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pete hegseth
House Progressives Demand Pentagon Answer for Alleged Abuse in US-Ecuador Operation
"The United States cannot continue to be complicit in abuses abroad. There must be accountability," said Rep. Chuy García, who co-led a letter to the Pentagon.
May 13, 2026
Backed by anti-war and human rights organizations, 20 "deeply concerned" progressives in the US House of Representatives sent a letter to the Pentagon on Wednesday demanding answers about "reports of serious human rights violations and the bombing of what appear to have been civilian facilities during joint US-Ecuador military operations conducted in northern Ecuador."
While bombing Iran and boats allegedly running illegal drugs through the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, President Donald Trump deployed US troops to Ecuador in March for a joint campaign combating "narco-terrorists" in the South American country.
Led by Democratic Reps. Greg Casar (Texas), Jesús "Chuy" García (Ill.), and Sara Jacobs (Calif.), the lawmakers called for "an explanation of the administration's legal justification for the involvement of US armed forces in these operations, which have not been authorized by Congress," as well as their immediate suspension "until these incidents are fully investigated."
The Democrats' letter to US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth cites reporting that one target "appears to have been a civilian dairy and cattle farm with no known links to armed groups or drug trafficking," where witnesses said "Ecuadorian military personnel interrogated and assaulted unarmed civilians, burned homes and infrastructure, and subjected detainees to torture."
"Beyond these recent incidents, we are concerned that our military is deepening its ties with the government of Ecuador, even as it undergoes an alarming authoritarian and anti-democratic drift," the Democrats wrote, pointing out that "President Daniel Noboa has overseen the violent repression of Indigenous-led protests, publicly threatened the Constitutional Court, and frozen the bank accounts of civil society organizations."
Noboa's allies "have also pursued questionable cases against his political opponents," as "Ecuadorians have endured more than two years of a prolonged state of emergency, marked by the military's domestic deployment to combat so-called 'narco-terrorists," the letter continues. "With investigative reporting now linking President Noboa's family business to drug trafficking and the same illicit networks he claims to be fighting, an independent and transparent investigation into these allegations is warranted."
The letter stresses that "if US forces provide new or continued security assistance to units that engaged in acts such as torture, extrajudicial killings, or enforced disappearances, and there is no credible investigation or prosecution underway, this would constitute a violation of the Leahy Laws, which prohibit assistance to foreign security forces credibly implicated in gross human rights violations without effective steps to bring those responsible to justice."
The Democrats—supported by Amnesty International USA, Center for Civilians in Conflict, Center for Economic and Policy Research, Friends Committee on National Legislation, Human Rights First, Latin American Working Group, Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, StoptheDrugWar.org, Washington Office on Latin America, and Win Without War—demanded "a prompt and complete response" to their list of questions by May 22.
"The United States cannot continue to be complicit in abuses abroad. There must be accountability," García said on social media.
As El País reported Wednesday, the letter was made public as Noboa began a two-day trip to Washington, DC, during which he is set to meeting with US Vice President JD Vance and Organization of American States Secretary General Albert Ramdin.
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Trump Cries 'Virtual Treason' as US News Outlets Detail Iran War Intel Assessments
New reporting on classified US intelligence findings undercuts the Trump administration's repeated claims that it has obliterated Iran militarily.
May 13, 2026
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday accused news outlets of committing "virtual treason" by reporting on classified American intelligence agency assessments showing that Iran has retained significant missile capabilities, contradicting triumphant White House claims that the Middle East country's forces have been utterly decimated.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that the Trump administration's "public portrayal of a shattered Iranian military is sharply at odds with what US intelligence agencies are telling policymakers behind closed doors, according to classified assessments from early this month that show Iran has regained access to most of its missile sites, launchers, and underground facilities."
"Most alarming to some senior officials is evidence that Iran has restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it maintains along the Strait of Hormuz, which could threaten American warships and oil tankers transiting the narrow waterway," the newspaper added.
The Times reporting came on the heels of a Washington Post story last week detailing "a confidential CIA analysis delivered to administration policymakers" concluding that Iran "can survive the US naval blockade for at least three to four months before facing more severe economic hardship."
The Post also reported that the US intelligence community "found that Tehran retains significant ballistic missile capabilities despite weeks of intense US and Israeli bombardment."
"Iran retains about 75% of its prewar inventories of mobile launchers and about 70% of its prewar stockpiles of missiles," according to the Post, which cited an unnamed US official. "The official said there is evidence that the regime has been able to recover and reopen almost all of its underground storage facilities, repair some damaged missiles, and even assemble some new missiles that were nearly complete when the war began."
In a Truth Social post late Tuesday afternoon, Trump—who has claimed that Iran has "nothing left in a military sense"—fumed that "when the Fake News says that the Iranian enemy is doing well, Militarily, against us, it’s virtual TREASON in that it is such a false, and even preposterous, statement."
"They are aiding and abetting the enemy!" the president continued, declaring that Iran has "no Navy, their Air Force is gone, all Technology is gone, their 'leaders' are no longer with us, and the Country is an Economic Disaster."
On top of intelligence assessments showing that Iran has maintained substantial military capabilities in the face of the US-Israeli onslaught, reports indicate that Iran has inflicted more damage on American military bases and other equipment than the Trump administration has publicly disclosed.
"American military bases and other equipment in the Persian Gulf region suffered extensive damage from Iranian strikes that is far worse than publicly acknowledged and is expected to cost billions of dollars to repair," NBC News reported late last month, citing three unnamed US officials, two congressional aides, and another person familiar with the damage.
A recent Washington Post analysis of satellite imagery found that "Iranian airstrikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at US military sites across the Middle East since the war began, hitting hangars, barracks, fuel depots, aircraft, and key radar, communications, and air defense equipment," an amount of destruction "far larger than what has been publicly acknowledged by the US government."
Phil Gordon, a foreign policy scholar at the Brookings Institution, wrote Wednesday that, "10 weeks in, the strategic failure is undeniable" for the Trump administration in Iran.
"The risk now is that having missed the opportunity to declare victory after the first few weeks, Trump can't accept defeat and humiliation so will keep looking for the next quick fix, thereby likely only making things worse," Gordon warned.
The Trump administration has lashed out publicly at news outlets for reporting on assessments that run counter to the Pentagon's rosy narrative of the illegal war's trajectory. Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon secretary, has condemned American media outlets as "unpatriotic" and warned reporters to "think twice" before publishing classified information.
Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal revealed that the US Justice Department subpoenaed the newspaper's journalists in March for records related to coverage of the Iran war.
“This is the latest attack in the Trump administration’s war on press freedom," Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said in response to news of the subpoenas. "Time and again, the administration has shown itself willing to disregard the First Amendment and long-standing limits on the use of government power to go after news outlets that publish embarrassing or critical information about the government."
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Economist: Don't Listen to Hegseth, Trump's Iran War Will Cost 'Very Possibly Trillions'
"War is hell. And hell comes with a hefty price tag," said University of Michigan professor Justin Wolfers.
May 08, 2026
University of Michigan professor Justin Wolfers on Friday joined a growing number of economists and other critics casting down on what he called "the Pentagon's lowball $25 billion estimate" for the cost of President Donald Trump's illegal war on Iran.
While testifying before Congress last week alongside US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Pentagon comptroller Jules "Jay" Hurst offered the $25 billion figure. However, experts have responded with raised eyebrows. Stephen Semler, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, estimated that the government spent at least $71.8 billion during the first two months of the war, or around $1.2 billion each day.
Although Trump told Congress last Friday—a key deadline under the War Powers Act—that his assault on Iran had been "terminated," citing the ceasefire deal reached a month ago after his genocidal threat, the administration has maintained its naval blockade and on Thursday bombed what it claimed were "Iranian military facilities responsible for attacking US forces."
The cost isn't just measured in billions of taxpayer dollars spent on a war that doesn't make us safer. It's measured in economic losses such as high prices working families see at the gas pump. The human toll can't be ignored. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/o...
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— Randi Weingarten 🖇️📚✊🇺🇸 (@rweingarten.bsky.social) May 8, 2026 at 2:41 PM
As the threat of more US bombings of Iran loomed, Wolfers wrote Friday in a New York Times opinion piece that "the Pentagon's stated number reflects only a narrow accounting of the tab that Operation Epic Fury is running up. It's the price of the more than 2,000 Tomahawk and Patriot missiles already fired, the warplanes already flown and in some cases lost, and the rest of the gear already chewed through. It does not measure the true cost of the war—including the human toll."
"Since the start of the war, oil markets have been disrupted, consumer confidence has cratered, the global economy is groaning, and military budgets are growing," the economist continued. "The toll from this upheaval must be counted in lives disrupted, jobs lost, companies shut down (see: Spirit Airlines), and the income and output sacrificed. The less easily quantified costs—death, disability, and mental health—could become much more dramatic should President Trump send troops into Iran, which still can't be ruled out."
As David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, detailed Friday, the war seemingly hasn't achieved any of Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's shifting objectives:
The US and Israel said they wanted to eradicate Iran's nuclear program and change its regime. The regime is now composed of more hard-liners than before, and Iran's nuclear capability has not budged since last summer. Now the two sides are negotiating the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before the conflict, and the terms of Iran's nuclear program, which they were negotiating before the conflict. Moreover, the compromise being contemplated involves Iran pausing uranium enrichment in exchange for the US lifting sanctions and unfreezing Iranian funds. That sounds suspiciously like the deal President Obama struck in 2015 that Trump ripped up when he took office, complete with the "bags of cash" sent to Iran that Trump flipped out over back then.
All this war has done is killed thousands of people, opened a new front for Israel in Lebanon, damaged most US military sites and most energy production facilities in the region, led to oil spills that are visible from space, created a shipping bottleneck that will take at least a year to fix, raised domestic gas prices to a record for this time of year, cost American consumers $34.3 billion and counting, ended the life of one US airline with more likely to come, and led us down an imminent path to physical shortages of critical commodities like oil, including in the United States.
I have never in my life seen a war that achieved literally none of its objectives while directly causing this many devastating costs, and I lived through Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that the Central Intelligence Agency has privately warned the Trump administration that "Iran can survive the US naval blockade for at least three to four months before facing more severe economic hardship," and its "analysis might even be underestimating Iran's economic resilience if Tehran is able to smuggle oil via overland routes."
The reporting heightened concerns about how long the war may drag on. The International Monetary Fund warned last month that a prolonged conflict could cause a global recession.
Already, the war has "pushed the Federal Reserve Bank into a corner," and "Wall Street is worried, despite the market touching new highs," Wolfers wrote Friday. "My estimate—based on the movement of oil prices, along with the S&P 500—is that stocks are about 5% lower than they otherwise would be, suggesting that the war has wiped about $3 trillion off the value of these companies."
The economist also cited recent research showing that elevated "geopolitical risk leads to lower investment and employment."
Shortly after launching the war in February, the White House signaled it would need $200 billion for the operation. However, it is now seeking a $1.5 trillion defense budget for the next fiscal year—which Hegseth tried to frame as a fiscally responsible plan that puts "the American taxpayer first" in a widely ridiculed video this week. Wolfers highlighted that the budget request is "a roughly 40% boost over this year. That's a massive $600 billion increase, or roughly $4,000 per household."
Like Dayen, Wolfers also pointed to the Iraq War, which economists Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz estimated cost the US around $3 trillion, after factoring in expenses such as "lifetime medical care and disability benefits for veterans, and the higher recruitment and retention costs that follow a bloody war—all compounded by a rising interest bill."
"The best any economist can do right now is get the order of magnitude right, and my math suggests the Iran war will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and very possibly trillions," Wolfers concluded. "War is hell. And hell comes with a hefty price tag."
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