“It’s done.”
With those two words, House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers declared he has no interest in investigating a military campaign that has killed nearly 90 people in 100 days, forced the resignation of a combatant commander, and caused one of America’s closest intelligence partners to stop sharing information with us.
One classified briefing. No public hearings. No document requests. No testimony under oath. Just a quick look at some footage with the admiral who ordered the strikes, and Rogers has “all the answers he needed.”
This isn’t oversight. This is complicity.
The broken promise arc (pledged oversight, then had one classified briefing, then announced suddenly “it’s done”) reinforces this is a deliberate coverup.
The facts that Rogers is hand waving about and trying to get people to ignore are damning.
Admiral Alvin Holsey, commander of Southern Command, abruptly announced his resignation in October after less than a year in the position. Reports indicate he raised concerns about the legality of strikes against alleged drug boats and was pushed out by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. When Holsey appeared before the committee this week, he suddenly claimed his departure was “personal” and “had nothing to do with the operations in his command.”
A four-star admiral doesn’t abandon his command after less than a year for personal reasons. He does it when he’s told to execute orders he believes are illegal, refuses, and gets forced out. Then he lies to Congress about it because the alternative is worse.
The United Kingdom—our closest intelligence partner, a Five Eyes member, the special relationship itself—has stopped sharing intelligence with us over these operations. That doesn’t happen over legitimate military action.
That happens when an ally concludes they cannot be associated with what we’re doing. And what are we doing? The failed Iraq War all over again? President Trump told Politico this week, as if trying to sound like President Bush:
We’re gonna hit ’em on land very soon, too.
Ninety dead in 100 days, and the promise is endless, escalation with no outcome other than deaths mounting.
The legal framework here isn’t complicated. Shooting survivors in the water after disabling their vessel isn’t drug interdiction. It’s summary execution. When military forces kill people who pose no immediate threat, who are not engaged in hostilities, who are in the water clinging to wreckage, that’s a war crime. It doesn’t matter if the victims were smuggling drugs. It doesn’t matter if they were bad people. The laws of armed conflict don’t have a “they deserved it” exception.
Rogers knows this. He sat through the same briefings. He saw the same footage that made Adam Smith call for “a full-scale investigation.” He watched the same video that reportedly shows what actually happened to those people in the water.
And his response was: “It’s done.”
Under international law, command responsibility extends beyond those who pull triggers.
It encompasses those who knew or should have known that crimes were being committed and failed to take action to prevent or punish them. Rogers isn’t in the chain of command, but he chairs the committee that exists specifically to provide oversight of military operations. When he sees evidence of potential war crimes and actively refuses to investigate, he’s not just failing at his job. He’s providing cover.
The congressional response to 90 deaths and a combatant commander’s suspicious resignation? Withhold a quarter of Hegseth’s travel budget until he hands over unedited footage.
That’s not accountability.
That’s the appearance of accountability, carefully calibrated to produce criminals.
We’ve seen this pattern before.
We saw it with the torture program, where oversight committees were briefed just enough to make them complicit, then told everything was legal. We saw it with drone strikes, where the classification system ensured that no one with authority to act ever had to confront what was being done in their name. The machinery of oversight becomes the machinery of impunity.
Rogers has chosen to enable crime. By declaring this “done” before any real investigation, before any public hearing, before any of the people doing the killing or the dying have been identified and questioned under oath, he’s cast his lot with the architects of criminal campaigns of murder.
History will record that when the evidence of war crimes was presented to the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, he looked at it, shrugged, and said he didn’t want illegality to stop.
That’s not oversight.
Driver who killed Grammy-nominated musician walking his dogs had been arrested over 100 times.
That’s accessory after the fact.
