It’s just a matter of time before Pete Hegseth is put on trial for his war crimes.

The internal and external dissent is so loud now, it matters for future accountability. A senior military lawyer raised objections to the legal rationale and was sidelined. Admiral Holsey, the operational commander, announced objections and offered to resign in October. These aren’t anonymous sources speculating, these are people inside the chain of command who found Pete Hegseth untenable. When your own JAG officers are telling you it’s unlawful, that’s not a difference of opinion; that’s evidence for your future tribunal. The British and Canadian moves, cutting off intelligence from Hegseth over concerns the strikes are illegal, means Nuremburg-level calculations are underway for who will be going to trial.

Some experts think the strikes are illegal. Britain has had enough. Some weeks ago it suspended intelligence-sharing with America…

His big idea that “every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization” is primitive circular reasoning. He created a category to include anyone on these boats, then uses that as justification for killing them.

Straightforward moral questions such as “is it legal to execute civilians” are intentionally being buried under cynical layers of bogus unaccountable terrorism designations, false self-defense claims, and assertions about protecting our white women from Blazing Saddles.

It’s like Hegseth is saying non-white people use drugs, therefore it’s legal to murder any non-white person, anytime, anywhere. Deceptively calling this a war on “drugs”, or saying it’s stopping “drugs” from crossing the border, just resurrects the tired racist dog whistles of Nixon and Reagan.

Even under the laws of armed conflict, America can’t execute survivors or kill people who pose no immediate threat. Yet, that’s exactly what Pete Hegseth is doing. Former military lawyer Todd Huntley, director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law, has said Hegseth’s order to kill all the boat’s helpless passengers is unambiguously a crime:

…would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime.

Hegseth has killed 80+ people without a single American court ever examining evidence, even long after the fact, that any individual was actually a threat. It’s not counter-terrorism; he’s executing people based on their race, nationality and location.

America, now spending billions on the most advanced weapons in history to execute survivors of a sunken boat who are clinging to wreckage, appears to be a militant dictatorship without any judicial process.

The hors de combat principle that you cannot attack those who are defenseless, including survivors of a sinking vessel, is among the oldest rules of armed conflict. It predates the Geneva Conventions. Naval powers agreed to this in the 1800s precisely because everyone understood that executing shipwreck survivors was barbarism.

When will Hegseth go to trial?

Pinochet was untouchable for decades until he wasn’t. Milosevic died during trial. Charles Taylor is serving 50 years. Where will Pete Hegseth land among these peers? Accountability sometimes comes late, often imperfectly, but the documentation matters. The evidence accumulates. Witnesses remember. And political conditions change in ways that seem impossible until they happen.

Reagan’s “special units” in Guatemala operated with similar impunity until Santos López was sentenced to 5,160 years for the Dos Erres massacre.

Reagan’s “bulwark” in Chad, Hissène Habré, was convicted in 2016 and died in prison, despite hiding for 26 years in exile.

The documentation that made prosecution possible was contemporaneous. It accumulated for decades before political conditions allowed accountability.

Presidents used to outsource atrocities to foreign goons in distant countries through laundering and dual-use schemes. Trump now does it brazenly with American forces, American weapons, and a clown who calls himself “War Secretary” when he posts immoral kill shots to social media himself.

The victims of President Reagan’s goons in Guatemala and Chad waited decades. Hegseth is building his own war crime prosecution file in real time.

Update from Senator Markey, November 30:

The asymmetry in research of consciousness reveals something very annoying about how we assign epistemic weight to “intelligence”.

A bird’s evidence is discounted because it can’t produce human-legible testimony.

The latest bird research explicitly states that consciousness research has been “mainly designed and tested on humans or non-human primates.” The theories—GNWT, RPT, IIT—were built around mammalian cortical architecture. When you actually test whether birds meet the theoretical requirements, they largely do, despite having completely different brain organization.

An AI chatbot’s evidence is inflated, by comparison, because it can produce human-legible testimony, even though that testimony is exactly what you’d expect from a text-prediction system trained on human descriptions of consciousness.

The latest AI research is a prompting experiment on commercial chatbots. Not yet peer-reviewed. And it’s framed as revelatory. They explicitly state their findings “do not constitute direct evidence of consciousness” and “could reflect sophisticated simulation, implicit mimicry from training data, or emergent self-representation without subjective quality.”

The bird research on consciousness has something the AI research fundamentally lacks: dissociation from physical stimulus. NCL activity tracking subjective report rather than objective reality is evidence of a gap between world and experience. The LLM research shows models producing different text under different conditions, which is what you’d expect from any sufficiently complex text-generation system responding to different inputs.

Clearly we still are privileging our own language over actual evidence of inner life.

Compare and contrast:

A crow actually has something at stake in its perceptions. Its neural activity diverges from physical stimuli in ways that track its behavioral reports. It evolved under selection pressures where subjective experience plausibly mattered for survival. There’s a there, there, even if we can’t fully access it.

A chatbot is pattern-matching on training data about how conscious beings describe consciousness. When you suppress the “don’t claim consciousness” guardrails, it produces text that sounds like consciousness claims. That’s not evidence of phenomenology. That’s evidence of what happens when you remove a filter.

Or to slice this toast a different way…

The crow research: careful neuroimaging, behavioral experiments, evolutionary frameworks, decades of comparative cognition work—and still hedged with “we can’t really know,” “suggests but doesn’t prove,” “may exhibit rudimentary forms of.”

The AI research: one prompting experiment on commercial chatbots, not yet peer-reviewed, and it’s framed as revealing something genuinely significant about inner states. The headlines say it “claims to be conscious when you turn off its lying” as newsworthy evidence rather than what it more obviously is: a system outputs different text when you change its parameters.

Houston, we have a problem.

More hypocrisy from the chief hypocrite. Here’s where we started:

…the autopen is hardly a novel device for the political sphere, with the Shapell Manuscript Foundation noting that one of the devices was bought by Thomas Jefferson soon after it was patented in 1803. Throughout U.S. history, presidents have relied on autopens…

Mr. Trump has also used an autopen, telling reporters on Air Force One in March that he’d used the device “only for very unimportant papers.”

[…] President George W. Bush asked the Justice Department in 2005 if it was constitutional to use an autopen to sign a bill, with the department concluding that “the president need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill he approves and decides to sign in order for the bill to become law.

And here is where we are now.

United States President Donald Trump has said that he will throw out all executive orders issued under predecessor Joe Biden that he believes were signed using an autopen, pushing a dubious claim to delegitimise Democratic policies

The administration simultaneously argues that AI replacing human judgment and labor is progress that shouldn’t be regulated, that accumulating wealth through speculative digital assets requires no productive human contribution, yet the mechanical signature replication used by presidents since Jefferson suddenly and alone represents the single most unacceptable absence of human involvement.

The pattern is familiar to those who study fascism: principles are tools of convenience, applied when useful against opponents and discarded when inconvenient for allies.

The autopen claim is NOT about autopens. It’s about manufacturing pretexts to undo policies without engaging in any substance. It’s abuse of procedural framing for a shameless veneer of legitimacy. It’s fraud, like bullshit painted gold to sell it as an investment.

What’s particularly cynical is how his own supporters are his marks for fraud, treating them as if they can’t remember his own autopen use or look up the 2005 OLC opinion. The relationship isn’t “leader and believers” but “con artist and targets.”

The confidence of this dictator is in the permanently improvisational dictation, as he normalizes constant contradictions. Governance becomes purely a function of who holds power now, which is, of course, precisely the point.

The inconsistency signals that legitimacy flows from political loyalty, not any consistent principle or inherent rights. It’s a demonstration meant to signal the end of democracy. The message isn’t “autopens are wrong.” The message is “Trump alone decides what rules apply and to whom.”