Your Government Stands Behind Every One of Them: The Hegseth War Crimes Files, Updated

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Update to “The Pete Hegseth War Crimes Files” (Sept. 9, 2026). 

Two months ago we documented a pattern: something terrible happens, the government denies it, and the evidence catches up anyway. Since then the evidence has kept coming, and the denials haven’t changed.

This week the House got its first chance to do something about it. On Nov. 9, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) filed eight articles of impeachment against Secretary Hegseth. They include waging war on Iran and Yemen without congressional authorization, ignoring laws meant to limit civilian deaths, and “extrajudicial killings” in the boat strike campaign. The next day, House Republicans derailed it. Hegseth called the articles a “farce” and told reporters, 

“I stand behind every one of these operations.”

So let’s look at what he’s standing behind.

What’s changed since September

The boat strikes didn’t stop. In September we counted about 25 strikes and roughly 100 dead. The Intercept’s tracker now counts 72 strikes and at least 243 dead. That’s more than double in two months.

• The denial: The Pentagon’s latest civilian casualty report says no civilians were killed in the boat strikes. It still hasn’t released evidence that the people killed were traffickers.

The Minab school strike is no longer a mystery. On Sept. 20, Bloomberg reported on the Pentagon’s own unreleased investigation. According to officials involved, the school was still listed as a military site in outdated records, and planners leaned on an AI targeting system to catch the error. The team that checks targets for civilian harm had shrunk from about ten people to one, and nobody on it reviewed the school before the strike. Some Pentagon personnel knew within hours that the U.S. was responsible.

• The denial: Remember President Trump (R) saying on March 7 that it was “done by Iran”? According to those officials, people inside the Pentagon already knew otherwise. The Pentagon still hasn’t released the findings or publicly accepted responsibility.

Lamerd: the denial that won’t die. On Feb. 28, a missile hit a sports hall in Lamerd, Iran, where a girls’ volleyball team was training. Since our September post the evidence has kept piling up, and so has CENTCOM’s denial. An Airwars investigation mapped three impact sites: the sports complex and nearby homes. It found the strikes killed at least 21 civilians, including seven children, and that the evidence points to the Army’s new Precision Strike Missile (PrSM). “Precision” missile, 180,000 tungsten pellets, damage reaching more than three times the 50-meter radius its maker implied. In Lamerd, that meant a girls’ volleyball practice. The U.N. mission reached the same conclusion. It cited the missile’s long, sharp nose cone and short tail fins visible in verified video, and detonations directly above the target, which matches the PrSM’s airburst design. It’s hard to blame Iran for a weapon CENTCOM was bragging about. Its own commander, Adm. Brad Cooper, announced that the PrSM was used in combat for the first time in this very operation.

• The denial: On March 31, CENTCOM said U.S. forces launched no strikes in Lamerd or anywhere within 30 miles of it that day. It claimed the missile in the video was twice as long as a PrSM, “consistent with” an Iranian Hoveyzeh cruise missile. Weapons experts disputed that, and a U.S. official confirmed to The New York Times that the missile was a PrSM. After the Airwars report, CENTCOM said it had “no record” of the strikes. Eight months later, that’s still its answer.

The U.N. weighed in. On Sept. 17, a U.N.-commissioned fact-finding mission found “reasonable grounds” to believe the U.S. committed war crimes at both Minab and Lamerd. It concluded that the Minab school building was the intended target, not collateral damage from the IRGC base next door. It also attributed the Lamerd sports hall strike to U.S. Central Command forces. The two strikes killed at least 178 civilians.

• The denial: The White House rejected the findings. CENTCOM still says it didn’t strike Lamerd.

Incidents we missed

The Kuhestak wedding (Sept. 1, 2026). A strike hit a home in Kuhestak, Iran, during a wedding. According to the Iranian Red Crescent, it killed five people and wounded 67. The dead included a 4-year-old and a 16-year-old. CENTCOM opened an internal review.

• The denial: CENTCOM’s response was that the U.S. military “never targets civilians, unlike the IRGC.” Vice President JD Vance (R) said he was “skeptical” the U.S. was responsible. In October, Rep. Jason Crow (D) and Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D) led 74 House Democrats in demanding answers by Oct. 26. [We have not found a public response.] To be fair, U.S. responsibility here hasn’t been confirmed.

Yemen (2025). A U.S. strike on Yemen’s Ras Isa fuel port on April 18, 2025 killed at least 74 people. Ten days later, a strike on a migrant detention center in Sa’ada killed dozens, and Amnesty International called for a war crimes investigation.

• The denial: The Defense Department has said its strikes in Yemen did not kill or injure any civilians.

Somalia (Nov. 15, 2025). A Guardian investigation found that a U.S. strike in Jamame killed at least 12 civilians, including eight children and a pregnant woman.

• The denial: There wasn’t one, because the military never opened an investigation or acknowledged that civilians died.

Correction to the original post

• We described the “no quarter” War Crimes Act memo as [internal]. It is a hypothetical legal analysis by outside scholars, published by Just Security in the form of a Pentagon General Counsel memo. It is not an actual Pentagon document.

The bottom line

The pattern hasn’t changed: civilians die, the government denies it, and the evidence comes out anyway. The difference now is that a Republican congressman has put it in articles of impeachment, a U.N. mission has put it in a formal finding, and the Pentagon’s own investigators have reportedly put it in a report the public isn’t allowed to see. Democrats are expected to bring impeachment back after the new Congress is sworn in on Jan. 3, and we’ll be watching.

This post was researched and written with AI assistance. All facts come from the linked sources.

Your Government’s Cops Spent Years Swapping Racist Texts in Charlotte, and Only Got Caught by Accident

In July 2026, the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation opened a probe into Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer Seth Elliott, accused of misusing the department’s Flock license-plate-reader system to track an individual. Elliott was later charged with illegally accessing a government computer and has since resigned. When investigators pulled data from his phone and handed it to CMPD, internal affairs found something else: a private text thread among six patrol officers. On October 15, Chief Estella Patterson confirmed the messages showed racial, sexual and religious bias and dated back years. She said the officers were of three different races and that four came from the same 2024 academy class. An independent chain-of-command board unanimously cited all six for termination on October 9. According to anonymous sources who spoke to WBTV, the thread included repeated use of the N-word, a contest over who could pull over the most Black drivers, and talk of using force against Black residents. CMPD hasn’t confirmed those specifics and says it won’t release the texts, citing personnel law. Patterson said an audit of the officers’ traffic stops, arrests and complaints has found no evidence so far that they acted on the messages, but she has asked federal partners to look for civil rights violations and will seek to have the officers’ state law enforcement certifications revoked. As of October 19, four of the six had resigned. The Civil Service Board has the final say on the other two.

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Commentary: The department didn’t catch six officers trading racist texts for years. It stumbled onto them while investigating a different cop for misusing license plate cameras, and it’s still asking us to take its word that none of it ever left the group chat.

Source: https://www.axios.com/local/charlotte/2026/10/15/cmpd-racist-texts-police-chief-officers-resign

AI disclosure: ⚠️ This content was researched and written with AI assistance and may be fully AI-generated. All facts are sourced from the linked article and corroborating sources.

Your Government Let a Domestic Violence Cop 'Complete a Program' and Immediately Arrested Him Again

 In June 2023, Connecticut State Police say East Lyme Police Chief Michael Finkelstein grabbed a woman during an argument and struck her in the nose with a small remote control. The case landed with his own department — East Lyme police — to investigate. No charges were filed. A year later, on June 5, 2024, police were called to Finkelstein's home for a fight with his wife that "turned physical," and court documents say he punched her in the face; he was charged with second-degree breach of peace and disorderly conduct and suspended with pay. His case was transferred out of the local court system specifically to avoid a conflict of interest. Weeks later, state police reopened the original 2023 incident — the one his own department had quietly closed — and added a felony charge for violating a protective order, after he surrendered only his department-issued handgun to authorities while claiming it was his only firearm, despite owning others; his attorney blamed "lack of sleep" for the omission. Facing five total charges, Finkelstein checked into in-patient treatment for "stress and alcohol management," was accepted into a family violence diversion program in July 2024, and retired from the department in May 2025, citing PTSD and "poor decisions" in his resignation letter. This year, having completed the program, all five charges against him were formally dropped. Then, on May 22, 2026 — barely two months after those charges were cleared — East Lyme police arrested him again, this time for disorderly conduct following another domestic dispute at his home; officers wouldn't say whether it involved the same victim as before. Days later, state police hit him with two more warrants: a new felony charge for violating a protective order on June 12, and a second false-statement charge, again over an undisclosed firearm police say he failed to report.

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Commentary: A police chief hit two women, got a program instead of a courtroom, walked out the other side with a clean record, and was back in handcuffs within two months — proving that "diversion" for domestic violence sometimes just means diverting the consequences until the badge runs out.

Source: https://dailyvoice.com/ct/windsor/ex-east-lyme-police-chief-arrested-again-after-domestic-dispute-adding-to-troubling-history/

AI disclosure: ⚠️ This content was researched and written with AI assistance and may be fully AI-generated. All facts are sourced from the linked article and corroborating sources.

Your Government Called It 'Mutual Combat' to Let a Cop With Two Domestic Violence Arrests Walk Free

LAPD Officer Shay Austin Van Deventer was first arrested on suspicion of domestic violence in May 2023, booked and released on $50,000 bail; he was stationed at the department's Devonshire Division at the time. Less than a year later, on March 7, 2024, he was arrested again — a second domestic violence incident involving a different victim than the first. Four days later, deputies seized three firearms from his Valencia home after he reportedly made threatening remarks toward law enforcement, and prosecutors added a charge of illegal possession of an assault weapon on top of two misdemeanor domestic violence counts. The case sat for more than a year and a half. Then, in November 2025, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office quietly dropped both charges — the weapons count on November 19, and the domestic violence count the following week. According to a transcript of the hearing, Deputy District Attorney Tatiana Chahoian explained her decision to Judge Danielle Colon O'Sullivan on the record: she'd spoken with the alleged victim, Van Deventer's ex-girlfriend, and was recharacterizing the incident using the legal term "mutual combat." No further public explanation was given for dropping the separate assault weapon charge. Van Deventer appears to remain employed by the LAPD.

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Commentary: A man with two separate domestic violence arrests involving two separate women, caught with an illegal assault weapon and threatening cops in his own driveway, got both cases erased because a prosecutor decided, after one conversation, that his second alleged victim was just as much a combatant as he was — that's not a legal judgment, that's a badge doing what badges do for each other.

Source: https://signalscv.com/2026/05/da-drops-weapons-dv-charge-against-lapd-officer/

Image guidance: For Wikimedia Commons, search "Los Angeles Police Department patrol car" for a generic department vehicle image, or "Santa Clarita courthouse" for the relevant judicial building. Avoid any personal photos of Van Deventer circulating on social media, which are not public domain.

AI disclosure: ⚠️ This content was researched and written with AI assistance and may be fully AI-generated. All facts are sourced from the linked article and corroborating sources.

Your Government Started Firing a Predator Cop in 2008, Then Let Him Keep Assaulting Children for 14 More Years

Patrick Heron joined the Philadelphia Police Department in 1995 and, according to a 2026 civil lawsuit, the department began proceedings to terminate him as early as 2008 following sustained allegations that included "associating with known criminals." He wasn't fired. Instead, prosecutors say, he was moved between districts and allowed to remain on the force for another 11 years, retiring on his own terms in 2019. During that time, using the authority, uniform, and patrol car the department kept giving him, Heron built a pattern investigators say spanned roughly 17 years, from 2005 through 2022, deliberately targeting vulnerable women and girls: runaways, girls who'd just been arrested, and people struggling with addiction. In one case detailed by prosecutors, he drugged a girl in the back of his cruiser and told her, "Finish that needle," before filming himself assaulting her while she lay unconscious. He met one victim, a 9-year-old, and photographed and videotaped her while unconscious; when she posted about the abuse on Facebook years later as a teenager, he threatened her into silence. He met another victim, an 11-year-old, when he was dispatched to drive her home after she ran away from a hospital — and drugged her in his locked patrol car. He met a third victim at a courthouse in 2014, when she was 16 and had just given birth. Investigators eventually identified at least 48 victims, the overwhelming majority still unidentified "Jane Does." Heron was finally arrested in 2022 — three years after he'd already retired with a pension — and in 2023 pleaded guilty to avoid trial on more than 200 counts, receiving 15 to 40 years in state prison rather than the roughly 1,300 years he could have faced if convicted on every charge. Philadelphia has since paid out $2.3 million to settle a lawsuit from two of his child victims, with at least one more lawsuit still pending, all while the department's own 2008 termination attempt sits in the court record as proof officials knew something was wrong more than a decade before he was finally stopped.

Image by ChatGPT - hard to get them to make an image for this kind of stuff due to their rules - so this is the best I could do.

Commentary: The department had enough evidence to start firing this man in 2008 and chose to reassign him to a different neighborhood instead — which means every single girl he drugged, assaulted, and threatened into silence for the next 14 years was hurt by a decision the city's own paperwork proves it was capable of making correctly the first time.

Source: https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/patrick-heron-philadelphia-police-sexual-assault-lawsuit-settlement-20260811.html

AI disclosure: ⚠️ This content was researched and written with AI assistance and may be fully AI-generated. All facts are sourced from the linked article and corroborating sources.

Your Government's Police Department Let a Serial Rapist Operate for Years, Then Paid $30.6 Million to Admit It

Sean Williams ran a glass and concrete contracting business out of a fifth-floor downtown apartment in Johnson City, Tennessee, for years while, according to a federal lawsuit, he drugged and sexually assaulted dozens of women — allegations Johnson City police first received reports about as early as 2018. The "Jane Doe" lawsuit, filed in June 2023 on behalf of nine alleged victims, claimed police knowingly allowed Williams to keep assaulting women through at least 2021, alleging Williams paid officers to obstruct investigations into him. A separate lawsuit, filed by a woman who survived a fall from Williams's fifth-floor apartment window, and another filed by a former federal prosecutor whose 2021 attempt to arrest Williams on a felon-in-possession charge was allegedly deliberately botched by police — allowing him to flee before his eventual capture in North Carolina two years later — described the same pattern of institutional protection. In February 2025, Johnson City agreed to pay $28 million to settle the core Jane Doe lawsuit, a figure that later grew to a final $30.6 million once settlements for two additional minor victims and a broader class action were folded in. That class action, covering any woman or girl who reported a sexual assault to Johnson City police between 2018 and 2022 — regardless of whether Williams was involved — grew out of a third-party audit the city itself commissioned after the scandal broke, and the plaintiffs separately alleged the department's failures reflected a pattern of gender-based bias against women victims generally, not just a blind spot around one man. Williams, now 53, was never actually charged by Johnson City police with the sexual assaults described in the lawsuits; he's currently serving time on federal charges for producing child sexual abuse images and for breaking out of a prison transfer van in 2023. The city and its officers have consistently denied the corruption and bribery allegations, and as part of the settlement, plaintiffs agreed to formally dismiss those specific claims — meaning nobody was ever held individually accountable, even as the city paid out one of the largest sexual-assault-related police settlements in the country.

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Commentary: A city government paid out $30.6 million rather than let a jury hear the evidence — and part of the deal for that money was that no one has to admit they took a bribe, covered for a rapist, or looked the other way while women reported him for years, which tells you everything about how confident the city actually was that a trial would go their way.

Source: https://www.wjhl.com/news/local/sean-williams-case/new-minor-settlement-final-approval-for-sean-williams-johnson-city-lawsuit/

AI disclosure: ⚠️ This content was researched and written with AI assistance and may be fully AI-generated. All facts are sourced from the linked article and corroborating sources.

Your Government Had Three Chances to Save Three Women Who Begged for Protection — And Failed All Three

 Across three states in less than four months, women followed every step the system tells them to follow — reporting abuse, requesting restraining orders, leaving detailed voicemails and text records — and the system failed to act in time to save any of them.

St. Francis, Wisconsin — Kiana Pliska, 32. In February 2025, Pliska told police her ex-boyfriend had choked and pinned her down; officers arrested him, but he was released. An earlier restraining order request was dismissed in April when she didn't appear in court. Days before her death, she said he kicked her apartment door off its hinges. On July 17, 2026, she filed for a new restraining order. That same day, she was shot and killed at her apartment complex. A judge signed the protective order the following morning.

Franklin Township, New Jersey — Lauren Semanchik, 33. A veterinarian, Semanchik had dated New Jersey State Police Sgt. Ricardo Santos on and off before the relationship ended in September 2024, after which she says he stalked her and planted recording devices in her home. On May 20, 2025, she left a detailed voicemail with Franklin Township police asking about filing a report or restraining order, telling them, "He's also a state trooper, so I'm especially uncomfortable." Nobody called her back. She separately raised her concerns with a different state trooper who worked alongside Santos. On August 1, 2025, Santos followed her home and shot and killed her and her new boyfriend, volunteer firefighter Tyler Webb, before killing himself. Neighbors called 911 reporting gunshots and screaming that night; a Franklin Township patrol car drove past the house without going in. The bodies weren't discovered until the next day, by Semanchik's own father and sister. The families' attorneys have accused police of a "blue wall of silence" — protecting one of their own even in death.

Kenosha, Wisconsin — Makayla Plaza. Plaza filed for divorce, and the very next day filed for a restraining order reporting abuse from her husband. A judge denied it, ruling she hadn't met the "burden of proof" required to show she was in danger. She was stabbed to death shortly after. City officials publicly called the outcome a systemic failure, questioning why the burden falls on victims to prove they're in danger rather than on the system to protect them by default.

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Commentary: Three different women, three different states, three completely different bureaucratic failure points — a court that granted the order a day too late, a department that never called back because the abuser wore the same badge, and a judge who decided her fear wasn't "proven" enough — and the common thread running through every one of them is that the system had exactly what it needed to act, and simply didn't.

Sources:

• https://www.tmj4.com/news/local-news/kiana-pliska-restraining-order-death (Pliska)
• https://abc7ny.com/post/franklin-township-murder-suicide-families-victims-file-lawsuit-police-department-nj/17607573/ (Semanchik)
• Local Kenosha coverage of the Plaza case, alderwoman statement on system failure

AI disclosure: ⚠️ This content was researched and written with AI assistance and may be fully AI-generated. All facts are sourced from the linked articles and corroborating sources.