gamers, gamers are weird in the way they talk to each other," attorney Amir Makled said to the Free Press following a jail visit with his client on Saturday, Nov. 1.

According to Makled, his client is one of five men ages 16 to 20, all born in the United States, who were arrested in separate FBI raids on Halloween, accused of plotting to carry out a terrorist attack over the weekend.

But none of it is true, protested Makled, who said there was never any plot to harm anyone, and that FBI Director Kash Patel jumped the gun in annoucing on "X" that the "FBI thwarted a potential terrorist attack and arrested multiple subjects in Michigan who were allegedly plotting a violent attack over Halloween weekend."

"There is nothing here," Makled said. "What they did was jump the gun."

As for his 20-year-old client, who remains jailed without charges, Makled said:

"He says they got it all wrong. ... There's no plan. There was no plot, and there was no imminent threat of a terrorism event in the state of Michigan at all. And I believe him."

None of the five suspects have been charged. In federal cases, the government typically has 48 hours to charge someone before letting them go.

According to Makled, the five suspects landed on the FBI's radar over their recreational gun activity. ...

Makled said this case reminds him of the failed 2012 Hutaree terrorism trial, which involved a group of heavily armed militia members upset with the government, and talking about committing all sorts of violence while "playing army" in the woods.

The defense in that case argued that it was all just talk. The judge eventually agreed and acquitted seven of the Hutaree defendants, just as the jury was about to go into deliberations. The defendants were free to go and the jury was sent home.

"This is like Hutaree 101," Makled said of the current case, adding: "I don't know what the government has yet ... but it's giving me those Hutaree vibes."

Trump's OK with a terrorist running Syria, so leaving Gaza still in the grip of Hamas is hardly surprising

 

Trump is The Decider Bush 43, Obama, and Biden wrapped into one: junking due process, designating people terrorists without evidence and ignoring the evidence when they are, censoring speech, and generally making a mockery of the rule of law

 

They're painting the left as terrorists for a reason, but they don't have the courage to name them . . . yet

Designated terror organizations can be legally attacked using the US military. They'll do the designating, and then they'll do the attacking.

That's why they are doing this.

That's why they are fascists. 

Stop Left-Wing Terror Networks and Their Funding

Mollie Hemingway, FOX News

Do you not see what's happening here? The Trump administration is declaring everything it doesn't like to be terrorism in order to justify autocratic repression of it using the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force

The run of the mill narco smugglers from Venezuela suddenly are terrorists under Trump, so they blow them up.

Suddenly the left wing Charlie Kirk critics are being transformed into terrorists, too, so they say they will also destroy them.

Who's next? Where will it end? 

J. D. Vance once wanted to stop this underlying basis for neo-con adventurism. Now the chameleon is part of its expansion to include unconstitutional domestic repression.

These people must be stopped. 

Stephen Miller: We Will Dismantle And Destroy "Terrorist Networks" That Led To Charlie Kirk Assassination

 

 

 

Uniparty Trump hides behind the skirts of the 2001 anti-terror legislation to murder so-called terrorists near Venezuela after cutting and running from the Houthis in the Red Sea

<insert tough guy image here>

MEXICO CITY — U.S. forces could have stopped the boat that officials say was carrying illegal drugs from Venezuela to the United States on Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, but President Donald Trump chose instead to destroy it, killing 11 people on board, to send a deterrent message to traffickers. ...

The action was a dramatic escalation for the U.S. in its fight against drug traffickers. Lawmakers and legal analysts questioned the legality of launching a lethal strike against civilians in international waters outside of an armed conflict.

White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement that the strike was “conducted against the operations of a designated terrorist organization and was taken in defense of vital U.S. national interests and in the collective self-defense of other nations,” an apparent reference to the 2001 authorization for the use of military force enacted by Congress after the 9/11 terrorist attacks that year. It authorizes the use of force against the perpetrators of the al-Qaeda attacks and to prevent “future acts of international terrorism.” Various lawmakers have tried unsuccessfully for years to repeal the measure, including Vice President JD Vance, who as a senator in 2023 co-sponsored the End Endless Wars Act. ...

The U.S. Coast Guard sometimes shoots out the engines of go-fast boats during maritime interdictions, the former agent said, but killing the crew is new for the United States. ...

Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, said the strike violated international law. The U.S. is not in armed conflict with Venezuela or its criminal elements, she noted, which means it violated the suspects’ right to life. ...

Colombian President Gustavo Petro called the attack “murder.”

“We have been capturing civilians transporting drugs for decades without killing them,” Petro said. “Those who transport drugs are not the big drug lords, but very poor young people from the Caribbean and the Pacific. ...

 More. 

The Grauniad wants you to worry about a far-right civil war in the United States employing drones because of one guy on Substack found by one analyst with a vivid imagination

 Alarm: Far-right extremists eye drones for domestic attacks...

 

 ... the far-right American terrorist movement sees off-the-shelf or home-built first-person viewer (FPV) drones as a critical weapon in their own future war against the US government ...

... talk is commonplace of how these cheap drones are revolutionizing current wars and will be the critical tools of a so-called second civil war ...

... Multiple sources told the Guardian that the FBI has major concerns about the accelerationist neo-Nazi sect on the far right – one calling for an insurgency against the US government – and other ultra-violent actors in the same ideological space, eyeing the use of FPV drones for domestic attacks. ...

... evidence has emerged of military-trained neo-Nazis with relevant skillsets having pinpointed the drones as a potential tool ...

... [Joshua] Fisher-Birch first spotted the Substack and vouched for its credibility. According to him, the writer’s alleged background is not only “significant” but “violent white supremacist groups would find his drone experience to be useful”. ...

 

  

Trump's DOJ brings Kilmar Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador to face a slew of criminal charges it has cooked up against him in the interim since the Supremes ordered him returned in April

 

Watch out, Elon, you may be next.

 Kilmar Abrego Garcia returns to face immigrant smuggling charges after wrongful deportation

Kilmar Abrego Garcia was returned to the United States to face criminal charges involving an alleged undocumented immigrant smuggling ring Friday, months after the Maryland resident was wrongfully deported to a prison in his native El Salvador. ...

The indictment alleges that Abrego Garcia and others from 2016 through 2025 “conspired to bring undocumented aliens to the United States from countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Ecuador, and elsewhere, ultimately passing through Mexico before crossing into Texas.”

The grand jury that issued the indictment found that he made more than 100 trips smuggling thousands of immigrants. ...

In a post on X on Friday, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele wrote, “As I said in the Oval Office:1. I would never smuggle a terrorist into the United States. 2. ⁠I would never release a gang member onto the streets of El Salvador.”

“That said, we work with the Trump administration, and if they request the return of a gang member to face charges, of course we wouldn’t refuse,” Bukele wrote. ...

 

 

 

A week before the 60-day War Powers Act deadline, the Houthis conveniently cry uncle and pledge to halt attacks on US naval forces and Red Sea shipping

 

Israel wipes out the Houthi airport, fuel supplies, and concrete factory and then they finally cry uncle? 

Something doesn't add up here.

Trump announces US will stop bombing Houthis 

... Trump, ahead of a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, said the halt would start immediately. The Houthis approached the administration on Monday night indicating “they want to stop the fighting,” he said. ...

Israel escalated strikes against the Houthis on Monday night with 20 fighter jets bombing the rebel-held port city of Hodeidah. Israeli forces were responding to a ballistic missile strike against the Jerusalem airport by the group. The Trump administration also labeled the Houthis a terror group in March, changing a Biden-era policy. ... Houthi strikes against the waterway have declined significantly in recent months, and the group hasn’t targeted a commercial vessel since late December. ... 

Israel's military says it has fully disabled Yemen's main airport with strikes... 

... “We indirectly informed the Americans that the continued escalation will affect the criminal Trump’s visit to the region, and we have not informed them of anything else,” said Mahdi al-Mashat, head of the Houthi’s supreme political council, in a statement carried by the rebel-controlled SABA news agency early Wednesday. Trump is due to visit Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates next week. ...

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: Trump will stop at nothing in his quest for imperial power and will destroy the credibility of US Treasury debt

 

telegraph.co.uk

If you think it’s alarming now, just wait for Trump to wreck the bond market

The White House’s push for for expanded presidential power threatens US economic stability

 

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

8 April 2025

---

Donald Trump is systematically purging every US government institution, a pattern familiar to anybody who has studied the caudillo regimes of Latin America, or the playbook of today’s Putin-Orbán-Erdoğan prototypes.

It is a racing certainty that he will soon do the same to the Federal Reserve, forcing the central bank to cut interest rates into the teeth of rising inflation, with epic consequences for the world’s dollarised financial system and for €39 trillion (£33 trillion) of offshore dollar debt contracts and swaps.

Late last week he fired the head of the National Security Agency and its top officials at the behest of Laura Loomer, a fringe conspiracy theorist, who whispered into Trump’s ear that they were disloyal to the Maga movement.

He has already fired the heads of the FBI’s intelligence division, its counterterrorism division and criminal investigations division, as well as the heads of the Washington and New York offices.

He has fired the top brass of the US military, starting with a preemptive strike on the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. An earlier chairman – General Mark Milley – refused to ratify Trump’s attempted coup d’etat on Jan 6 2021.

“We don’t take an oath to a king, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We take an oath to the constitution,” said Milley in his parting shot.

But Trump also fired the three judge advocates general, who are legally independent by Congressional statute and have the authority to decide which military orders should be disobeyed – such as Trump’s order to “just shoot” American protesters, on American soil, during the Black Lives Matter saga.

That obstacle will not recur. Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, said the three judges had been sacked to stop them posing any “roadblocks to orders given by the commander-in-chief”.

You can go through the list, agency by agency, extending to the universities and private law firms, and even to the muzzled editorials of some of America’s once great newspapers: the purge is Bolshevik in ambition.

Does anybody in their right mind think that Trump will spare the Fed’s Jerome Powell as the two men gear up for an almighty clash over US monetary policy? “CUT INTEREST RATES, JEROME, AND STOP PLAYING POLITICS!” bellowed Trump in capital letters on Truth Social on Friday.

The Fed will indeed cut rates this year but not until it is able to see through the confusing blizzard of tariffs and the ricochet retaliation of an angry world.

Powell told Congress that the tariff shock is much bigger than expected and may set off “persistent” inflation rather than just a one-off jump in the price level. He came close to damning Trumponomics as a recipe for low-growth stagflation. That is a red flag to a bull.

The current debate over whether or not Trump has the legal power to fire Powell entirely misunderstands the character of the Maga revolution. America’s rule of law is for guidance only these days.

You could say it was ever thus. Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court after it blocked the New Deal. He failed, and unleashed tax investigations to settle scores, as did Richard Nixon. But Trump is an order of magnitude more outrageous.

Powell will not go without a fight. “I will never, ever, ever leave this job voluntarily until my term ends under any circumstances,” he said during Trump 1.0.

Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, said the administration could sideline Powell by appointing a “shadow” Fed chairman, who could steer the markets by issuing forward guidance. But this does not overcome resistance from the Fed board and the hawkish regional presidents.

A secretive team of Trump loyalists drew up a 10-page report before the election proposing more radical measures. These include forcing the Fed to “align policy with administration goals” or even to make the president an “acting” member of the Fed board.

Trump could purge members of the seven-strong Fed board one by one until they get the message. The law states that the president can terminate the 14-year term of a Fed governor “for cause”, usually meaning malfeasance or neglect.

But Trump has just abused his tariff powers on an heroic scale by invoking fictitious “emergencies”. He could no doubt stretch the meaning of “for cause” to anything he wants. The Supreme Court has the last say, but Trump-appointed justices have already shown a strong leaning towards an imperial presidency.

In any case, there are other methods to bring the Fed to heel.

Maga vigilantes are intimidating American judges by having pizzas delivered to their homes – a mob tactic to say “we know where you live”. So we can assume that recalcitrant members of the Federal Open Market Committee will face this sort of treatment.

The major US banks are raising their inflation forecasts to 4pc or higher this year. This inflation will hit before the last three price shocks – Covid, the Putin commodity spike and Biden’s overspending – have faded from immediate memory. It is exactly how inflation psychology becomes embedded.

A variant happened in the 1970s. Nixon bullied the Fed into expansionary policies, with some choice language on “the myth of the autonomous Fed” that later surfaced in the Oval Office tapes.

Loose money stoked inflation, so Nixon ordered a freeze on prices and wages in 1971, declaring war on “gougers”. It was very popular. Illiterate policies often are.

If Trump succeeds in extracting rate cuts from the Fed and tax cuts from Congress, the same problem is going to arise. So my assumption is that he will blame the symptoms and will resort to price controls.

The elephantine difference is that US federal debt was 34pc of GDP in 1971. Today it is 122pc on the Fed measure, and galloping upwards. The fiscal deficit is over 6pc as far as the eye can see.

The US does not have the domestic savings to fund this debt appetite. The savings rate has collapsed to 0.6pc of national income. It was 12pc in the 1960s.

Foreign investors have been plugging the gap. This soaks up a large part of the world’s savings – the underlying cause of America’s trade deficit.

If you think the stock market gyrations of the last few days are terrifying, just wait until Trump destroys the credibility of the Fed and of US treasury debt, the anchor of the global system.

He could order a captive Fed to relaunch quantitative easing and buy the bonds, but to do that when inflation is running hot would be seen by the whole world as naked fiscal dominance. It would set off a price spiral and a collapse of the currency – the sort of outcome seen over the decades in Latin America, or Erdoğan’s Turkey.

The end destination is a return to US capital controls to stop foreign funds and US investors from taking their money out of America. A man willing to impose 116pc tariffs – including pre-existing ones –  on Chinese goods and shut down the biggest bilateral trade relationship in the world as if it were a TV reality show will stop at nothing.

 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/04/08/trump-sell-off-is-bad-wait-until-wreck-us-bond-market/

Republicans under Trump lay the groundwork for the police state which Democrats could only wish for: AG Pam Bondi threatens US House Representative Crockett (TX-30) with terrorism charge

 

 In the future, everything wrong will be deemed "domestic terror" and suffer the draconian punishments for domestic terror.

 

Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has nothing better to do than appear everyday on Fox News, has the temerity to threaten a Congresswoman. Wait until it's your free speech which is threatened.

 

On second thought, don't wait. It already is.

 

Pam Bondi warns Jasmine Crockett to ‘tread very carefully’ in what she says about Elon Musk

... “She is an elected public official, so she needs to tread very carefully because nothing will happen to Elon Musk, and we’re going to fight to protect all of the Tesla owners throughout this country,” Bondi said during an appearance on Fox’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” ...     

If AG Merrick Garland had done this to a Republican, you would have never heard the end of it from the likes of Mark Levin and his ilk.

But hey, when Republicans do it it's OK!

 

Defying every norm, Trump is negotiating directly with terrorists again (no, not the ones in Moscow)

 US holding secret talks with Hamas on release of Gaza hostages, 'Post' confirms

... US special envoy for hostage affairs Adam Boehler ... met with senior Hamas officials in Doha, Qatar, several times. These meetings, first reported by Barak Ravid on Axios, mark the first known direct dialogue between Hamas and the US administration since the US designated Hamas as a terrorist organization in 1997.

Such talks run counter to long-standing US policy against direct contact with groups that Washington lists as foreign terrorist organizations. ...

The White House said Boehler has the authority to negotiate directly with Hamas.

“When it comes to the negotiations that you’re referring to, first of all, the special envoy who’s engaged in those negotiations does have the authority,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters. ...

Such talks run counter to long-standing US policy against direct contact with groups that Washington lists as foreign terrorist organizations.Such talks run counter to long-standing US policy against direct contact with groups that Washington lists as foreign terrorist organizations.

Remember that Donald Trump betrayed freedom in Afghanistan in February 2020 as coronavirus was about to explode, and in Hong Kong in May 2020 as America was about to explode over George Floyd

 Betraying Ukraine is just another day's work in February 2025, but the question is, Who will it next be, in May 2025?

 

"We just signed an agreement . . . the Taliban will be killing terrorists."

 

"Up until yesterday I still believed Hong Kong has the rule of law."