TV News LIES

A US appeals court on Thursday handed a victory to Donald Trump in his effort to keep national guard troops in Washington DC, pausing a lower court order that would have ended the deployment in the coming days.

In a written order, the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit lifted an injunction that said the troops needed to leave the nation’s capital by 11 December.

The DC circuit’s order, while not a final judgment, allows Trump to continue a deployment he began this summer and has ramped up in response to a 26 November shooting of two national guard members near the White House.

The order came in a lawsuit filed by the DC attorney general, Brian Schwalb, a Democrat and the capital city’s top legal officer.

More than 2,000 national guard soldiers have been in Washington since Trump’s initial deployment in August, part of the president’s contentious immigration and crime crackdown targeting Democratic-orled cities.

The guard troops in the city include contingents from the District of Columbia, as well as Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, West Virginia, Georgia and Alabama.

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The Pentagon announced on Thursday that the US military had conducted another deadly strike on a boat suspected of carrying illegal narcotics, killing four men in the eastern Pacific, as questions mount over the legality of the attacks.

Video of the new strike was posted on social media by the US southern command, based in Florida, with a statement saying that, at the direction of Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, “Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel in international waters operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization”.

“Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting along a known narco-trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed,” the statement added.

The latest strike comes as the Pentagon and the White House have struggled to answer questions about the legal basis for the campaign to kill suspected drug smugglers with military strikes, with US lawmakers promising to investigate the first such attack, in September, in which two survivors clinging to wreckage were killed in a follow-on strike.

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Navy Adm. Frank Bradley, the commander who oversaw the Sept. 2 strikes on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean, denied that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered his subordinates to “kill everybody” aboard the vessel during briefings to lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

The denial follows a report from The Washington Post last week that the Pentagon chief gave a spoken directive to “kill everybody” ahead of the U.S. military’s Sept. 2 attack against an alleged drug-smuggling vessel in the Caribbean, an operation where 11 “narco-terrorists” were killed.

Both Hegseth and the White House have denied that he gave such an order to Bradley, the commander of Joint Special Operations Command.

“Admiral Bradley was very clear that he was given no such order, not to give no quarter or to kill them all. He was given an order that, of course, was written down in great detail, as our military always does,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told reporters after the Thursday closed-door, classified briefing with Bradley and the Joint Chiefs of Staff chair, Gen. Dan Caine.

“The admiral confirmed that there had not been a ‘kill them all’ order, and that there was not an order to ‘grant no quarter,’” Himes said on Thursday.

Still, Himes said that he was “deeply” troubled by the Defense Department’s attack on Sept. 2, in which the U.S. military conducted four strikes, killing 11 and sinking the boat.

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The Pentagon’s watchdog found that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth put U.S. personnel and their mission at risk when he used the Signal messaging app to convey sensitive information about a military strike against Yemen’s Houthi militants, two people familiar with the findings said Wednesday.

Hegseth, however, has the ability to declassify material and the report did not find he did so improperly, according to one of the people familiar with the findings who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the information. That person also said the report concluded that Hegseth violated Pentagon policy by using his personal device for official business and it recommended better training for all Pentagon officials.

The initial findings ramp up the pressure on the former Fox News Channel host after lawmakers had called for the independent inquiry into his use of the commercially available app. Lawmakers also just opened investigations into a news report that a follow-up strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean Sea in September killed survivors after Hegseth issued a verbal order to “kill everybody.”

Hegseth declined to sit for an interview with the Pentagon’s inspector general but provided a written statement, that person said. The defense secretary asserted that he was permitted to declassify information as he saw fit and only communicated details he thought would not endanger the mission.

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Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, told soldiers under his command in Iraq to ignore legal advice about when they were permitted to kill enemy combatants under their rules of engagement.

The anecdote is contained in a book Hegseth wrote last year in which he also repeatedly railed against the constraints placed on “American warfighters” by the laws of war and the Geneva conventions.

Hegseth is currently under scrutiny for a 2 September attack on a boat purportedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean, where survivors of a first strike on the vessel were reportedly killed in a second strike following a verbal order from Hegseth to “kill everybody”.

Hegseth has denied giving the order and retained the support of Donald Trump. The US president said Hegseth told him “he did not say that, and I believe him, 100%”. But some US senators have raised the possibility that the US war secretary committed a war crime.

In the book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth relates a story about a legal briefing at the beginning of his service in Iraq, in which he told the men under his command to ignore guidance from a military judge advocate general’s (JAG) attorney’s guidance about the rules of engagement in the conflict.

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The Pentagon on Tuesday scapegoated a navy admiral for the extrajudicial double-tap strike that killed survivors of a 2 September attack on an alleged drug boat and vowed to continue operations, even as lawmakers investigate whether the attack constituted a war crime.

At a Pentagon briefing on Tuesday, Kingsley Wilson, the Pentagon press secretary said that the decision to re-strike the “narco terrorist vessel” was made by Adm Frank M Bradley, “operating under clear and long standing authorities to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States was eliminated”. Wilson added that Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon secretary, “stands behind Admiral Bradley, 100%”.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, on Monday explicitly named Bradley as the officer who “directed the engagement”, distancing Hegseth from accountability despite a Washington Post report that he ordered the deaths of everyone on the boat.

Wilson dismissed critical reporting of the incident as “fake news”.

During a cabinet meeting alongside Donald Trump on Tuesday, Hegseth said: “We’ve only just begun striking narco boats and putting narco terrorists at the bottom of the ocean.” He defended Bradley, who is set to provide a classified briefing to lawmakers overseeing the military on Thursday, saying Trump “always has our back” and that “we always have the back of our commanders who are making decisions in difficult situations”.

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