This is the way stories about the demise of a cabinet secretary classically begin: The knives are out for Schmucko at the Department of Mistakes Were Made.

This time it’s more like the bazookas are out for Champagne Pete, as columnists have become fond of calling him. Stories leaked out of Hegseth’s Pentagon today about the Inspector General report that was ordered several months ago on the so-called Signalgate fiasco. Inspector Generals, especially the ones who are a part of the Pentagon and the armed services, generally do what the boss expects of them. When there’s a scandal, find some cubbyhole of a regulation or SOP – Standard Operating Procedure – to hide uncomfortable information. The attitude over there on the Virginia side of the Potomac is that they’ve got more important things to do than diddle around with an IG complaint that points to some awkward or embarrassing situation involving a deputy secretary or even one of the higher-up generals working for a chief of staff of the Army or Navy.

They couldn’t sweep this one under the rug. Back in March, as Hegseth joyfully engaged in his first shoot-em-up, an air assault on the Houthi militia that had been making shipping through the Red Sea miserable if not downright deadly, he just couldn’t resist sharing his excitement with a coterie of his fans that turned out to include his wife, a Fox News producer, and his brother, who holds down a previously non-existent job as “senior adviser and liaison to the Department of Homeland Security.” You know, Hegseth needed his brother being in constant contact with Kristi Noem because she is fond of dressing up in camo-mufti and she really, really needs to know what’s going on with Hegseth and his camo-warriors over at the Pentagon.

So, Hegseth set up not one but two chat-groups on the utterly insecure Signal app and shared classified details about the attacks in Yemen. When news of Hegseth’s little electronic cocktail party was revealed by the editor of the Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, who had been somehow included in the chat-group, Hegseth went into full-on-lie-a-minute mode, claiming that “no classified information was shared.” Naw, Hegseth was just informing his wife and brother and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent about odds and ends like the precise moment the first bombs dropped on Houthi targets, and what kind of bombs they were, and which Air Force and Navy jets were dropping them. You know, just chat-group gossip.

The Inspector General report, however, found that the information Hegseth shared on Signal was classified and that sharing it on an insecure information network could have potentially put the operation and the pilots at risk if it had been revealed to the enemy.

Also revealed in the report was the fact that Hegseth refused to be interviewed by representatives of the Inspector General. The only cooperation he would give was a “short statement.”

Nothing to see here, said Sean Parnell, a personal friend of Hegseth and the Pentagon’s chief spokesman. “This matter is resolved, and the case is closed,” Parnell said prematurely today. Parnell went on to mischaracterize the highly critical report as “a TOTAL exoneration of Secretary Hegseth.”

The Inspector General report includes no information on any of the chat-group members, who included Vice President Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and of course White House jack-of-all-black-trades Stephen Miller. Nor did the Inspector General take a look into how Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg ended up being included in the group.

Goldberg’s inclusion in the Signal chat would appear to be an important, if not the most important, aspect of any sort of real investigation into what turned out to be the sharing in real time of highly classified military information about a combat operation. Apart from Hegseth’s wife, Goldberg was the only civilian in the group. His presence in the chat-group went somehow undetected until Goldberg himself revealed in the Atlantic that he had been included.

Goldberg reported that several days before the strike on the Houthis, he received a “connection request” from Michael Waltz, who was not further identified to Goldberg in the Signal request. Goldberg reported that he “assumed” it was the same Michael Waltz who was then serving as the White House National Security Adviser, who Goldberg said he had “met.” Goldberg accepted the Signal request, thinking that Waltz might want to “chat about Ukraine, or Iran, or some other important matter,”
since Goldberg had reported international relations and national security matters in the past.

A few days later, Goldberg received a notice that he had been included in the “Houthi PC small group,” the Signal chat-group that included representatives of all the important departments in the Trump government. In real time, on his phone or computer, Goldberg sat there and watched as Rubio, Trump-trouble-shooter Witkoff, White House chief of staff Suzi Wiles, and the others logged in their presence in the group.

Nobody noticed or remarked on the presence of the editor of the Atlantic being among them. Goldberg was not unknown to either Donald Trump or members of his administration. He was the one who had reported that Trump’s refused to attend a ceremony at a World War I American cemetery in France and had called the fallen soldiers in the cemetery “losers and suckers.”

So how was Goldberg included in the Signal chat-group that ended up receiving highly classified information about the airstrike on Houthi rebels? Well, there’s another excellent example of an Inspector General sweeping uncomfortable information under the nearest rug.

It seems that we will have to rely on theories as to how and why this serious breach of military security took place. My friend Terrence Goggin, who writes his “West Point History Professor” Substack, has a theory that there is a small group of people at the Pentagon who actually are loyal to the Constitution and take their oaths to defend it seriously. He believes they are responsible for sneaking Goldberg into the Signal chat and are probably responsible for the leaks that have revealed some of Hegseth’s other dick-stomping, most prominent of which is his apparent order to “kill them all” in the first “drug-boat” strike in the Caribbean that ended up including a second strike on two survivors who were clinging to the wreckage of their boat.

Multiple members of both the Senate and House Armed Services Committees are calling for an investigation of this apparent war crime. If Goggin is right, and there is a secret group of national security figures in and out of uniform who have been spreading damaging information about Hegseth, their leaks reached a critical mass with the Inspector General report on Hegseth’s Signal chat-group.

The report will be released publicly tomorrow. Members of Congress were given a classified version on Capitol Hill today. The report itself will be interesting to read in full, and I expect there will be even more interesting leaks from the classified report in the coming hours and days.

Hegseth, with his Christo-fascist tattoos and history of drunkenness and sexual abuse and harassment of women, is a buffoon. Yesterday at the sleepy-Don cabinet meeting in the White House, the title on Hegseth’s nameplate was misspelled as “SSECRETARY OF WAR.” “SS” is the abbreviation for “Schutzstaffel,” the notorious paramilitary organization in Nazi Germany which swore allegiance to Hitler and was responsible for enforcing the racial policy of the Nazi party. The “Waffen-SS” was the combat arm of the SS, and the SS-Totenkopfverbande, the notorious “Death’s Head” units, were in charge of running the Nazi concentration camps that put to death millions of Jews and other “undesirables” under Nazi rule.

“SS” in the job title on a cabinet meeting plaque of a man like Hegseth, who has shown-off his Nazi-adjacent tattoos, is not a dog-whistle to the far right of the MAGA base, it’s a clarion call. Under any sane administration, that alone would lead to a resignation or firing of the cabinet member responsible for the misspelled title.

It would be nice to be able to say that all of this about Hegseth will probably lead to his downfall and that his days at the Pentagon are numbered. But he serves at the pleasure of Donald Trump, a man who issued 160 posts on Truth Social the other night, some of which made Hegseth’s “SS” name plaque look tame in comparison.

It’s wait and see time with Secretary of Whatever Hegseth. My feeling at this moment is that he is such a fuck up and clearly damaged human being, if this doesn’t get him, something else will. There are good people looking over his shoulder at the Pentagon. Hegseth has chosen the wrong man to pick on with his threat to court martial Senator Mark Kelly. The person who should be brought back into uniformed service to face a court martial is Hegseth himself.

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News outlets are reporting this morning that former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández has been released from a federal prison in West Virginia after Donald Trump gave him a “full and complete pardon.” Hernández was serving 45 years in prison after having been convicted last year of running a “narco-state” by using payoffs from drug cartels to support his political career in Honduras. Evidence in his trial proved that he had facilitated the movement of 400 tons of cocaine through Honduras on its way to drug gangs in the United States.

Hernández’s wife Ana García thanked Trump for the pardon in a post this morning on X: “Today we give thanks to God, because He is just and His timing is perfect. Thank you, Mr. President, for restoring our hope and for recognizing a truth that we always knew,” she wrote.

We have not seen any evidence that Hernández or people close to him paid a sum of money to Trump to secure his pardon, but with Trump’s moves against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whom he accuses of running Venezuela as a “narco-state,” what other conclusion can you draw? During the eight years Hernández served in office between 2014 and 2022, politicians from both American political parties, including Joe Biden, praised him for cooperating with the U.S. in fighting drug trafficking. Trump in 2019 praised him for “stopping drugs at a level that has never happened.” 2019 was the same year that the Honduran president’s brother, Tony Hernández, was convicted in the U.S. on drug trafficking charges and sentenced to a term of life in prison.

Just between us, there had to have been evidence that he moved one hell of a lot of drugs to get a life sentence. The conviction of the brother of the president of Honduras for drug trafficking shows without a doubt that the Department of Justice had a great deal of knowledge of how drug trafficking worked in Honduras, especially since President Hernández himself was named in the case as an unindicted co-conspirator of his brother.

The president overseeing the DOJ at the time of the conviction of Tony Hernández was Donald J. Trump. It is likely that the DOJ began its investigation of the Honduran President at the time of his brother’s conviction and sentencing. That means it was Trump’s DOJ in 2019 and 2020 that began treating Hernández “very harshly and unfairly,” as Trump has described his prosecution.

An American jury found Hernández guilty of trafficking hundreds of tons of drugs into this country. Prosecutors produced evidence at trial that he had protected drug lords in Honduras and prevented their prosecution in that country in order to facilitate their trafficking business. All of this at the same time he was being celebrated by U.S. political figures as an “ally” of this country in fighting drugs.

Trump’s pardon of such a man makes absolutely no sense unless Hernández arranged for Trump to be paid off.

Trump has moved dozens of American war ships into the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Venezuela and has spent the last three months blasting boats out the water that are said to be carrying drugs from Venezuelan gangs. Trump has accused Maduro of facilitating drug trafficking from his country through his association with drug gangs such as Tren de Aragua.

That sounds one hell of a lot like the way the DOJ accused Honduran President Hernández of facilitating drug trafficking from his country through drug cartels.

The mainstream media has been reporting that what Trump really has his eye on in Venezuela is its oil business. That may be true. Trump wouldn’t mind helping out his buddies in the oil business with leases on oil fields in Venezuela. In this country, Trump has shut down all government assistance to renewable energy in solar and wind projects and opened every square inch of U.S. territory he can to oil drilling, including the Arctic wilderness and the waters off the gulf coast of Florida and the beaches of California.

But Trump doesn’t own any oil companies. His most recent financial statements don’t reflect holdings in the stock of oil companies. Trump would rather take money directly. He pardoned crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the crypto exchange Binance, after he had arranged to host trading for the Trump family crypto business, World Liberty Financial. The deal between the two companies was described at the time as potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the Trump family.

Last week, Trump commuted the sentence of a hedge fund billionaire, David Gentile, who was convicted of using money from new investors to pay off earlier investors, a classic Ponzi scheme. The government alleged that Gentile had defrauded as many as 10,000 investors out of $1.6 billion. Gentile had just begun serving a seven-year term in federal prison at the time of his pardon from Trump. Gentile’s partner in the scheme, Jeffrey Schneider, was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison for helping to market the scheme to investors.

Schneider, notably, was not pardoned by Trump, even though he was convicted of a lesser role in the phony investment scheme.

How does this make sense? Only if Gentile, or persons working on his behalf, arranged for a payoff to Donald Trump for the commutation of his sentence.

It was reported that last week, Donald Trump had a telephone conversation with Venezuelan President Maduro. Some reports said that Trump had urged Maduro to leave the presidency of Venezuela and guaranteed him and his family “free passage” if he agreed to leave. This was after Maduro in October offered the United States “a dominant stake” in Venezuela’s oil business, according to the New York Times. That offer was rejected. Shortly after Trump’s phone conversation with Maduro last week, Trump announced that he was “closing the skies” over Venezuela to all civilian and military air traffic.

How do you think Trump’s conversation with Maduro really went? First, what the hell was he doing talking to a man he accuses of running a “narco-state?” Oh, that’s right: Trump just pardoned a former narco-state president, so talking to narco-state guys is a regular thing for Trump that makes perfect sense…if what they talked about was money.

Trump doesn’t do favors for people. Every single thing he does has a price. What did he get from pardoning more than 1000 January 6 seditionists? The undying support and love from his base. What did he get from making Elon Musk the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency? Nearly $300 million in campaign contributions in battleground states that put him in the White House, that’s what.

Trump rejected oil deals as a payoff to stop his military pressure on Venezuela. What do you think his price was to guarantee Maduro safe passage out of the country?

Why do you think that Trump, who once called crypto a “scam,” has embraced the fly-by-night money transfer business that converts dollars into thin air and back into dollars again at the whim of the people who run crypto businesses like Trump’s buddy, the owner of Binance, to whom he gave yet another of his pardons?

Trump converted his business, the Trump Organization, from constructing and owning buildings to putting his name on other people’s buildings in return for cash. The deals that were announced for two Trump properties in Saudi Arabia aren’t deals for the Trump organization to put up buildings. He doesn’t have to do business anymore with the kinds of sub-contractors he once ripped off to increase his profits. Now he just takes money from Arab princes to put his name on hotels and condos in the desert.

Donald Trump used to borrow money from banks. Now he’s out of the bank game altogether. His money is in the cloud of crypto so nobody can count it, nobody can see it, nobody can trace it.

That’s where all his payoffs are. No more paper trails. No more electronic trails. No more evidence of corruption. It all happens out there in a mysterious, impenetrable land called crypto. What other conclusion can you draw?

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Tomorrow, two of Donald Trump’s loyal underlings, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, will get on an airplane owned by the U.S. government and fly to Moscow to meet with an accused war criminal, Vladimir Putin, allegedly to negotiate some sort of deal to end Russia’s war on Ukraine. What sort of deal will they talk about with Putin? Well, as the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, “borders matter less than business” when it comes to dealing with Russia and Ukraine. As long as everyone gets rich, very much including their master, Donald Trump, the details, including hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded, entire Ukrainian cities including hospitals and churches in rubble, don’t matter. Trump doesn’t care if the color of money is red, so long as the right percentage of blood money ends up in his pocket.

Nor does it matter to Donald Trump how his war is fought against drug trafficking in the Caribbean and Pacific seas. On September 2, at the very beginning of the Navy’s strikes on alleged “drug boats,” Pete “secretary of whatever” Hegseth ordered Seal Team Six to “kill everybody” who survived an airstrike on a boat off the coast of the Caribbean island of Trinidad. A second missile strike was ordered. The two survivors, who had been clinging to the wreckage of their boat, were “blown apart in the water,” according to the Washington Post.

Let me describe to you where Hegseth was when he ordered the deaths of these two men: He was in his office at the Pentagon, nowhere near the alleged “drug boat,” nowhere near whatever was left of it after the first missile hit, nowhere near the blood that flowed into the water when the two men were hit by the second missile. Hegseth’s office is on the third floor of the Pentagon overlooking the Potomac River, with a view of the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. The office has its own express elevator that goes straight to the basement parking garage, making no stops on other floors.

Outside the office, the third-floor hallway is lined with photographs of previous secretaries of defense and chairmen of the joint chiefs of staff. Shortly after taking office, Hegseth ordered that photos of General Mark Milley and former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper be removed. The same day, he ordered that the security clearances of the two men be revoked. Hegseth understands erasure. He does not understand killing. That is why he has ordered the missile strikes on the so-called “drug boats,” without any evidence that the boats are carrying drugs or manned by drug dealers.

Hegseth’s order, which has been variously quoted as “kill them all” or “kill everybody,” is such an extreme departure from military doctrine and law that two Congressional committees, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, have announced “inquiries” and a “full accounting” of the circumstances of the operation ordered by Hegseth that killed the two survivors of the missile attack on the boat in the Caribbean.

Hegseth does not have much to worry about. Although airstrikes on unidentified and undefended boats from a country we are not at war with may be a war crime, Donald Trump will pardon him if he should ever face charges.

Trump has pardoned war criminals before. In his first term, he pardoned Army Lieutenant Clint Lorance, who was serving a 19-year sentence in the military prison at Fort Leavenworth. Lorance ordered his unit to kill two unarmed civilians in Afghanistan. Trump also pardoned an Army Special Forces major who was facing a court martial for killing an unarmed Afghan civilian whom he believed was making bombs.

Trump, who is obsessed with the obvious lie that every boat that has been attacked and sunk by U.S. forces is carrying enough fentanyl to kill 25,000 Americans, has announced that he will pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who is serving a 45 year term in federal prison for drug trafficking offenses that included conspiring with foreign drug cartels to move 400 tons of cocaine through Honduras to gangs in the United States. Hernández was accused of accepting millions in bribes from drug cartels and was also sentenced to pay an $8 million fine in addition to his prison term. Legal and law enforcement experts say that it is highly unlikely that the boats in the Caribbean and Pacific are carrying fentanyl. The places where they were destroyed by airstrikes are known smuggling routes for cocaine.

Hegseth’s order to kill survivors of one of the airstrikes reflects a desire by the Trump administration not to get involved in arrests and trials of the alleged drug smugglers, in case they turn out to be fishermen or other innocents. There have been several other survivors of the airstrikes. U.S. military forces made arrangements with Mexico and Columbia to rescue the survivors and prosecute them in the countries that picked them up.

Lawlessness has consequences. This country may have endured a repercussion from one of our recent wars when two National Guard soldiers were shot on a street corner in Washington D.C. last week. One of the soldiers died of her wounds. The other is in critical condition in a D.C. hospital. The Afghan national accused of the shooting is a veteran of a so-called “Zero Unit” of the Afghan military that was employed by the CIA to carry out assassinations of Taliban figures. Assassination of a political figure, even during an armed conflict, is considered a war crime by many nations.

That is one of the problems with condoning the commission of war crimes. Other countries are inclined to employ war crimes such as murder and assassination if war crimes are committed against them.

The administration of Donald Trump has been a consequence-free environment since January 20 of this year. One of Trump’s first acts was to pardon the more than 1,000 insurrectionists convicted of crimes on January 6, 2021. Many of those pardoned have gone on to commit new crimes, including armed robbery and domestic violence. Those Trump pardoned are free to buy and possess firearms, even though many of their convictions included a lifetime ban on possessing guns.

It’s all of a piece. Ignoring the law and embracing law breakers creates a permission structure for the commission of new crimes. Does Hegseth even wonder what the consequences will be from shooting boats out of the water that belong to another country? There is a massive black market in armed drones, some of which are capable of attacks on ships. What if Venezuela, or some militia operating on its behalf, uses a drone to attack one of the many U.S. warships now stationed in the Caribbean? Once the drone has exploded when it hits a ship, the evidence of its origin explodes with it.

Not that evidence would matter to Donald Trump or Pete “sign your NDA on this line” Hegseth. Evidence has not mattered to Trump’s Department of Justice in the charges it has attempted to bring against people Trump considers enemies such as James Comey and Leticia James. The evidence of Putin’s war crimes against Ukraine has not mattered in the “peace deal” Trump is attempting to make with him to end his war in Ukraine.

Crime pays. That has always been Trump’s motto. Crimes have victims, and the question this country faces every day is, when will enough of Trump’s victims in this country be mad enough to fight back?

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Most of the shenanigans and just plain idiocy involve this guy, Vinay Prasad, an RFK Jr. acolyte who currently heads up the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. It’s necessary to use the word “currently” in the above sentence, because you just never know what’s going to happen next with him. Earlier this year, Prasad was forced to resign his post after Laura Loomer – you just knew she’d be involved – went after him as a “progressive leftist saboteur” shortly after he placed a hold on a drug to treat muscular dystrophy “for safety reasons.” Prasad is “a Marxist Trojan Horse,” Loomer wrote in one of several posts attacking him.

Prasad stayed out of that job for two weeks, before being welcomed back to the RFK Jr. fold after unnamed “experts” determined that Loomer had been fronting for a drug manufacturer, Serepta Therapeutics, which manufactured the muscular dystrophy drug in question and stood to lose millions in sales because of Prasad’s decision to suspend usage of the drug. Conservative activists who pay attention to the fine-print ins and outs of who is funding who in their sphere of activism went after Loomer with boots on. Ned Ryun, one of the fine-tooth nitpickers on the Right, addressed Loomer directly on X, “The fact of the matter is you got funded by Sarepta Therapeutics to take Vinay out; probably thru a middleman for deniability but still pharma money funding it all.” Antonia Hitchens wrote in the New Yorker about a conversation she had with “a veteran political operative” at Ned’s Club, a members-only “lounge” frequented by Trump administration figures like Karoline Leavitt. Loomer, the right-wing operator, told Hitchens, is a “pay-to-play Tasmanian devil” who creates “total anarchy and a wide blast zone” with her attacks on figures such as Prasad.

It would almost be possible to feel sorry for Prasad until you have a look at his latest moves at the FDA, doubtlessly at the behest of his boss, Kennedy. Yesterday he announced a series of FDA decisions that will seriously affect access to childhood vaccines. Prasad is going to change the way vaccines are approved by requiring pharmaceutical companies to run much larger studies than are required now. The Washington Post reported that Prasad’s announcement will require that “pneumonia vaccine makers must demonstrate that their products reduce pneumonia rather than just generate antibodies to fight infections.”

This is in line with attacks on COVID vaccines that have been made by RFK Jr., that they do not prevent the disease from occurring but only reduce its severity once contracted. Which is like saying that the effectiveness of automobile brakes must be questioned because they don’t prevent crashes, they only serve to make them less likely and not as deadly when they occur.

Prasad has also ordered studies that will question whether multiple vaccines can be given at the same time, the common method for vaccinating children according to schedules that were previously approved by the FDA and pediatric specialists. Older Americans have been encouraged to receive vaccines for COVID, flu, RSV and pneumonia at the same time, cutting down the number of visits the elderly must make to doctor’s offices. That practice will come under scrutiny by the order Prasad issued yesterday.

What all of Prasad’s orders have in common is their connection to the anti-vaccine views long held by his boss, RFK Jr., who has been questioning the efficacy and safety of childhood vaccines for decades, as well as attacking the COVID vaccine as “the most deadly vaccine in history.” Prasad also announced that his office had conducted its own study of COVID vaccines and concluded that they had “contributed” to the deaths of 10 children between the years of 2021 and 2024. During these years, no fewer than one billion COVID shots were administered to Americans, saving millions of lives according to studies that the FDA is now busy questioning. At least 100 million COVID vaccine shots were given to children during that time.

“This is a profound revelation,” Prasad wrote. “For the first time, the US FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children.”

Ten American children. Over three years.

Prasad’s dramatic statement is not accurate, because his study concluded only that the COVID vaccine may have contributed to children’s deaths, not caused them.

Meanwhile, 157 children died from accidental gunshots during 2023, and 114 children died from the same cause in 2024, the most recent years for which statistics are available. The numbers come from analysis of figures from the Centers for Disease Control – another government agency now under the control of RFK Jr. – and Everytown for Gun Safety, a group that advocates for gun safety. There are reports of chaos at the CDC, which is operating under an acting director, the previous Senate-approved director having been fired by RFK Jr. after she refused to sign-off on vaccine policy directives he ordered. The announcement yesterday by Prasad is exactly the kind of policy change that former CDC Director Susan Monarez objected to, resulting in her being fired.

Funding for the division of the CDC that keeps records for and studies gun violence has been severely cut back under directives by RFK Jr. But then, who wants to study hundreds of gun deaths of children when ten children have allegedly died from a COVID shot?

RFK Jr. has been wanting to take apart the children’s vaccine schedule ever since he joined the board of Children’s Health Defense in 2015. The anti-vax group alleges that vaccines cause autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autoimmune diseases and even cancer. That the purpose of vaccines is to prevent diseases that for centuries were deadly to children and adults both does not matter to advocates from Children’s Health Defense, the most prominent of whom has been RFK Jr., who is now, as HHS secretary, in charge of vaccine policy.

Here, I would like to make a personal point as the father of three children. Every decision you make as a parent, and I mean every decision, is fraught. The act of strapping an infant or toddler into a car seat and driving a child to a doctor’s appointment is more dangerous than anything a pediatrician can do with or to that child in his or her office. A driver or a child in the backseat of a car is more likely to be seriously injured or die in a car accident than they are to get sick or die from a vaccination given by a pediatrician or a family doctor treating a father or mother of children.

Whether to allow a child to play pee-wee football or train to become a gymnast is another example of a decision parents often make. A boy of 7 or 8 can suffer head trauma playing football as a child. Head trauma is cumulative, meaning that multiple impacts to the head as you play football can contribute to neurodegenerative diseases later in life, even if no individual head impact as a child or young man results in a concussion.

Gymnastics, even with all the safety measures that are taken in training, can cause injuries that can become debilitating. So, what do you do if a son or a daughter wants to become involved in gymnastics? Do you bar your child from football or gymnastics and err on the side of safety on the theory that an injury in childhood could lead to more severe problems in adulthood?

What of the children who die on the football field or while practicing for cheerleading or gymnastics? Because there are ten deaths over a three-year period from children playing football or being a gymnast, do you just decide for your child that he or she cannot play those sports? Who would advocate cancelling the sports of football and gymnastics because ten children died?

We know from figures kept by the National Institutes of Health that as many as 15,000 children died from COVID during the pandemic. If in fact it turns out that a number of children did die from a COVID shot, that is indeed a tragedy. But how many children out of the tens of millions who received a COVID vaccination would have died without it?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a fanatic who has hired other fanatics such as Vinay Prasad to carry out an ideological assault on the healthcare of more than 300 million Americans because Donald Trump empowered them. The fact that Trump is the person who made the decision to develop the vaccine that saved millions from dying due to contracting the deadly COVID virus is an irony that is fast turning into a tragedy.

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Let’s begin with the egregious error that in August, the Capital and West Virginia and Louisiana National Guard were deployed in Washington D.C. in the first place. We’ll move on to the fact that they’re still there in November. The troops have been misused. They were never trained to be used on the streets of a major American metropolitan area. They were not trained to pick up trash on the Mall and “beautify” the District.

They especially were not trained to patrol the streets in groups of as few as two soldiers. In Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. soldiers were used, albeit in larger groups, in the same way. They were sent onto the streets of Baghdad and Mosul and other cities as “presence patrols,” which military commanders thought were valuable to show the “presence” of U.S. forces. The troops called them “target patrols.” As one soldier in Mosul put it to me one afternoon as I accompanied a squad on patrol, “You know, sir: we’re the target.”

The fact that the National Guard soldiers who were shot were themselves armed turned out to be meaningless. The shooter, an Afghan national named Rahmanullah Lakanwal, allegedly used a handgun. He ambushed the victims on a street corner a few blocks from the White House, an otherwise very safe neighborhood in Washington, shooting each of them repeatedly. One soldier, Army Specialist 4^th Class Sarah Beckstrom of the West Virginia National Guard, died later of her wounds yesterday in the hospital. The other victim, Air Force Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe, is in critical condition, described as clinging to life.

The question is, why would an Afghan immigrant who worked with U.S. forces as part of an Afghanistan army “Zero Unit,” drive all the way across the country from his home in Bellingham, Washington, to shoot two National Guard soldiers a few blocks from the White House? Administration authorities are describing the shootings as “targeted,” meaning that it was not random, that it was his intention to kill National Guard soldiers on a patrol close to the White House. His intention seemed to be to make a statement with the shooting, but what statement?

Much is being made of the fact that Lakanwal had been “vetted” before he and his family were given passage out of Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal in 2021. One story in the New York Times today said the vetting continued after refugees reached bases in Gulf states like Qatar, where they were held on American bases before being flown to the United States. Even to be chosen for such refugee status, an Afghan citizen who worked with U.S. forces had to have a sponsor who vouched for him. Lakanwal’s sponsor, according to reports, would have come from the CIA, with which his Zero Unit worked in the province of Kandahar in Afghanistan.

Most coverage of the shooting has not mentioned the fact that at least some of the people who worked with U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq took the positions to spy for insurgent forces they were secretly loyal to. I encountered two translators for American officers in Iraq who I thought were probably reporting to insurgents about the movements and intentions of U.S. units. I caught one of the translators behind a shed at a company-level base camp talking on a Motorola two-way “Walkabout” radio with someone off the base. When I asked him where he got the two radios that would have been necessary for such a conversation to take place, he said he had ordered and paid for them online and had them shipped to the American basecamp by FedEx.

It is of course unknown where Lakanwal’s loyalties lay then or now, but it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for Americans working with him in Afghanistan to track his movements and contacts with Afghans who appeared to be civilians but were actually military members of the Taliban. It is unlikely that he would have concealed his true loyalties all this time – four years since he was flown out of Afghanistan – for the express purpose of killing American military members years later in Washington D.C. There was no way for him to know that Trump would deploy the National Guard to Washington, although if that was indeed his purpose, he could have picked different targets elsewhere.

The question of his motivation may never be known, even if he survives his wounds and is indicted and tried for murder, as Attorney General Pam Bondi has said he will be. But the reason behind his actions may be close to what many American veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq have experienced: PTSD. Some of our veterans have committed crimes that have been attributed to PTSD, and there is evidence that many veterans’ suicides were caused by depression that resulted from the traumatic stress of having served in combat.

We don’t often think of the veterans of enemy armies, or the veterans of our allies, as suffering from the same terrible problem that our veterans endure after returning from war, but human beings everywhere are likely to suffer in the same way our veterans have. If this country is to accept foreign veterans who have served alongside our forces, then we are going to be vulnerable to their psychological and physical problems as well. I can see in my mind’s eye Donald Trump turning this fact into an excuse not to repay the service of foreign soldiers who transferred their loyalties to our side in a war. He has already announced that he will refuse to accept refugees from some 19 “third world” countries. I suppose he thinks that the moat of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans will protect us from the problems human beings contain just as we have been protected for more than 200 years from wars that have consumed continents far from our shores.

This is folly, of course, but what are we to expect from a fool?

The fact is that wars do not leave their tragedies on the battlefield. Human devastation comes home with warriors in their kit bags, in their minds, and in their broken bodies. Trump thinks that his fallacious “America first” policy will protect us from problems of the world beyond our shores. He thinks if we do not start wars, that we will be left alone to enjoy the fruits of Americanism, which he of course defines as Trumpism.

But wars have found us on airplanes flown into towers in New York City and the Pentagon, and wars come through customs in the persons of people who have served in them, and in the people who have suffered the devastation of wars, such as Ukrainians who have sought shelter as refugees from Russian military aggression and murder. The invention of commercial flight has been a boon to our economy, to the pleasures of our tourism in foreign lands, in trade made possible by transport aircraft, in bringing families together who would otherwise be separated by distances difficult or impossible to travel without flying.

We are open to the world whether Donald Trump likes it or not, and part of this freedom comes at a price paid by two National Guard soldiers this week in Washington D.C. They are as much casualties of our 20-year war in Afghanistan as were soldiers who shed their blood on Afghan battlefields. Bullets don’t care who they kill or where. Sadness from loss abounds when war is made and even when it ends. It is equally sad that this fact is not remembered by leaders who inflict war on soldiers and civilian victims, even upon soldiers assigned to walk patrols in a city where they are not needed or wanted.

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