Truthing the NY Times
Rhetorical analysis, baby!
So the NY Times ran an article so bursting with lies and cynicism I felt compelled to translate it into truth. The bits from the original article are all italicized, each followed by my translation in regular, non-italicized font. Finish the whole thing and you’re officially bilingual. Enjoy!
In Pursuit of a ‘Warrior Ethos,’ Hegseth Targets Military’s Top Lawyers
Man Who Cheated on His Wife & Paid $50,000 to the Woman Who Said He Sexually Assaulted Her Wants to Define Honor, Hates The Justice System
The defense secretary has repeatedly derided the military lawyers for war crime prosecutions and battlefield rules of engagement.
The defense secretary thinks war crimes are good and wants the American military to behave with the same impunity that led the Nazis to the Nuremberg Trials.
By Greg Jaffe
Reporting from Washington
Feb. 22, 2025
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to fire the top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force represents an opening salvo in his push to remake the military into a force that is more aggressive on the battlefield and potentially less hindered by the laws of armed conflict.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s baseless decision to fire the top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force is to be expected from a man who openly lusts after a lawless military accountable to no one and abusive to civilians domestic and abroad the world over.
Mr. Hegseth, in the Pentagon and during his meetings with troops last week in Europe, has spoken repeatedly about the need to restore a “warrior ethos” to a military that he insists has become soft, social-justice obsessed and more bureaucratic over the past two decades.
A man whose days in the military are behind him and who’ll never fight another battle is itching to project his racism and personal insecurities onto a military that already has the world’s most distended capacity for violence and whose budget is the number 1 reason generation after American generation are being born into a lower quality of life than their parents’.
His decision to replace the military’s judge advocates general — typically three-star military officers — offers a sense of how he defines the ethos that he has vowed to instill.
His decision to eliminate qualified people who lived by a code of honor — typically three-star military officers — is the behavior of a petty baby whose confidence grows best undisturbed, in the dark. Soft. Toxic. A mushroom of a man.
The dismissals came as part of a broader push by Mr. Hegseth and President Trump, who late Friday also fired Gen. Charles Q. Brown, the country’s top military officer, as well as the first woman to lead the Navy and the vice chief of staff of the Air Force.
The eight Joints Chiefs of Staff included six white men, one woman and a Black man, Charles Q. Brown, the chairman. The D.C. KKK fired the woman and the Black man.
By comparison, the three fired judge advocates general, also known as “JAGs,” are far less prominent. Inside the Pentagon and on battlefields around the world, military lawyers aren’t decision makers. Their job is to provide independent legal advice to senior military officers so that they do not run afoul of U.S. law or the laws of armed conflict.
Here reporter Greg Jaffe is rhetorically aligning himself with the illegal and immoral actions of a administration, diminishing the importance of JAGs as a way of softening the significance of their firings. This is Vichy journalism: it’s meant to look and sound like actual reporting, but it’s entire reason for being is to obey those in power as a mouthpiece for their lies.
Senior Pentagon officials said that Mr. Hegseth has had no contact with any of the three fired uniform military lawyers since taking office. None of the three — Lt. Gen. Joseph B. Berger III, Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Plummer and Rear Adm. Lia M. Reynolds — were even named in the Pentagon statement announcing their dismissal from decades of military service.
Here Jaffe is practically on his knees fawning at the contrast in power he attributes to Hegseth, all for . . . not contacting people he just fired, something everyone who’s ever fired anyone ever understands as basic common sense. It’s striking how much the people who complain about equal opportunity and social justice need to be constantly petted and told how special they are for doing things 99% of the world takes for granted.
A senior military official with knowledge of the firings added that the military lawyers had “zero heads up” that they were being removed from office and that the top brass in the Army, Navy and Air Force were also caught unaware.
Empty calorie details like this, offering no context or critical analysis — just talk that sounds like workplace gossip — is a way of trying to normalize aberrantly cruel people. Instead of focusing on the story’s subject — government officials firing qualified career officers for no apparent reason — the writer directs your gaze to the object in the story, the baffled, powerless victims. You’re meant to marvel at how manly manly men like Hegseth are so strong they can kick other kids clear out of their treehouse. For nearly half a millennia the laws and practices of the land were genocidally turned in their favor. Segregation was only illegal for 60 years before these soft underbellies couldn’t stand a level(er) playing field.
The unexplained dismissals prompted widespread concern. “In some ways that’s even more chilling than firing the four stars,” Rosa Brooks, a professor at Georgetown Law, wrote on X. “It’s what you do when you’re planning to break the law: you get rid of any lawyers who might try to slow you down.”
This is a classic case of the media having its cake and eating it, too. Including the quote from Brooks is typically the beginning of a counterargument, where a real reporter actually concerned with the real world would follow-up, elaborating on the warning from a professor of law that the freedom and security of literally millions of Americans is under attack. Jaffe gives it lip service, then pivots to centering Hegseth again, despite having nothing newsworthy to report. Instead he literally quotes from a book Hegseth wrote to make money and offers a mini-book report. That isn’t journalism, that’s propaganda.
The firings do not seem to be related to a single dispute but rather appear tied to Mr. Hegseth’s view of why the U.S. military struggled to achieve any significant victories in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he served in combat, and how he wants the military to operate under his leadership.
Hegseth didn’t get to be the hero he dreamed of then, so like so many angry middle-aged man whose high school dreams never came true, he’s going to push his unresolved issues onto the next generation.
In his book, “The War on Warriors” which was published last year, Mr. Hegseth castigates military lawyers for imposing overly restrictive rules of engagement on frontline troops, which he argues repeatedly allowed the enemy to score battlefield victories.
If the only way you can win a war is by committing war crimes, you shouldn’t be at war. You should be where the Nazis at Nuremberg ended up: in prison. Or worse.
Mr. Hegseth derisively refers to the lawyers in the book as “jagoffs.” The term led Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island and a West Point graduate, to ask Mr. Hegseth at a confirmation hearing whether he could effectively lead the military after disparaging it.
Hegseth’s boss has criticized military veterans for years, calling both prisoners and casualties of war “losers.” It stands to reason he’d share the same disdain for them his chickenhawk king does.
Mr. Hegseth’s account of this period in his book and his Senate testimony conflict with how battlefield rules of engagement were set during the wars. Senior officers in Iraq and Afghanistan, such as Gen. David H. Petraeus, came to believe that civilian deaths were turning the local population against U.S. forces and feeding the enemy’s ranks. So these officers emphasized protecting civilian life even if it meant that U.S. troops might have to incur greater risk.
It’s striking that any casual student of history understands not only the moral arguments against war crimes and brutalizing civilians, but the practical reality that violence against non-combatants, particularly violence so heinous that even the most brutal governments in history agreed it was illegal, means more suffering and death for your own soldiers. Yet again, an obvious and disturbing truth — the U.S. Secretary of Defense supports action that results in more dead American soldiers — is left ignored.
Ultimately, the rules belonged to battlefield leaders and not their military lawyers. The axiom — “lawyers advise, and commanders decide” — is a core piece of every military lawyer’s education, current and former JAG officers said.
Mr. Hegseth’s views on the laws of war could also put him in conflict with some of the senior military generals who currently serve under him.
In his book, he expresses repeated frustration with the international laws put in place after World War II to govern armed conflict. “What do you do if your enemy does not honor the Geneva Conventions?” he writes. “We never got an answer. Only more war. More casualties. And no victory.”
In World War II, the Allies enemies, the Axis, did not honor the Geneva Conventions. We got an answer. Several, in fact. There were war crimes trials. In Nuremberg. In Tokyo, too. Many were convicted. Many were executed. And no victory? Did neither Jaffe nor Hegseth study history?
To many senior commanders, the “warrior ethos” isn’t just about killing the enemy or winning wars. It also includes concepts such as discipline, honor and respect for the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Hegseth’s boss is a literal sex abuser. Half the administration are men who’ve been accused of similar crimes, the other half women who’ll be assaulted by them at some point. But yes, do go on about discipline, honor and respect.
“Combat can spin out of control and lethality and fighting can turn quickly into murder when passions run wild,” said retired Lt. Gen. David Barno, who commanded U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
War is murder. That it’s state-sanctioned doesn’t change that fact. It’s critical never to lose sight of that truth. There isn’t robbery and embezzlement; there’s just stealing. There isn’t “lethality and fighting” and “murder.” It’s all murder.
The laws of combat are designed to protect civilians as well as troops from moral injury. Soldiers will have to think about the enemy and civilians they killed “for the rest of their lives,” General Barno said, “and knowing they did it in an authorized way bounded by the laws of our country and armed conflict is incredibly important.”
Again, Jaffe nearly gets into meaningful, citizen-centered writing here, then hops into semantics and pretzel logic that says nothing.
In Mr. Hegseth’s Senate confirmation testimony, lawmakers sought to pin him down on what he meant when he referred to the “warrior ethos” and whether he believed U.S. forces should follow the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice even when America’s enemies ignore them.
Here the writing tries to rope you into accepting an assumption as fact without offering a single example to support it. Who are “America’s enemies”? Jaffe fails to offer specifics — not only for who these enemies supposedly are, but what crimes they’ve allegedly committed.
His answers were often evasive. “An America First national security policy is not going to hand its prerogatives over to international bodies that make decisions about how our men and women make decisions on the battlefield,” Mr. Hegseth replied.
He wants you to think he’s a super tough American hero, yet repeatedly alludes to both unnamed “foreign” enemies and front-facing government organizations that are just too scary and mean to fight without committing war crimes. Mushroom. Of. A. Man.
During the president’s first term, Mr. Hegseth appealed to Mr. Trump to issue pardons for U.S. troops accused or convicted of war crimes or murder for their actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. In October 2019, Mr. Trump called Mr. Hegseth to tell him that he was pardoning two soldiers and a Navy SEAL whose causes Mr. Hegseth had championed for months on his Fox television show.
The president ended their conversation with a compliment that Mr. Hegseth wrote that he would “never forget and might put on his tombstone.”
The president called him a warrior, using an expletive for emphasis.
Imagine the proudest day of your life being the time a draft-dodging sex criminal praised you for supporting impunity and injustice.
One of the pardoned soldiers was First Lt. Clint Lorance, who was turned in by his own troops after he ordered them to fire on unarmed Afghans over 100 yards away from his platoon, killing them. The soldier then radioed a false report claiming the bodies had been removed and couldn’t be searched for weapons.
The Army convicted Lieutenant Lorance of second-degree murder and other charges and sentenced him to 19 years in prison. To Mr. Hegseth, the pardon Lieutenant Lorance received represented justice. U.S. troops engaged in battle need to be “the most ruthless, the most uncompromising, the most overwhelming lethal” force on the battlefield, Mr. Hegseth wrote last year.
“Our troops will make mistakes,” he continued, “and when they do, they should get the overwhelming benefit of the doubt.”
Jaffe gives Hegseth the last (lying) word here, uncritically vomiting up “mistakes” at the end of the story to give it the spotlight, despite reporting right before it that the soldiers with Lorance turned him in because he told them to commit a crime. That’s not a mistake. That’s murder. “Overwhelming benefit of the doubt” is code for “stack the deck until we’re above the law.”
Senior Army lawyers strongly disagreed with the decision to pardon Lieutenant Lorance, according to Pentagon officials. Among those most upset by the presidential pardon were the troops who served under him and made the difficult decision to accuse him of war crimes and testify at trial.
The Lorance story alone makes clear Hegseth is uniquely unqualified to have any kind of involvement with honor, soldiers or lawyers. He’s dishonorable, his actions reflect the soldier-hating of his overlord, and someone who pays $50,000 to make a sex assault charge disappear has no business judging any part of the justice system.
“I thought of the Army as this altruistic thing,” Lucas Gray, who served under Lieutenant Lorance in Afghanistan, told The Washington Post. “I thought it was perfect and honorable. It pains me to tell you how stupid and naive I was.”
“The Lorance stuff just broke my faith,” he said, adding: “And once you lose your values and your faith, the Army is just another job you hate.”
The least qualified Defense Secretary of all-time is enshittifying the military. Ironic, yes, but par for the course for this funhouse mirror nightmare gang.