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Showing posts with label American international war crimes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American international war crimes. Show all posts
SO fascist fotze trunt petie lola hegseth is a deceiver, manipulator, misleading, bald-faced liar. Gee, considering NOT MY pres drumpf / trump is a narcissistic compulsive bald-faced liar and to be a member of his administration, a member of the gop / greed over people-republican party or a magat cultist you have to be a neo-nazi fascist fotze trunt and as well as an arschlecker to boot! This from TAG24.....
"Pete is not speaking truth to the president," one White House official told the Washington Post under the condition of anonymity. "As a result, the president is out there repeating misleading information."
Hegseth has repeatedly claimed that the US has complete control over the airspace and that Iran has "no air defenses" and can do nothing about US and Israeli attacks.
The official pointed to the weekend downing of an F-15E fighter jet and an A-10 warthog by Iran as an indication that such claims betray a fundamental misunderstanding of the US and Israel's domination of Iranian airspace.
While speaking with the Post, military analyst Kelly Grieco pointed to this reality as an example of what happens "when you have air superiority but don't have air supremacy."
This misunderstanding and distortion of the truth has reportedly been rubbing off on Trump, who has been known to repeat statistics and claims previously touted by Hegseth.
"We've decimated them as a military. No Air Force, no Navy, very few rockets left," Trump said during a March 26 cabinet meeting, echoing similar bombastic statements made by the Pentagon chief. "We blew up so many."
According to a Wall Street Journal report last week, Hegseth has been drip-feeding Trump short videos of airstrikes on Iranian targets in an attempt to convince the president that the US is about to achieve a mighty victory.
New: Pete Hegseth's triumphant portrayal of the conflict in Iran has alarmed U.S. officials who are concerned the statistics he often promotes are misinforming both the public and the president
EVERYBODY lies ( except maybe the Pope, but he is human... ). NOT MY pres drumpf / trump, NOT MY vp vance, Sec of State fascist fotze trunt little marco rubio and Sec of Defense fascist fotze trunt petie lola hegseth are compulsive liars and their volume of lies, deception, misrepresentation, manipulation and Orwellian propaganda rivals what goebbels ( reincarnated as fascist fotze trunt stevie miller ), hitler, stalin, mao, putin and netanyahu spewed. We will be eternally grateful to the true Fact Checkers for the work they do and share. This from PolitiFact.....
On Feb. 28, the world learned that the United States and Israel had launched wide-ranging attacks on Iranian military and leadership targets. Tensions between the U.S. and Iran had been building for weeks, and prior to that, for decades. But the specific timing and the broad sweep of the military campaign caught many people off guard.
At such a tense moment, fact-checking is crucial. PolitiFact and other fact-checking outlets around the world, including Agence France-Presse, Germany’s Deutsche Welle, Iran’sFactnameh, India’s BOOM, and Israel’s Globes' Whistle, jumped in.
On the war’s first day, PolitiFact investigated whether President Donald Trump was right when he said Iran could "soon" have missiles capable of reaching the U.S. Trump contradicted a 2025 federal government assessment that said such capabilities are years away. In short order, we looked at what the war might mean for petroleum markets (nothinggood) and whether the U.S. had a "virtually unlimited supply" of munitions to fight the war. (It varies by type.) And we delved into misleadingsocialmediaposts, some of them using artificial intelligence, and offered advice on how not to get fooled by war fabrications online.
Trump asserted multiple times in mid-March that U.S. and Israeli strikes had already "destroyed 100% of Iran’s military capability." We concluded that although data showed that the U.S. had weakened Iran’s military capabilities, Iran was continuing to fire missiles and drones at its neighbors and U.S. military sites.
Determining the truth of something happening under classified conditions on the other side of the world is not easy, and fact-checkers’ assessments inevitably require caveats about what we don’t know. But PolitiFact and other fact-checking outlets know how to use the resources that do exist, including data and the assessments of experts we’ve found to be trustworthy. We value transparency — not anonymous sources, who may have an agenda — and we value fairness, including reaching out to whoever is making the claim, including the Trump White House.
On International Fact-Checking Day, April 2, we’re reflecting on our mission of holding powerful politicians to account, and of cutting through the clutter to provide our readers with a better understanding of often overwhelming news developments from across the globe.
The Iran war is an example of why the tradition of open-minded but clear-eyed fact-checking that PolitiFact and its colleagues around the world is needed every day.
Here are three political themes over the past year in which PolitiFact identified an immediate need for clarity, and sought to provide it. Each topic inspired public confusion on a matter of high import: war, democracy and the global economy.
A video broadcast on Iranian state television shows trucks outside the Fordo nuclear facility in Iran on Aug. 29, 2016. (Via AP)
The 2025 U.S. airstrike on Iranian nuclear facilities
After the United States attacked three Iranian nuclear sites on June 21, 2025, Trump said that "Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated."
Trump’s comment immediately caught our eye because battle damage assessments take time to produce — and because Trump’s certitude contrasted with more measured assessments from Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Israeli militaryofficials. So we jumped into action.
As Trump doubled and tripled down on his "obliterated" characterization, we published an extensively reported article that exposed uncertainty in Trump’s analysis. We concluded that Trump’s arrival at such certitude, so quickly, was questionable.
Assessing the results of a bombing raid begins with the use of overhead surveillance, from satellites and sometimes from drones, military experts told us. Reports from the participating pilots can also be valuable, although they might be hampered by high altitude and darkness.
In the case of the Iran strikes, the targets were located hundreds of feet underground and would not be visible on satellite imagery. Unless military forces or spies were on the ground, the U.S. would have to surveil conversations by Iranian officials or lower-level workers at the sites, or be fed information by Iranians working with U.S. intelligence. A completed assessment is also not as definitive as Trump’s "obliterated"; it is usually offered on a spectrum with a specific level of confidence — either high, low or somewhere in between.
Making these judgments is a painstakingly time-consuming process, requiring much more time than Trump would have had before making his initial statement shortly after the mission was completed.
In the nine months since that strike, a bit more information has become public about the 2025 strike, but little additional certainty, even though Trump continues to use such maximalist phrasing.
A voter works on her ballot at a polling place at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024, in Simi Valley, Calif. (AP)
What’s the truth about a proposed rewrite of election law?
In the Trump era, he and his supporters have regularly questioned the legitimacy of the voting process. The audacity of these claims has led our readers to care a lot about the discussion over preserving democratic norms around voting. Our most-clicked 2025 fact-check concerned how married women who take their spouse’s name would be affected by a proposed law backed by Trump and his allies.
That debate and reader interest continued in 2026.
Having argued for years that he lost the 2020 election because it was "rigged" — even though it wasn’t — Trump has sought to curb practices like voting by mail and require voters to present documentation of their citizenship status before registering to vote. Verifying citizenship is commonly practiced across the world, experts say, but many countries have national ID cards, often mandatory and at no cost. That’s not the case in the U.S.
As lawmakers have been debating the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (or SAVE America) Act, we’ve published numerous fact-checks of claims for and against the legislation. The mixed Truth-O-Meter ratings underscore another truth about fact-checking: Rhetoric is rarely black and white.
We also fact-checked Trump’s statement that "mail-in voting means mail-in cheating." That earned a Pants on Fire.
Gas prices are displayed at a station March 24, 2026, in Chicago. (AP)
How could the Iran war affect gasoline prices?
Crude oil prices, and the prices for many other commodities, have soared after Iran threatened tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. Hardly any country has been immune. Amid widespread U.S. voter concern about high consumer prices — an issue that may have done more than anything to propel Trump back into the Oval Office in 2024 — few price increases hit consumers everywhere harder than prices at the gasoline pump.
The international market for oil is confusing and sometimes counterintuitive. For instance, the release of oil from underground stockpiles or increased Venezuelan production may not do much to lower gasoline prices for Americans. And higher output from U.S. oil producers may not be able to keep prices down.
In a March 12 Fox News interview, Energy Secretary Chris Wright downplayed the impact of stalled tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. "The United States — we produce more oil than we can consume. We’re a net oil exporter," Wright said.
Wright’s comment was misleading.
The U.S. does produce a lot of crude oil, but it’s not a net exporter of crude oil on its own — and it’s not clear that the U.S. could meet its own consumption needs without also buying some oil from other countries.
The reason for this is a refinery mismatch — something the average reader may not know, but which an energy secretary should. The U.S. doesn’t have enough refinery capacity to make gasoline out of all the oil it produces domestically, so it exports some of the type of oil it can’t refine and imports some of the kind of oil that can be refined here. This makes the U.S. dependent for at least some of its oil on the international market, where the Strait of Hormuz blockage is pushing prices higher.
Once again, it was a case where we heard something our leaders were saying that raised our eyebrows. And if that’s the case, we think our readers will benefit from a deep, dispassionate investigation — especially at a time in which every day brings urgent news developments.
That’s what keeps us motivated to go into work every day.
Louis Jacobson is PolitiFact’s chief correspondent. A longtime Washington journalist, he joined PolitiFact in 2009. Reach him at ljacobson@poynter.org
SEETHING? Is that enough for congressional Democrats to take action to hold NOT MY pres drumpf / trump responsible and if that is stopped by the gop / greed over people-republican party controlled congress then use their abdication of authority and responsibility to win back the House and Senate. Democratic Party leadership, if you do not have the courage and strength to take on they illegal authoritarian actions of the fascist drumpf / trump-vance administration and to take us to victory in the midterms get out of the way because there are Democrats that can lead us to victory! Reps Omar, Jefferies, Moulton & Vasquez, Sens Sanders, Kaine, Kim, Gallego & Kelly are just a few of the congressional Democrats not intimidated by drumpf / trump-vance. Schumer, go ahead and continue wasting your time talking with gang of eight republicans who have no intention of doing anything to stop drumpf's / trump's illegal and immoral military aggression, maybe you can hold l graham's hand while shesh clutches pearls and squeals quotes from project 2025. Check out
Democrats are furious over President Donald Trump’s plans for Venezuela.
The president’s latest show of force on the world stage, which Trump says saw the U.S. military capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, quickly united both party leaders and rank-and-file lawmakers behind one message: The White House illegally bypassed Congress and appears woefully underprepared for the aftermath of the surprise military operation.
The top Democratic congressional leaders each released statements lambasting Trump after he revealed at a Mar-a-Lago news conference Saturday that the administration plans to run Venezuela for an undetermined amount of time.
“The administration has assured me three separate times that it was not pursuing regime change or taking military action in Venezuela,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said. “Clearly, they are not being straight with Americans. The idea that Trump plans to now run Venezuela should strike fear in the hearts of all Americans. The American people have seen this before and paid the devastating price.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was even more explicit in drawing parallels to recent U.S. efforts at regime change that were costly in both taxpayer dollars and American lives.
“The promotion of security and stability in a region requires more than just military force as we painfully discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said.
Trump announced the strike in an early morning post on Truth Social Saturday, touching off a wave of praise from ideologically aligned members of his party. But while Democrats were largely careful not to defend Maduro, they had quick criticism for how Trump had secretly orchestrated the strike.
The Gang of Eight, which includes senior congressional leaders and top members of the House and Senate Intelligence committees, was notified of the operation only after it had been launched, according to a person with direct knowledge granted anonymity to discuss private outreach.
While several Republican lawmakers said Saturday they had been personally briefed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, few if any Democrats appear to have gotten that courtesy.
Schumer told reporters Saturday afternoon he still had not been briefed by the administration. In a separate joint statement, Schumer and Jeffries requested a Gang of Eight briefing as soon as Saturday, as well as a briefing for a wider group of lawmakers early next week.
Trump defended the administration’s tight lips in his news conference, telling reporters that “Congress has a tendency to leak.”
“This would not be good,” he added. “If they leaked … I think this would be a very different result.”
But Schumer called that an “excuse for secrecy” that is “outrageous” and “dangerous.” Schumer said Saturday that he is already strategizing with top committee Democrats about what steps they could take to “hold the administration accountable.” House Democrats are scheduled to hold an emergency caucus meeting Sunday, according to an invitation sent to members.
“Some of the Republican chairs, at least privately on the phone … have expressed a lot of troublesome comments about what Trump is doing and the way he is doing it, and those discussions will continue,” Schumer said, relaying private conversations between Democrats he had spoken to and the GOP chairs.
Well before the top Democratic congressional leaders spoke out, rank-and-file lawmakers took the lead in angrily denouncing Trump’s decision to topple a foreign leader by military force without asking lawmakers for authorization first.
“Congress did not authorize this war,” Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) wrote on X. “Venezuela posed no imminent threat to the United States. This is reckless, elective regime change risking American lives (Iraq 2.0) with no plan for the day after. Wars cost more than trophies.”
Congress has not authorized military action against Venezuela, and lawmakers have been split for months on the legality of the Trump administration’s strikes against suspected drug smuggling vessels in the waters off Latin America and a potential move to oust Maduro. Republicans have fended off several Democratic-led efforts to require Trump to seek approval from Congress before attacking Venezuela.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, announced Saturday he would again force the chamber to vote on his effort to constrain Trump’s war powers next week.
“It’s time for Congress to get its ass off the couch and do what the Constitution mandates that we do,” Kaine told reporters during a call Saturday. “What we’ve seen is members of Congress who, frankly, lack the guts, lack the backbone, lack the courage to have that debate, and they’ve been willing to allow an increasingly declining and erratic president to make these decisions without them.”
In addition to the war powers vote, Kaine raised the possibility that an upcoming government funding deadline could offer further leverage. Democrats, he said, would “press for a vote” to prohibit expenditures on military actions concerning Venezuela without congressional approval.
Schumer, however, didn’t draw a red line on the spending fight, saying the immediate focus was on getting briefings and a war powers vote: “Let’s first get all the facts out,” he said.
In addition to criticizing the murky legal justification for the operation, several Democrats said the move is an about-face for administration officials who they said argued regime change wasn’t the end goal of the administration’s aggressive military campaign in Latin America.
“Secretaries Rubio and [Pete] Hegseth looked every Senator in the eye a few weeks ago and said this wasn’t about regime change. I didn’t trust them then and we see now that they blatantly lied to Congress,” Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) said on X. “Trump rejected our Constitutionally required approval process for armed conflict because the Administration knows the American people overwhelmingly reject risks pulling our nation into another war.”
Meanwhile, Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), a combat veteran who deployed to Iraq as an infantryman in 2005, wrote on X Saturday that “the American people did not ask for this.”
And he wondered aloud about what comes next for the South American country, asking on X, “so who is in charge of Venezuela now?”
A December Quinnipiac poll found that Americans overwhelmingly oppose military action against Venezuela, with just 25 percent of respondents saying they supported an intervention inside the country. Even the White House’s strategy of targeting boats with alleged drug traffickers proved broadly unpopular.
“I fought in some of the hardest battles of the Iraq War,” Gallego wrote. “Saw my brothers die, saw civilians being caught in the crossfire all for an unjustified war. No matter the outcome we are in the wrong for starting this war in Venezuela.”
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), who is a co-chair of the Congressional Venezuela Democracy Caucus and represents a significant population of Venezuelan immigrants in South Florida, signaled agreement with the move to oust Maduro. She called his capture “welcome news” for Venezuela but argued Trump should have involved Congress before conducting the attack.
“The absence of congressional involvement prior to this action risks the continuation of the illegitimate Venezuelan regime,” Wasserman Schultz said in a statement.
Other Democrats voiced stronger opposition to the administration’s military moves.
“Millions of Americans voted in the last Presidential election to end frivolous conflicts and unnecessary foreign wars,” said Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D-N.M.), an Armed Services Committee member, in a statement. “This escalation of hostilities against Venezuela and the capture of a foreign leader without congressional authorization goes against the will of the Americans who put the president in power.”
“I want the people of Venezuela to be free to choose their own future, but if we learned anything from the Iraq war, it’s that dropping bombs or toppling a leader doesn’t guarantee democracy, stability, or make Americans safer,” he wrote in a statement. “More often, it leads to chaos or drags the U.S. into a war and lengthy occupation. I don’t trust that this administration has a plan, timeline, or price tag for what comes next.”
But haw
kish GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina offered a rejoinder on X to critics of the operation who are “focus[ed] on absurd ‘legal’ theories” and “virtually AWOL for the cause of freedom.”
“To the pathetically weak and hand wringing liberal Democrats who seem to be okay with a perpetual drug caliphate in our backyard, the centerpiece of which is Venezuela,” he wrote, “Get a grip.”
