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'Cowardly and Despicable': Hegseth Condemned for Sinking of ‘Defenseless’ Iranian Ship
"If the United States is at war, then Pete Hegseth is a war criminal. If the United States is not at war, then Pete Hegseth is a murderer."
Mar 05, 2026
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday was condemned for his boasts on Wednesday about sinking an Iranian military ship after allegations emerged that it was "defenseless" at the time it was torpedoed in international waters by a US submarine.
Military.com reported Thursday that the Iranian ship had been departing from a biennial multinational naval training exercise that it had been invited to participate in by the Indian government.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has so far remained silent on the US attack on the ship, but other politicians in India delivering sharp condemnations.
According to the Times of India, opposition leader Rahul Gandhi tore into Modi for not speaking up after the US torpedoed a boat that his government had invited into its waters.
"The conflict has reached our backyard, with an Iranian warship sunk in the Indian Ocean," Gandhi said. "Yet the PM has said nothing. At a moment like this, we need a steady hand at the wheel. Instead, India has a compromised PM who has surrendered our strategic autonomy."
In a social media post, former Indian Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal said there was no way that the Iranian ship could have been perceived as any kind of military threat.
"I am told that as per protocol for this exercise ships cannot carry any ammunition," he wrote. "It was defenseless... The attack by the US submarine was premeditated as the US was aware of the Iranian ship's presence in the exercise to which the US navy was invited but withdrew from participation at the last minute, presumably with this operation in mind."
Drop Site News reporter Ryan Grim noted that, in addition to striking what appears to have been a defenseless boat, the US also didn't help rescue any of the shipwrecked men who were aboard the vessel.
"The Sri Lanka Navy was left to pull the dead bodies from the water," Grim commented. "I am hard pressed to think of any other nation throughout history that would do something so cowardly and despicable. We are genuinely in a league of our own, and American media—mostly shrugging off the bombing of a girls school and acting as if carpet bombing Tehran is a normal military tactic—is deeply complicit."
Author Bruno Maçães also pointed to the decision to leave the shipwrecked crew at sea as an act of historic depravity.
"Really quite extraordinary that the US bombed an Iranian ship and then left the surviving sailors to drown," Maçães wrote. "There are many many accounts of the Nazis or Imperial Japan saving survivors at sea. I see we have now dropped below that level."
Mohamad Safa, executive director of PVA Patriotic Vision, an international multilateral organization with special consultative status at the United Nations Economic and Social Council, said that the US attack on the Iranian ship constituted either a war crime or straight-up murder.
"What Pete Hegseth ordered the military to do violates international law," he wrote. "The Iranian ship was near Sri Lanka, in international waters outside the combat zone and on a training exercise. Under the Geneva Conventions, you are obligated to rescue the crew of a ship that you sink during war. Abandoned any survivors and leaving them to drown is illegal and a war crime."
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Data Shows the Only Refugees Legally Settled in the US Since October Have Been White South Africans
"This kind of quota system mirrors the kind of policies that white supremacist groups, including the Klan, pushed for 100 years ago."
Mar 05, 2026
Not a single refugee who isn't a white South African has been legally resettled in the United States since October, according to the State Department's most recent arrivals report.
The report, published last month, shows that from the start of October 2025 and the end of January 2026, just 1,651 people were admitted under the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), which allows those fearing persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group to apply for refuge in the United States.
Aside from just three, every single one of them was from South Africa.
Three Afghan refugees were also reported to have been settled in Colorado in November. But since then, their admission has been indefinitely suspended, and those who have entered may be at risk of deportation.
During that same period a year earlier—the final months of the Biden administration—a total of 37,596 refugees arrived in the US, with the greatest numbers coming from the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa.
The Trump administration dramatically curbed refugee admissions during its first year in power. On his first day back in office last January, President Donald Trump suspended USRAP processing, leaving around 600,000 people in the pipeline suddenly stranded, including roughly 10,000 who'd already booked flights.
Around 130,000 of those refugees had already been through the State Department's meticulous and taxing vetting process, and were instead "left to languish in refugee camps around the world after being given the promise of safety and a new life in America,” as a group of Democrats in Congress put it.
The next month, however, Trump carved out an exception to the suspension exclusively for white South Africans, who he has falsely claimed face a "genocide," and severe "discrimination" from land redistribution policies intended to correct extreme apartheid-era inequalities.
After previously discussing a cap of 40,000 refugee admissions for the fiscal year 2026---already a reduction by over two-thirds from the Biden administration---Trump announced on September 30 that he would lower admissions to just 7,500, a historic low.
He announced the change without consultation with Congress, which is required under the 1980 Refugee Act, leading Democrats to accuse him of acting in "open defiance of the law."
But in late February, Reuters reported on an internal State Department document showing that the administration was planning to welcome as many as 4,500 white South Africans to the US per month and detailed plans to install trailers on US Embassy property in the country to expedite more immigrant approvals.
All the while, refugees fleeing war, government oppression, and genocide in countries including Syria, Sudan, Ukraine, Afghanistan, and others have been locked out or face threats of arrest by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under a new policy requiring them to be reinspected to determine their ability for “assimilation.”
Many critics have pointed out the dramatic gulf in treatment between white immigrants from South Africa and members of other, largely nonwhite groups of immigrants, whom it has undertaken extreme measures to remove from the country with expediency.
Last month, a Rohingya refugee, who fled genocide in Myanmar and legally entered the US as a refugee, was found dead on the streets of Buffalo, New York, after being detained and then left outdoors in the freezing cold by immigration agents.
The policy was revealed as part of a case in which a federal judge halted a DHS effort to detain thousands of refugees in Minnesota who did not seek green cards after their first year of residency in the United States.
"While the Trump administration is trying to convert warehouses at home into massive prisons to jail and deport immigrants swept up in its racist crackdown, it is also working to build trailers in Pretoria so it can rapidly increase the number of white South Africans," wrote Ja'han Jones in an opinion piece for MS NOW.
Likening it to the 1924 Immigration Act, which created strict ethnic quotas for entry into the US, Jones said: "It’s the kind of immigration policy the Ku Klux Klan dreamed of. Literally. This kind of quota system mirrors the kind of policies that white supremacist groups, including the Klan, pushed for 100 years ago."
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Adios Kristi! Noem’s Long History of Lying to Protect the Powerful
Nearly a decade before she was the public face of DHS, Noem’s tall tales about the estate tax helped gut one of the few remaining checks on elite fortunes.
Mar 05, 2026
Kristi Noem will no longer be the face of the Department of Homeland Security, labeling peaceful citizens defending liberty as “domestic terrorists.” President Donald Trump is now appointing her to a new position of “special envoy in the Western Hemisphere.”
Wherever she goes next, we should remember her DHS debacle wasn’t her first deception rodeo. It turns out that Noem has a long history of twisting the truth to serve the powerful.
In 2017, nearly a decade ago, we caught then-Rep. Kristi Noem (R-SD) telling a whopper fib about her family’s experience with the estate tax—or what Noem called the “death tax.”
The estate tax, our nation’s only levy on the inherited wealth of multimillionaires and billionaires, has been in place since 1916. In its first half century, it helped put a brake on the build-up of concentrated wealth and power, discouraging dynastic fortunes that threatened democracy.
It’s strangely fitting that Noem, who now slanders law-abiding immigrants and the citizens defending them as “domestic terrorists,” played a big role in gutting those taxes on the rich.
But for the last 30 years, the estate tax has been under right-wing assault, including a steady drumbeat for its repeal. And one tactic they’ve used is to claim the tax applies to small farmers and other working Americans, rather than the tiny percentage of extremely wealthy estates it actually targets—exclusively multimillionaires and billionaires, the top 0.01%
Noem’s personal political narrative, repeated at town hall meetings during her 2010 campaign for Congress, is a yarn about a rapacious and greedy federal government imposing an estate tax on her struggling family.
In a 2015 speech on the House Floor and in a 2016 op-ed for Fox News, Noem repeated the estate tax story. After her father died, Noem claimed, “We got a bill in the mail from the IRS that said we owed them money because we had a tragedy that happened to our family.”
“We could either sell land that had been in our family for generations or we could take out a loan,” Noem said, adding that “it took us 10 years to pay off that loan to pay the federal government those death taxes.” Noem says the episode was “one of the main reasons I got involved in government and politics.”
In December 2017, Noem was appointed by then-House Majority Leader Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to the joint committee working to reconcile the 2017 Trump tax bill—which at the time included a proposal to eliminate the federal estate tax altogether.
That month, I published a widely circulated op-ed about Noem in USA Today arguing that “her sad family saga doesn’t add up.”
My commentary surfaced several simple facts: The federal estate tax has a 100% exemption for spouses. In other words, if a spouse dies, the estate’s assets go to the surviving spouse without any estate tax. Corinne Arnold, Kristi Noem’s mother, was alive during these years. (In fact, she is still alive now at 78 years and was active in Kristi’s second campaign for South Dakota governor in 2022.)
Estate tax attorney Bob Lord noted at the time: “It’s hard to believe the estate of a farmer who died in 1994 and was survived by his spouse was subject to the tax. It easily could have been deferred. That would have been a no-brainer.”
Moreover, the process of filing a return can be extended for years, especially for operating farms.
The combination of family tragedy and populist outrage makes for a potent partisan story, but veers from the truth. In the years she campaigned as a victim of the estate tax, Noem’s family actually cashed millions in government farm subsidies. Between 1995 and 2024, her family’s Racota Valley Ranch in Hazel, South Dakota deposited $4.9 million in government subsidy checks.
A few days after my USA Today article, the Argus Leader, South Dakota’s biggest statewide newspaper, wrote an editorial: “Time for Kristi Noem to Get Her Tax Story Straight.” In her now well-known deflective fashion, Noem fired back that it was “fake news.”
If Noem’s estate tax story is true, she could easily put our doubts to rest. She could explain why her family didn’t use a spousal exemption, share a redacted “bill” from the IRS, or disclose who provided the loan she allegedly received. But she hasn’t.
In the meantime, Noem has helped gut the estate tax, contributing to the growing concentration of wealth that threatens our economy and democracy.
Under the Trump tax bill Noem worked on, the federal estate tax now exempts the first $15 million of wealth for an individual and $30 million for a couple. And as governor of South Dakota, Noem fortified the state’s role as a trust haven, attracting billionaires interested in forming dynasty trusts to hide wealth and use loopholes to avoid federal taxes.
The Trump administration and its allies have blamed immigrants for all manner of social ills—including struggling schools, expensive housing and healthcare, and more. In reality, the blame more often lies with extremely wealthy people who won’t pay their fair share of taxes to support public programs.
So it’s strangely fitting that Noem, who now slanders law-abiding immigrants and the citizens defending them as “domestic terrorists,” played a big role in gutting those taxes on the rich.
These lies—about the estate tax, about immigrants, about protesters—have something in common: They protect the powerful. As lawmakers attempt to hold Noem accountable for the reckless activities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement—and consider her for future jobs—they should keep this early story in mind.
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Dems Rebuke GOP for Using Trump's Illegal Iran Invasion to Push DHS Funding
"The idea that we should fund an agency that is killing Americans here at home because this president has launched an illegal war of choice abroad is absolutely ludicrous," said Sen. Raphael Warnock.
Mar 05, 2026
As the US Senate took up the issue of Department of Homeland Security funding on Thursday, three weeks into a partial shutdown of the agency, Democrats in Congress rejected Republicans' suggestions that restoring funding to DHS is key to keeping Americans safe amid President Donald Trump's war on Iran.
The war started last weeked after negotiations on Iran's nuclear program were reportedly making progress toward a deal; despite that, Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began launching strikes that have now killed more than 1,000 people in the Middle Eastern country.
Trump and top White House officials have insisted Iran posted an "imminent threat" and Republicans in Congress this week have used similar rhetoric about the country to demand that Democrats fund DHS, which includes the Transportation Security Administration, the Coast Guard, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as the two agencies that led Democrats to reject funding the department in recent weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
The latter two agencies have led Trump's mass deportation and detention campaign across the country, with thousands of federal agents deployed to cities where they've carried out roving patrols, engaged in racial profiling, assaulted protesters, and fatally shot at least eight people including three US citizens.
The House passed a measure to fund DHS through September earlier this year, before legal observer Alex Pretti became the third American to be shot and killed by federal agents. Seven Democrats joined the Republican Party in passing the bill.
That bill failed in the Senate for a third time on Thursday, and the House was set to vote on a similar proposal later in the afternoon.
On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (D-La.) accused Democrats of "playing political games" and refusing to protect Americans by funding DHS.
"Now is the time to be vigilant at home and to ensure that all of our doors are locked, so to speak," Johnson said. "Obviously everyone understands that it's a heightened threat environment. Global tensions are high, threats are constantly evolving and America's adversaries are watching for any sign of weakness on our part."
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) said it was "absolutely ludicrous" for Republicans to suggest "that we should fund an agency that is killing Americans here at home because this president has launched an illegal war of choice abroad."
Democrats and rights advocates have warned that under the second Trump administration, DHS has done little to keep Americans safe. At least 170 US citizens have been arrested or detained by immigration agents, and the agency's own records call into question the White House's frequent claim that it is targeting the "worst of the worst" violent criminals.
The Cato Institute found in November that between October 1-November 15, only 5% of people booked into ICE detention had violent criminal convictions, and 73% had no convictions at all.
In the House on Wednesday, Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) said Democrats would "continue to oppose this terrible Homeland bill because they're trying to use ICE and CBP money against US citizens."
.@RepPeteAguilar on DHS Funding: "We'll continue to oppose this terrible Homeland bill because they're trying to use ICE and CBP money against U.S. citizens. They've already killed two. Their policies are the problem." pic.twitter.com/UsgS1u0ivk
— CSPAN (@cspan) March 4, 2026
"Their policies are the problem," said Aguilar.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said that it was "insane" for the Republicans to push for DHS funding amid Trump's war on Iran, which experts have said clearly violates international law including the United Nations Charter."
"Donald Trump launches an unauthorized war in the Middle East, he characterizes it as endless, he decides that he wants to spend billions of dollars to bomb Iran, rather than spend taxpayer dollars to lower the grocery bills that are crushing the American people, and then wants to use his unauthorized war as an excuse to continue spending taxpayer dollars to brutalize or kill American citizens by continuing to unleash ICE without restriction on the American people," Jeffries said Tuesday. "Make it make sense, because it does not."
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