A four-star admiral just resigned abruptly rather than continue overseeing what Pentagon officials are calling “criminal attacks on civilians.”
Four-stars.
We are talking about the very highest level of authority, a specific role created for a specific person to command entire theaters of war. That person doesn’t resign mid-tour unless they believe they are being made complicit in some illegal or immoral acts, a crime. Admiral Holsey just did exactly that, just months after his Senate testimony.
If his abrupt resignation doesn’t immediately trigger a new Church Committee, America has learned nothing from its shadowy history of political assassinations.
We’re now in a pre-revelation moment, everyone wondering how to put the puzzle together, as rampant abuses are happening yet obfuscated to avoid accountability.
For those who don’t remember, the Nixon Presidency used a wide range of illegal covert actions across Latin America to create a drug explosion, with cooperation between US covert operations and drug-dealing organizations making operations self-financing and insulated from oversight. Nixon’s creation of the drug crisis was then cynically pivoted into his justification for a covert race war (“war against drugs”), to target non-white Americans with mass incarceration and extrajudicial violence.
Nixon’s targeted manipulation of the definition of drugs as a “foreign danger” was so he could link supply control ideology with political concepts of containment (e.g. anti-communism), creating dangerous narco-dogma to frame domestic power into high-danger external threats.
John Ehrlichman later openly and famously admitted of the whole Nixon program:
We knew we were lying about the drugs. By getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.
The administration criminalized domestic political enemies by externalizing the threat—turning law enforcement into military operations against foreign “combatants”, exactly what we see happening in 2025.
The Trump administration has sought to make the label of drug-trafficking groups as “foreign terrorist organizations” (FTOs) great again, publishing a memo claiming the US is in a “non-international armed conflict” with cartels described as “unlawful combatants.”
As a historian the pattern is unmistakable. The structural parallels to Nixon’s abuse of power for anti-democratic political violence aren’t just similar…
THE PATTERNS
| Abuse Pattern | Nixon Era (1970s) | Trump Administration (2025) |
| Extrajudicial Killings | Operation Condor coordinated kidnapping, torture, disappearance and assassination across six South American countries without trial or due process | Military strikes killing civilians in Caribbean without trial or evidence, described by Pentagon officials as “criminal attacks on civilians” |
| Legal Authority Bypass | CIA operated parallel covert government without congressional oversight; Kissinger coordinated directly with CIA, bypassing proper military channels | Secret legal opinions justify strikes; classified briefings to Congress cancelled; operations rely on expansive Article II claims without congressional war authorization |
| Intelligence Displacing Military | DEA’s 400 overseas agents became vehicle for CIA operations requiring “plausible deniability” after Congress banned Office of Public Safety | Trump publicly confirms using military strikes as cover for CIA regime change operations in Venezuela; CIA operations prioritized over military command structure |
| Manufactured External Threat | Nixon created drug crisis through CIA cooperation with drug-dealing organizations, then weaponized it into “war on drugs” to target domestic political enemies | Cartels designated as “foreign terrorist organizations” in “non-international armed conflict”; drug enforcement militarized to justify strikes against “unlawful combatants” |
| Senior Military Resignations | Military officers objected to illegal operations; parallel covert government undermined proper chain of command | Four-star Admiral Alvin Holsey resigned abruptly as SOUTHCOM Commander rather than oversee what he apparently believes are war crimes |
| Normalization of War Crimes | Torture, assassination, and extrajudicial killing became normalized as “counter-insurgency” and “anti-communism” | Defense Secretary Hegseth lobbied for war crime pardons, called laws “getting in the way,” told troops to “stack bodies,” dismissed war criminals as “warriors” |
| Congressional Oversight Eliminated | Operations conducted in secret without authorization; Church Committee later discovered COINTELPRO, Family Jewels, MKULTRA, assassination programs | No congressional authorization for military operations; administration refuses classified briefings on legal justification; operations conducted under secret directives |
| Domestic Blowback | 1976 car bombing assassination of Orlando Letelier on Embassy Row in Washington D.C.; CIA had intelligence and chose not to prevent it | Pattern suggests inevitable domestic deployment of foreign operational methods; surveillance and targeting frameworks developed “over there” always come home |
This appears to be an act of Republicans deciding all the things known for 50 years to be illegal and immoral from the Nixon administration now are to be resurrected and normalized.
Congress holds the sole power to declare war under Article I of the Constitution. The Trump administration has neither sought nor received congressional authorization for these military operations. Instead, it relies on secret legal opinions, classified directives, and expansive claims of Article II executive authority—the same “imperial presidency” doctrine that led to Nixon’s downfall.
Nixon’s Operation CONDOR notably had used the DEA as cover for CIA operations. When Congress banned the Office of Public Safety for being CIA cover, the DEA’s 400 overseas agents immediately became an untouchable invisible new vehicle for operations requiring “plausible deniability”.
Trump has inverted this by claiming he is using military strikes to provide cover for CIA regime change operations. Trump confirmed CIA operations while discussing potential land attacks on Venezuela, with officials stating the strategy focuses on removing Maduro from power.
I’ll just set aside for now the operational stupidity of an American President publicly announcing he is running CIA regime change operations in a foreign country. Self-sabotage is expected for the Trump detested brand, but it doesn’t make their underlying crimes any less serious.
The Church Committee was so powerful in Nixon’s time because it discovered COINTELPRO, Family Jewels (CIA assassination programs), Operation Mockingbird (media propaganda), Project MKULTRA (drug experiments on citizens), and ZR/RIFLE (assassination capability development).
CIA programs included assassination plots against Castro, Lumumba, Trujillo, and Schneider, revealing a parallel covert government had been setup to operate without congressional oversight. CIA officials secretly coordinated operations directly with Kissinger, bypassing proper military channels. Kissinger instructed the Agency on operational guidelines for overthrowing Allende before October 24, 1970.
James Risen put it like this:
Prior to the Church Committee, there was the growth of a parallel, a secret government that was not being reined in. The republic would have been in danger if the Church Committee hadn’t done its work.
Operation CONDOR, for example, involved officially sanctioned torture and execution. Nixon’s rhetoric to “let drug cops off the leash” is nearly identical to Hegseth’s recent Pentagon belligerence, to generate extreme violence in drug-producing countries that amplifies refugee waves in a circular path to authoritarianism.
DEA agents who witnessed Operation CONDOR called it “the atrocities,” cruelly joking that Mexican police commander Jaime Alcalá García “killed more people than smallpox“. When top legal authorities resisted American corruption, they were removed.
It’s eerily foreshadowing of today, as a Pentagon official who just noted the Trump administration in 2025 “paved the way for the attack by firing the top legal authorities of the Army and Air Force earlier this year”
More Americans should think deeply about the fate of DEA agent Kiki Camarena who was tortured for 30 hours and murdered in 1985 after he discovered the CIA involvement in drug trafficking operations used to fund Contras in Nicaragua.
Defense Secretary Hegseth has fired in 2025 multiple senior military officers, including Navy chief of staff Jon Harrison, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse (Director of Defense Intelligence Agency), Rear Admiral Milton Sands (Naval Special Warfare Command), and Gen. David Allvin (Air Force Chief of Staff).
Defense Secretary Hegseth has a well-documented history of dismissing war crimes accountability. During Trump’s first term, he privately lobbied for pardons of service members convicted or accused of war crimes, telling Fox News viewers “They’re not war criminals, they’re warriors.” At his Senate confirmation hearing in January 2025, Hegseth stated he wanted to ensure military lawyers “aren’t the ones getting in the way” of troops destroying the enemy. In his book, he referred to military lawyers as “jagoffs.”
This creates a direct conflict: a Defense Secretary who has spent years undermining war crimes accountability now oversees a four-star admiral who apparently resigned over concerns that he was being ordered to participate in what he believed were war crimes.
The tensions reached a breaking point on October 6, when Admiral Holsey met with Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Dan Caine at the Pentagon. According to sources, Holsey offered to resign during that meeting over his concerns about the legality of the operations. The fact that his departure wasn’t announced until over a week later—and won’t take effect until year’s end—suggests an administration scrambling to manage optics of a four-star commander’s public rejection of their policy.
Now the Trump administration refuses to provide any evidence to lawmakers proving that his multiple targeted civilian boats for military strike are carrying narcotics, pointing only to unclassified “shock and awe” videos glorifying airborne extrajudicial assassinations of non-combatants.
A high-ranking Pentagon official has “stated the obvious, that such strikes are criminal attacks on civilians. Drug traffickers may be criminals but they aren’t combatants.” Legal experts also note the obvious, that the smuggling of illegal goods of any kind does not constitute direct participation in hostilities or render civilians lawful military targets.
Trump thus appears to be identically replicating the illegal Nixon administration doctrines, as he publicly confirmed CIA authorization for covert operations in Venezuela with lethal authority, an extraordinary and unprecedented acknowledgment. The CIA directive broadens the agency’s role beyond intelligence gathering to carry out lethal operations across the Caribbean.
Trump updated CIA authorities around the same time he signed a secret directive ordering military strikes against Latin American cartels, with officials saying the ultimate goal is regime change in Venezuela.
Notably, for the first time, survivors from the sixth military strike are being repatriated to Ecuador and Colombia. These survivors represent the first potential witnesses to what actually happened on these boats—whether they were carrying drugs, whether they posed any threat, whether the administration’s justifications hold up under scrutiny. Their testimony could prove devastating to the administration’s narrative, which is likely why they’re being quickly returned to countries that have less robust legal systems rather than more appropriately held for questioning in the United States.
How bad could it get, with a return to Nixon’s illegal platforms documented in the dual operations known as CONDOR? Recently declassified documents reveal lawyers have investigated and documented eighteen distinct types of torture used by the Americans running CONDOR, including beating, waterboarding with chili-infused sparkling water, near-drowning in excrement-filled water, and rape.
The operations running concurrently as a fake counterinsurgency campaign that instead suppressed social and armed movements, coordinated drug trafficking, and reorganized the drug industry to protect major cartel leaders while creating American control over and pacts between drug lords and security agencies like the DFS and Mexican military.
Because Congress banned the Office of Public Safety programs in 1974 that had been giving the CIA cover in Latin America, suddenly the DEA assigned 400 overseas agents for CIA operations requiring “plausible deniability.” Court documents from a 1985 case stated that despite official claims, Mexico’s Operation CONDOR was “the conduit” through which US intelligence funneled money, weapons and support to undermine and destabilize Central American governments.
CONDOR OPERATION ONE (South America, 1975-1989) Template: CIA political assassinations disguised as defense of freedom
CIA-coordinated transnational collaboration included kidnapping, torture, disappearance and assassination across Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. CIA officials including Thomas Karamessines met with Kissinger to coordinate coup plotting, with Kissinger instructing secret American agents to “continue keeping the pressure on every Allende weak spot”.
CONDOR OPERATION TWO (Mexico, 1975-1985) Cover: CIA regime change operations disguised as drug enforcement
A DEA program in Mexico, overseen by the State Department’s narcotics office, generated drug lords who undermined civilian protections. Mexico’s DFS intelligence service was completely corrupt, with its chief Miguel Nazar Haro setup to be a CIA asset. Mexico also contracted with Evergreen International Aviation, which had extensive CIA connections.
CONDOR DOMESTIC ARRIVAL: Inevitable home deployment of foreign test cases
The 1976 car bombing assassination of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt on Embassy Row in Washington D.C. shattered any illusion that CONDOR was for “foreign” operations. The bomb on American soil, planted by Chilean intelligence operatives working with Cuban exiles, detonated just blocks from the White House. It was American state-sponsored terrorism within America—the CIA had intelligence the attack was coming and chose not to prevent it.
This is the trajectory of unchecked covert operations: they always come home. The legal frameworks and operational methods developed “over there” inevitably get deployed “here again.”
The pattern repeats throughout history, for those who study it. Consider OPERATION IGLOO WHITE—a $1 billion/year program that deployed networked sensors and surveillance drones over Cambodia—when Nixon turned the same foreign surveillance apparatus on American citizens. The tools of empire always come home.
The bottom line is Americans should consider right now how the Church Committee happened because senators did their job and enforced institutional integrity regardless of political campaigning and Presidential pressure.
Today’s Congress faces the same choice.
The Senate Intelligence Committee and Senate Armed Services Committee staff are now watching a rerun, and they must be held accountable if they do nothing.
The Trump administration produced a classified legal opinion justifying strikes against a secret and expansive list of cartels, yet canceled classified briefings to Congress about the legal justification.
Admiral Holsey cannot publicly state his objections without violating classification rules. But his actions are testimony. He walked away from the Pentagon rather than participate in what he apparently believes are war crimes.
Congress has the authority to grant him immunity and compel his testimony in closed session. That’s exactly what the Church Committee would have done. Does today’s Congress have the courage of a 1975 Senate?
We’re watching an intentional return to Nixon’s worst abuses. The difference is that this time, we up front can see exactly what happens if Congress does nothing. The Church Committee uncovered a “parallel, secret government”. It prevented Republicans from destroying the republic.
What happens when there’s no Church Committee this time? We’re about to find out, unless the Senate acts now. Admiral Holsey has pulled the four-star alarm. It doesn’t get much higher, given the role reports almost directly to the President.
Related Reading – Pete Hegseth Statements on War Crimes:
- Redefined war criminals into “warriors”: Hegseth repeatedly dismissed war crimes through a PR campaign on Fox & Friends: “These are men who went into the most dangerous places on earth with a job to defend us and made tough calls on a moment’s notice. They’re not war criminals, they’re warriors”
- Lobbied for war crime pardons: Hegseth privately lobbied Trump during his first term to pardon Army Lt. Clint Lorance (convicted of murdering two Afghan civilians), Army Major Matthew Golsteyn (charged with murdering an unarmed Afghan), and Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher (convicted of posing with a corpse)
- Normalized war crimes as “could’ve been me” and “Put us all in jail”: Hegseth said the possibility of pardons was “very heartening for guys like me,” that it “could’ve been me” on trial for war crimes, and that if Golsteyn’s actions counted as a war crime, then “put us all in jail“
- Declared laws are “getting in the way” of illegal military operations: During his Senate confirmation hearing, Hegseth stated he wanted to ensure lawyers “aren’t the ones getting in the way” of service members having “opportunity to destroy…the enemy”
- Defamed military lawyers as “jagoffs”: In his book “War on Warriors,” Hegseth used the derogatory term “jagoffs” to describe Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) lawyers
- Claimed loopholes to Geneva Convention: When pressed by Senator Angus King, Hegseth agreed the Geneva Convention was “the law of the land” but qualified that such laws of war existed “above” restrictive rules of engagement
- Invoked genocidal outcomes: “Stack bodies”: On a June 2024 podcast, Hegseth said: “They killed the right guys in the wrong way, according to somebody. I’m done with that…you stack bodies, and when it’s over, then you let the dust settle”