War Crimes as Content

There is a particular kind of rot that sets in when a government begins “studying” the evidence of its own violence. Not moral study, not philosophical study—no, the Pentagon’s favorite stall tactic: bureaucratic constipation.

And so, with a straight face and an empty mind, the most unqualified Secretary of Defense in American history tells Chuck Schumer:

“We have to study it.”

Study what, exactly? A missile strike on a scrap of fiberglass bobbing off the coast of Venezuela—so small a boat you could tow it behind a jet ski. A strike that killed two people clinging to the wreckage of a vessel that had already been obliterated by a first missile that killed nine.

Was it a tactical examination of the raw geopolitical conditions that led to the strike?

Was it a legal study, perhaps, of international maritime law?

Was it a humanitarian study, a policy review, a soul-searching?

No.

They simply don’t want you to see the video.

Pete Hegseth—Trump’s cartoonishly irresponsible Secretary of Defense—released the first video gleefully. Like a teenage boy showing his friends fireworks.

He wanted you to watch a U.S. missile vaporize a small boat with 11 people aboard. He wanted you to witness the violence, to feel the cinematic thrum of American power.

That video was propaganda.

But the second missile?

The one fired at two survivors clinging to the driftwood of their own apocalypse?

That one’s “under study.”

There is only one reason a regime obsessed with spectacle withholds a spectacle:

Because it reveals the truth they never want named—this wasn’t war. It was murder.

Last week he pretended ignorance.

This week he pretends omniscience.

“I watch everything,” he says—like a bored deity, skimming creation.

When asked if the second strike was necessary, he offered the moral framework of a malfunctioning vending machine:

“Well, it looked like they were trying to turn back over the boat… but I don’t get involved in that.”

Of course he doesn’t.

Kings don’t get involved. Kings decree. Subjects die.

But what Trump did admit was crucial:

He’s seen the video.

He’s just not showing it to you.

Which means one thing:

If it helped him, you would have seen it already.

Warner—who has seen the footage—says the men were incapacitated before the second strike.

Unarmed.

Shipwrecked.

Unable to flee.

Executed.

But the administration says they can only release the cool videos—the ones where the explosions look heroic.

Ah yes, the old Pentagon rule:

If the war crime is photogenic, publish it.

If it looks like what it actually is, bury it.

Even Rand Paul—Libertarian cosplay aside—managed to articulate the obvious:

You cannot legally bomb shipwreck survivors.

Not in war.

Not in peace.

Not in your nation’s backyard.

Not 2,000 miles from your nation’s backyard.

Especially not when you have zero evidence the boat was carrying drugs, or weapons, or anything at all besides desperate human beings trying to exist in the blast radius of American imperialism.

These boats aren’t drug-smuggling narco-subs.

They aren’t floating arsenals.

They are the smallest boats the American military has ever attacked in its entire history.

You could pull one behind your nephew in a lake.

But Trump wants you to picture an armada of villains cresting the horizon with cocaine-powered jet engines, headed straight for Florida.

This is where the absurdist circus becomes performance art.

While claiming we need to blow up fishermen 2,000 miles offshore to “stop drugs,” Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernández—the former Honduran president convicted of trafficking literally 400 tons of cocaine into the United States.

Four. Hundred. Tons.

Entire mountain ranges of powder.

And Trump shrugs:

“I don’t know him. People said he was set up.”

People.

Unnamed, vague, imaginary “people.”

This is the theology of the strongman:

Evidence is fake.

Law is fake.

Truth is fake.

Only vibes remain.

And Trump’s vibe was:

My friends asked me to free him. So I did.

Meanwhile, two men clinging to wreckage in the Caribbean get a missile.

The boats were too far from the U.S. to pose a threat.

Too small to transport meaningful quantities of anything.

Too fragile to survive a storm.

Too broken to float.

And the men aboard were too injured to move.

So the excuse collapses.

The justification collapses.

The moral scaffolding collapses.

All that remains is the truth:

America is projecting military power not to defend itself, but to perform cruelty.

Not deterrence.

Performance.

Aestheticized violence.

The Empire livestreaming its own sociopathy.

Trump insists the military would carry out his illegal orders.

His Secretary of Defense, his own attorney general (before she sold her soul), and multiple senators all agree on one thing:

The military is required to refuse illegal orders.

They can be prosecuted for following them.

This is why Trump is furious.

This is why he threatens senators.

This is why he wants new laws—to make war crimes legal retroactively.

He wants a military that kills whoever he points at.

Not enemies.

Not combatants.

Not criminals.

Just targets.

This isn’t policy.

This isn’t national security.

This isn’t strategy.

This is the logic of fascism entering its sloppy experimental phase.

The moment when power tests the boundaries of what a population will tolerate.

When the empire fires missiles at shipwreck victims and waits for your silence.

Because silence is permission.

And permission is the oxygen of authoritarianism.

When the most shameless propagandists in American history—Trump and Hegseth—refuse to release a video, it’s because the truth inside it is lethal.

Lethal to their story.

Lethal to their narrative.

Lethal to their myth of heroic violence.

That video is the Rosetta Stone of this whole sordid affair.

Because in it, for once, the United States is not the liberator.

Not the hero.

Not the flawed-but-trying giant.

In it, America is simply the executioner.

And they know it.

And they hope you never will.