The War We’re Not Allowed to Call a War: Caribbean Strikes, Venezuelan Dreams

Drunk Cop, Dead Fishermen, and a Free Ride Home (Part 3)

Congress’s Watchdogs Pull Over Pete Hegseth… and Let Him Walk Away

Imagine a police officer driving home after one too many drinks, swerving all over the road. In the old days, if that drunk driver flashed a badge, the unwritten rule was professional courtesy: the responding cop might ignore the infraction and even give their tipsy comrade a lift home, no questions asked. Those days are gone – killed off by dashcams, bodycams, and a public that won’t stand for cover-ups. Case in point: when an Oklahoma City police captain was pulled over for DUI, he begged the officer repeatedly, “Turn your camera off… Please. Turn your camera off,” only to be flatly refused . The bodycam stayed on, and the captain took a ride to jail, not to his living room couch. Accountability, bolstered by policy and video evidence, prevailed on that highway.

Now swap that roadside scene for the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. The “drunk driver” in this political parable is Pete Hegseth, the Trump-appointed Secretary of Defense. And the ones pulling him over for reckless behavior are supposed to be Congress, the watchdogs, the oversight crew, the folks with the flashing lights and sirens labeled “accountability.” Hegseth has been speeding down the foreign policy highway like he’s in The Fast and the Furious: Pentagon Drift, blowing up boats in the Caribbean and leaving a trail of carnage. In early September, under Hegseth’s orders, a special ops team struck what they thought was a drug-smuggling vessel off Venezuela. They sank it – and then, after the boat was destroyed, launched a second strike to “kill them all,” wiping out survivors who were clinging to the floating wreckage . Turns out many of those targets weren’t cartel kingpins or terrorists at all. They were fishermen. Real people with families, just trying to make a living on the open sea . Hegseth’s campaign of extrajudicial boat attacks has killed at least 80+ people across 22 strikes since September , and by multiple accounts some of the victims were exactly the kind of innocent civilians you’d call “collateral damage”, if you were being grossly euphemistic or “murdered fishermen,” if you call it like it is .

This is not an exaggeration. One Colombian fisherman, Alejandro Carranza, was blown up while out looking for a “spot with good fish,” and his grieving family has filed a human rights complaint calling his death what it appears to be: an unjustified killing . “The fishermen have the right to live. Why didn’t they just detain them?” Carranza’s widow pleaded with a question so basic and humane it should rattle the conscience of the nation. It sure rattled some in Congress. Lawmakers from both parties started voicing outrage, at least in press releases. Senator Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican, conceded “These are serious charges, and that’s the reason we’re going to have special oversight” . Democrats were (understandably) even less diplomatic: by early December, Senator Patty Murray was calling for Hegseth to be fired immediately, and a coalition of over 100 House Democrats blasted him as “incompetent, reckless, and a threat to the lives” of our service members . In other words, the congressional cops sounded like they were finally going to administer a good old-fashioned field sobriety test to the Defense Secretary.

And Hegseth? He did what any busted driver would do. He denied everything, then backtracked when the evidence became undeniable. First he tried to dismiss the reports of a follow-up “double tap” strike on shipwrecked castaways as “fabricated.” But soon enough, under mounting evidence, he basically admitted to it. In a Cabinet meeting, Hegseth shrugged that he acted in the “fog of war” and “didn’t stick around” to see if anyone was left alive before ordering the second strike . (Translation: Yeah, I blew them up, but I was too busy to check if they were fishermen or traffickers.) This is the same guy who earlier in the year was caught discussing war plans on an unsecured Signal chat aka “Signalgate,” as that scandal came to be known . A Pentagon inspector general’s blistering report just confirmed that Hegseth violated security policies by sharing classified military intel over Signal before those Yemen strikes . So our “driver” was not only drunk on power and mowing down bystanders, he was texting while doing it, too.

At this point you’re thinking: surely, the system will yank this guy’s keys, right? If a beat cop today can’t even cover for a tipsy buddy without a camera recording, then Congress, under the glare of public scrutiny must be ready to throw the book at Hegseth. Think again. Instead, it’s playing out like a bad buddy-cop movie. The congressional “police” pulled Hegseth over, listened to his slurred excuses, and essentially said, “Alright, sir, you have a good night now. Get home safe.” No arrest, no handcuffs, not even a definitive demand that he step down. Yes, a few politicians are yelling for his resignation, but Hegseth ain’t resigning. He shows “no signs of stepping down” and still enjoys the full confidence of his boss. In fact, Trump is doubling down on the boat-blasting campaign, raving that each destroyed boat saves 25,000 American lives (a statistic he seemingly pulled from thin air) . As long as the big guy in the Oval Office (or Mar-a-Lago, more likely) is patting Hegseth on the back, the Secretary isn’t going anywhere. It’s the equivalent of the police chief showing up at the DUI stop and ordering the cops to drive their buddy Pete home. And Congress, for all its stern talk, compliantly opened the squad car door for him.

John Bolton’s infamous 2019 notepad moment

John Bolton revealed a scribbled note about “5,000 troops to Colombia” during a White House briefing, sparking a media furor . That one leaked scribble made headlines worldwide. Yet in 2025, far more dire revelations complete with actual casualties are being downplayed or ignored.

Think about the contrast: Six years ago, a two-second glimpse of John Bolton’s yellow legal pad had reporters in a frenzy . Bolton had scrawled “5,000 troops to Colombia” on his notepad during a press briefing, and the media rightly treated it like a big deal – was it a secret plan? A message to Venezuela? It was the talk of Washington for days. Fast forward to now: we have something much more explosive than a scribble on a notepad. We have video of blood in the water, an inspector general detailing policy violations, an international human rights complaint, and even a widely circulated order to “kill them all” that officials say came straight from Hegseth . This isn’t a hint of a hypothetical deployment; it’s evidence of real misconduct and possibly war crimes. It’s as if Hegseth left a big neon Post-It on his desk saying, “Yes, I did it – I blew up a bunch of fishermen and I’d do it again,” and Washington shrugged. The evidence is in plain sight, but the response has been a collective yawn from the very institutions that are supposed to hold leaders accountable.

And where, one might ask, is the vaunted “Fourth Estate”, our legacy news media, in all this? You’d expect wall-to-wall outrage, special investigations, screaming headlines like “Pentagon Chief Implicated in War Crime, Still at Post!” Instead, it’s been mostly crickets. Sure, PBS, the AP, The Guardian, outlets with a conscience, have reported the story . But turn on the major network newscasts or the 24-hour cable channels, and you’d be hard-pressed to find more than a passing mention. It’s almost as if a Defense Secretary green-lighting a “double tap” on shipwrecked fishermen is just another Tuesday, nothing to get too worked up about. The legacy press seems to be treating this whole scandal like it’s a niche policy story rather than a raging five-alarm fire of corruption and moral failure. They’ve essentially put on their best serious face and intoned, “Move along, folks, nothing to see here,” leaving the public largely in the dark. Imagine being more fixated on a six-year-old scribble on John Bolton’s notepad than on an ongoing extrajudicial killing campaign. That’s how skewed the attention has been.

What We Are Witnessing

We are witnessing a tale as old as power itself: the powerful protecting their own while the innocent suffer. We see a man, Pete Hegseth, entrusted with the mightiest military on earth, who appears to believe rules are for other people. A man who (let’s be real) was already rumored to be literally drunk on the job , and now is figuratively drunk on power, steering the ship of state like it’s his personal speedboat. We see a Congress that has the tools to hold him to account, but instead gives us a lot of talk and little action. We hear pious words about oversight, but when push comes to shove, they hand the keys back to the guy who just drove the country into a moral ditch. We count on a free press to shine a light in the darkness, but much of that press is busy chasing ratings or stuck in horse-race political coverage, while a deadly scandal unfolds in the shadows. Because this is the moment for some righteous fury. This is the moment to demand that our leaders do what that honest cop in Oklahoma did – follow the damn rules. This is the moment to turn the bodycam on Washington, shine it right in those smoke-filled rooms, and don’t you dare turn it off until every last lie, excuse, and cover-up is exposed.

And so, as we reach the end of this saga, the message is as stark as a flashing police light in the rearview mirror: Accountability shouldn’t depend on whether the offender wears a uniform, a three-piece suit, or a Fox News grin. The era of free rides must end. If a drunk cop can’t get away with endangering lives because a bodycam is watching, then a drunk-on-power official shouldn’t get away with dead fishermen because Congress and the media looked the other way. It’s high time Washington’s watchdogs remember their oath, step up, and refuse to be accomplices in an outrageous “professional courtesy” gone wrong. The American people deserve leaders who uphold the law and not some old boys’ club that chauffeurs each other home after committing the unforgivable. Nothing to see here? No, folks there’s plenty to see, if only we open our eyes. It’s time to hold Pete Hegseth, and those enabling him, to account, keys taken away, end of ride. Because if we don’t, we’re all just passengers in the back seat of a car speeding toward disaster, and the driver thinks he’s untouchable. That, to put it mildly, is one hell of a dangerous ride.

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you know I didn’t set out to be anybody’s “watchdog.” I’m a retired cop who’d honestly prefer a quieter life, but the more I watched power get comfortable lying, the more I felt obligated to start taking notes in public. I used to squeeze this work in between gigs just to keep the lights on but now I’ve stepped into it full time, and the difference shows in the receipts: the volume, the quality, the consistency, and a community that’s grown to over 3,000 subscribers since starting from zero back in June.

If you want this kind of unflinching, document-driven reporting to keep coming and to keep getting sharper paid subscriptions are what buy the time and oxygen to do it.

Sources:

1. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/02/trump-caribbean-drug-boat-attack-complaint

2. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/03/pete-hegseth-caribbean-boat-strike-fishermen

3. https://apnews.com/article/us-military-drug-boat-strikes-caribbean-trump-8c9e7b3a9c0a4c4d9c1a8a4a2e7c3f5a

4. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-defense-secretary-hegseth-boat-strikes-congress-oversight-2025-12-04/

5. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/12/01/hegseth-admiral-boat-strike/

6. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/oklahoma-police-captain-dui-bodycam-video-rcna138029

7. https://www.politico.com/news/2019/01/29/john-bolton-troops-colombia-112185

8. https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/29/politics/john-bolton-notepad-5000-troops-colombia/index.html

9. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/pentagon-inspector-general-hegseth-signal

10. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pentagon-watchdog-hegseth-signal-violations-2025-11-30/