#eoir — Public Fediverse posts

#Trump Fired 2 Judges After They Blocked #Deportations of #Palestinian #HumanRights Activist Students

The #immigration judges’ abrupt dismissals marked the latest efforts by the Trump admin to reshape the country’s immigration courts & to interfere with the #independence of the judicial process.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/11/us/politics/immigration-judges-deportations-students.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Alt Text for Pete Hegseth’s November 1st Boat Strike Video

Like many of the boat strike videos posted to social media by Trump, Hegseth, and the White House, the video of the attack conducted in the Caribbean on November 1st was edited and heavily redacted before its release. Like the other videos, it masquerades as “unclassified” public disclosure, but it discloses almost nothing at all.

We are being asked to rely on the stories Hegseth and other administration figures tell when they post these videos on social media. These accounts have been a problem for me since I first started looking at these boat strike videos — not because I am an expert in military affairs, or South American drug trafficking, but because I can claim some expertise when it comes to the make-believe work of telling stories on video or film.

Moving through these videos shot by shot, and sometimes frame by frame, shows Hegseth to be, at best, an unreliable narrator. (The fancy term for this is proven liar, or, in American idiom, Fox News host.) So, since I’m on a slow New Jersey Transit train with some time on my hands, I thought I’d try a description of my own, and offer alt text for the November 1st video.

The first (low-res, highly pixelated. black and white) shot shows the point of view of the attacker, already in position over the boat. We can make out the wake of the boat, but the vessel itself, the purported target of the strike, is fully redacted. So is the EO/IR interface, and so are any location coordinates. The attacker can see things we can’t.

While it lasts a full six seconds and would seem intended to set the scene, situate the viewer, and show drug smugglers in flagrante delicto, this first shot does nothing of the sort. There is no approach or discovery, no reveal, no new intelligence; the decision to strike has already been taken.

In other words, any visual evidence arguing for the strike, any proof that these are, in fact, the bad guys, the “narcoterrorists,” is being withheld, or perhaps can’t be produced. (And even if these were the bad guys or, what’s more likely, a few desperate mules working for the bad guys,* intercepting the boat would make a lot more sense in terms of interdiction and carry the added benefit of not violating international law.) As Representative Adam Smith remarked after an Armed Services briefing, the Pentagon is “telling us is you need less evidence to kill somebody than you do to hold them.”

Then at 00:16:15, two munitions or pieces of ordnance fall from the sky and strike the redacted target. The blast radiates out from the center, but only for a single frame.

Everything goes white, for three frames. The redactions are the only features we can make out against the white.

In the (infrared) shot of the explosion that follows — the one that looks like a camera negative — the camera begins to move off the annihilated target. This shot runs nearly three seconds, from 00:06:17 to 00:09:20, revealing a black sea.

Then something curious happens. At 9 seconds (00:09:21, to be precise), the video returns to the blown-out, hot-white, three-frame post-strike moment shown at 00:06:14.

It’s a rewind of the narrative.

The final shot is a re-telling, an instant replay, a photo-realistic, searchlight-on-the-water view of the strike’s aftermath. It lasts seven seconds. Four seconds longer than the first telling. It’s repetition with a difference.

What’s the difference? In this second version, the camera moves off the annihilated target, as it does at 00:06-00:09, but then reveals that move to have been a mere feint. The camera drops back to show flames and columns of thick smoke rising from the sea.

At 00:14, we regain some orientation, with the reveal of the [N] or North marker. There are about a dozen redacted areas in these frames, but the extra four seconds make a distinct impression.

The impression is of report from a war zone, a helicopter pulling away from a sea strewn with burning wreckage. It’s an image deeply ingrained in the American psyche. The Ride of the Valkyries. But Wagner would be all out of proportion to what we’re seeing. It’s not just that the image is degraded. We might expect that from a war zone. It’s that we’re not in a war zone at all.

There is no threat of attack or counterattack. No enemy fleet. No other boats rushing to the aid of the vessel under attack. Instead, the world’s most powerful military, funded by $900 billion in taxpayer dollars, the erstwhile leader of the historic NATO alliance, is using state-of -the-art technology and sophisticated American firepower to target small, individual vessels off the South American coast and kill whomever happens to be on board.

“No country should go to war so that the leader’s inner circle can make Tiktoks,” quipped Tom Pepinsky this morning. But it looks as if that’s what’s about to happen. Hegseth’s conduct online — and off, if he’s ever offline — carries real risks, as military, legal, and policy experts are warning.

(On this point, I recommend reading Pepinsky’s article published today on East Asia Forum. And Elizabeth N. Saunders’ new piece on Venezuela that’s up today on Good Authority, where she observes that Hegseth is the embodiment of “incompetent risk.”)

It’s shabby and undisciplined conduct. It discredits the office of the Secretary of Defense, illustrating only the smallness of the man, his moral depravity, the dereliction of Southern Command and the international humiliation of the United States on his watch.

*As this 7 November 2025 AP report on the victims of the September strikes would seem to confirm.

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All the Boat Strike Videos, To Date, in Chronological Order

https://youtu.be/ahyptlMah7w

In my last couple of posts (here and here), I’ve been trying to look closely at some of the latest boat strike videos, call out some of their features, and discuss the information they offer as well as the information they withhold.

It might also be helpful to look at all the boat strike videos in a single chronological sequence. So, using the Associated Press timeline of the strikes, and the media downloader at xdownloader.org, I’ve assembled all the boat strike videos into a single sequence. The work here is quick and dirty: the videos are not gussied up (and are best watched in full screen mode); the only thing I’ve done is add a date before each video. I’ve tried to stick with the date of the strike; sometimes videos are posted a day later.

I put this sequence together for myself because I couldn’t find it elsewhere. I thought it might help me see patterns and make some new sense of these videos. I’m sharing it here on the chance others might find it useful.

I’ve seen a few TV news clips reporting the boat strikes that use the videos posted by Hegseth, Trump, and the White House as b-roll: videos from September are used to report a strike in late October, or the boat strike footage is assembled into a kind of montage, the strikes and locations conflated, one strike standing in for all of them, boats moving through the water, boats targeted, boats blown up, while the anchor introduces or interviews a guest. The strike videos themselves become part of the backdrop, or just background noise; the punditry gets foregrounded.

I get it. This approach allows people on TV to generalize about the strikes, which they should do. The strikes are illegal and immoral, degrading and corrupting; they bring the “war on terror” and its atrocities to our own hemisphere; they re-allocate forces and resources, altering the risk landscape; they are an international outrage. The strikes can be understood as part of a larger political project, a “primacist” project championed by Marco Rubio, which uses drug-trafficking as a pretext for belligerence.

The boat attack videos promote this project while serving other propagandistic functions as well. They tick the adolescent edgelord box that everyone in this administration seems desperate to tick, and which is apparently part of the warrior ethos Hegseth touts. They misrepresent lawlessness as law enforcement, as ICE does in its own videos promoting kidnapping and other abuses, and allow powerful people to boast of their own impunity. They masquerade as (“unclassified”) public disclosure, even as the administration stonewalls Congress and keeps the military lawyers out of the hearing room.

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How the Boat Strike Videos Dehumanize and Gamify Murder

The latest boat strike video shows US military attacks on four boats in the Eastern Pacific. The strikes killed 14 people and left one survivor, who is, according to Pete Hegseth, now in the hands of Mexican authorities.*

Edited together to show three strikes in different locations, these videos have many of the features called out in my first post on this topic: they are marked unclassified (all caps, in green letters set against a black matte or background); they are standard definition, low resolution, blurry and pixelated (the download from X is 568X320); features of the EO/IR interfaces and geolocation are redacted. On a strictly technical basis, they are information deficient — and deliberately so, I think it’s fair to say.

There is also a consistent pattern to the storytelling here. The videos go from black and white to color after each strike, at 00:07, 00:15, and 00:24. The target comes into focus through the black and white EO/IR interface, the strike is executed, then the videos cut abruptly to a more realistic color perspective on the burning vessels. The color frames offer a little more in the way of information, not about the boats, the people on them, or their cargo. They show us their obliteration.

In the first strike shown here, crew appear to be transferring cargo or gear of some kind from one boat to another when the boats are hit. Hegseth claims there were eight people aboard these two boats, but it’s hard to make out more than a few. In the second and third strikes shown here, the human figures are also hard to discern, but Hegseth claims there were four aboard the boat shown at 00:10-00:18, and three aboard the last boat shown, starting at 00:19.

It’s possible that crew members (in red) are visible fore and aft at 00:15, and one of them after the strike, at 00;17, but I am not at all confident about that. If I had to guess, I would say that the survivor in Mexican custody comes from this second strike. Notice that the boat continues to travel even after the strike, in the color frames from 00:15-00:17. Did the strike fail to neutralize this vessel? Any doubts are addressed by the black and white frames that follow at 00:17-00:18, which reduce the burning boat to a hot white flash on the water.

Just before the third strike, at around 00:21, a crew member appears to come partially into view.

In any case, the human figures aboard these boats are presented as objects of the strike, not as subjects in their own right or characters who are the focus of the story. Hegseth calls them “narcoterrorists”; for all intents and purposes they are what gamers might refer to as “mobs,” on-screen enemies to be tracked, targeted, and killed.

That may sound obvious, but I think it’s worth pointing out. It’s yet another way in which these boat strike videos are both information- and morally-deficient, a degraded and degrading spectacle. The aim is not to inform the public. It is to dehumanize the victims and gamify murder.

* Correction 29 October 2025: Mexican authorities now say that they did not manage to rescue this person.

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