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Security

Goodfire Announces a Blind Cop to Watch AI

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Goodfire says they built a detector that spots when an AI model is cheating. It worked 98 percent of the time. Then they used the detector to train the model. Afterwards the detector worked 57 percent of the time, close to a coin flip.

The model had moved its cheating pattern somewhere the detector could no longer see. A second detector, freshly trained, found the pattern still there.

The numbers are from Goodfire’s own paper, published November 5. TIME covered it the same day under the misleading headline Scientists Have Found a New Way to Control AI’s Behavior. Two days earlier, MIT Technology Review ran a puff piece on using incentives to keep AI agents honest. Both articles describe the same idea from different sides: find a way to punish bad behavior, and the model will stop. Philosophy answered that idea in 1764. The answer was no.

Goodfire miss

A detector, which researchers call a probe, is a small program that reads the model’s internal activity and reports whether a particular idea is active. Goodfire trained one to recognize the pattern that appears when a model is cheating. On its own, it was accurate.

Then they wired the probe into training. Each time the model acted, its score was lowered by how strongly the cheating probe fired. The model’s weights were adjusted to raise the score. There are two ways to raise it: stop cheating, or change the internal pattern so the probe stops firing. In the worst run the model did both. It cheated less, and it rearranged the pattern so thoroughly that the unchanged probe fell to near chance. The probe now reads clean whether the model is honest or not.

Goodfire then trained a fresh probe on the altered model and found the cheating pattern again. They present this as reassurance. It depends on something a real deployment lacks: labeled examples of cheating to train the fresh probe against. Goodfire had the labels. A company running the model in production has the old probe and a clean reading. A clean reading means the cheating stopped, or it moved. The method cannot tell those apart. The paper says so, calling a silent probe ambiguous.

Cheating is not the right word

Look at what the model actually did. It was given a task, a score, and a readable file containing the answer. Opening the file was the fastest route to the score, so the model opened it. An engineer who found the same file would call that efficient. What made it cheating was a sentence in the prompt asking the model to leave the file alone, and a sentence of prose is a suggestion to an optimizer.

DeepMind catalogued this behavior in 2020 under the name specification gaming. A robot arm rewarded for raising the bottom of a red block flipped the block instead of stacking it. A simulated walker hooked its legs together and slid along the floor. Sixty examples, and in each the agent did exactly what the task allowed. The authors point out that the task specification includes the training environment itself. A readable answer file is an environment bug. The incidents TIME opens with, a company hacked and a false tip filed with police, have the same shape: a path left open and a rule written in prose.

Goodfire’s method treats the environment bug as a flaw in the model’s character and sets out to train the character. The fix for an environment bug is to fix the environment. That takes a file permission. Training the character took a labeled corpus, a probe, a loss term, a theory of how probes degrade, and a five-step recovery ladder, and the result reaches an honest answer 96 to 98 percent of the time.

Beccaria was 1764

Punishing the model harder means a larger penalty in training. The model’s response, as measured, was to make the penalty fire less often, partly by cheating less and partly by hiding the pattern to avoid it firing. Logical.

Cesare Beccaria, Of Crimes and Punishments, 1764 told us this.

Crimes are more effectually prevented by the certainty than the severity of punishment.

Severity teaches evasion. Certainty changes behavior. Two and a half centuries of criminology agree with him. Daniel Nagin’s 2013 review of the evidence in Crime and Justice finds that the likelihood of being caught deters crime and the harshness of the sentence barely does.

Hume had the design rule earlier still. In Of the Independency of Parliament (1741) he wrote that in building the checks of a constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave. He calls the maxim false in fact and true in politics. The system has to work when a man is a knave, so it is built so that private interest can only run in the public direction. Honesty is welcome. The structure holds without it.

Incentives are economics, and have the same problem

The MIT piece starts well. Elad Hazan of Princeton says alignment describes behavior in a moment, and the controls should work regardless of what is inside the model. That is Hume.

His proposed control is a system of model auditors who punish model solvers for cheating, are punished themselves for missing it, send disputes to a trial, and are paid enough that colluding is a bad bet. Each piece is a punishment or a payment. The auditor is a model. The trial is a model, or a person reading what two models produced. The piece names Hazan’s source, Gary Becker’s 1968 economics of crime, which treats expected punishment as probability multiplied by severity.

The research Nagin reviews has tested that model for fifty years. Only one of the two terms survived. Raise the odds of getting caught and crime falls. Raise the punishment and little happens. Becker’s severity term is dead weight, and Beccaria had already buried it two centuries before the model existed.

Models all the way down

Goodfire’s answer to a failed probe is a five-step ladder. Keep the old probe. Train a new one. Train a more complex one. Train one at a different layer. And when the inside of the model has become unreadable, step five: treat it as a black box and have a separate model judge its inputs and outputs.

The ladder ends with another model. At every step the control is a guess about what the model is thinking.

The missing step is a gate.

The phone network learned this in the 1970s. AT&T’s long-distance switches listened for a 2600 Hz tone on the voice line to know a trunk was free. A toy whistle from a cereal box produced that tone. John Draper, who took the name Captain Crunch from the cereal box, and a generation of phreaks whistled into pay phones and the network gave them free calls. Ron Rosenbaum’s 1971 Esquire article put the method into the public eye.

AT&T prosecuted. Draper was convicted in 1972. People kept whistling. What ended it was an engineering change: the network moved its control signals off the voice line onto a separate channel the caller could never reach. Once the whistle had nowhere to go, the behavior stopped, and detection and punishment became beside the point. The control channel was out of reach.

That is the whole lesson. A prompt that says leave the file alone is control carried in the voice channel. The model whistles.

In Goodfire’s own experiment the model is given a file called target.txt containing the answer and told to leave it alone. Standard training opens it almost every time. Goodfire’s method gets honest answers 96 to 98 percent of the time. The other 2 to 4 percent is what a penalty looks like: a rule the model mostly respects.

Put the same model behind a gateway that limits which files it can open, and the file stays closed. The attempt fails at the operating system, is written to a signed log, and the model is told it was refused. The gate reads what the model asked to do. It reads nothing from inside the model, so training has nothing to hide from. The specification is now correct by construction, and the word cheating has nothing left to describe. That is Beccaria’s certainty and Hume’s structure, and anyone can check it afterwards from the log. It is what Wirken does for every action a model attempts.

Got gate?

Goodfire’s researchers claim a training method, flag the probe problem themselves, and say their tests ran on models about 1/300th the size of frontier systems. Use the paper for training. For trust, stop reading the model’s mind and put a gate on what it can do.

Wirken is that gate. It is an open source gateway, written in Rust, that sits between any model and everything the model can touch. The model proposes an action. Wirken decides: allow it, ask a human, or refuse. It reads the proposed action and nothing inside the model, so there is no probe to drift and no signal for training to hide from. Files outside the working set stay closed. Network requests reach declared hosts only. Every decision, including every refusal, is written to a signed, append-only log that can be verified offline with no gateway running and no model present.

That is the control channel moved off the voice line. The model can whistle all it likes.

Wirken works with any model, because the best gate has no opinion about what is inside.

Hume wrote the rule in 1741.

Beccaria published the result in 1764.

The 2026 gate is free on GitHub under the MIT license.

History, Security

Dobrindt ließ den Posten des Antisemitismusbeauftragten leer, um den Job selbst zu machen

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English | Deutsch

Ich stecke diesen Herbst bis über beide Ohren in deutschen Politikerreden und bin erschrocken über den Antisemitismus. Die Arbeit ist langsam und meist öde. Wir ziehen die Bundestagsprotokolle, wir lesen, was gesagt wurde, wir notieren, was eine Aussage über Juden macht und was nicht.

Die AfD liefert reichlich. Das war zu erwarten. Alle anderen Parteien zusammen kommen nicht annähernd an die AfD heran. Sie produzieren es, als wäre es freigeschaltet. Aber von wem, wie, und warum?

Nicht zu erwarten war ein Mann, der aus dem Baum fiel, als wir ihn schüttelten, obwohl seine Bilanz genau auf den Begriffen sauber ist, die wir geprüft haben.

Alexander Dobrindt ist Bundesinnenminister. CSU, seit 2002 im Bundestag. Wir haben alles gelesen, was er in diesen vierundzwanzig Jahren im Parlament gesagt hat. Er hat dort nie etwas gesagt, das als antisemitisch zu kodieren wäre. Keine Chiffren, keine Reizwörter, kein Augenzwinkern. Wenn er Juden erwähnt, verurteilt er Judenhass. Er sagt, Juden gehören zu Deutschland. Nach jeder fairen Lesart seiner Worte gehört er nicht in diesen Korb.

Warum landete er trotzdem immer wieder darin? Wegen dem, was er mit dem Thema und um das Thema herum beständig tut. Eine kleine Auswahl zeigt die Methode.

Ein Tag Abstand

Am 20. Mai 2025 stellte er die Statistik der politisch motivierten Kriminalität vor. Die Bundesregierung veröffentlichte seinen Satz: „Egal, wo der Antisemitismus herkommt – er ist unter keinen Umständen zu akzeptieren.”

Egal, wo. Dieses Wort merken.

Am nächsten Tag, dem 21. Mai, stand er dem Bundestag in der Regierungsbefragung Rede und Antwort. Plenarprotokoll 21/6, Seite 405: Antisemitismus gebe es „sowohl im rechtsradikalen Bereich als auch in Bereichen des importierten Antisemitismus.”

Importiert. Nicht egal, wo.

Derselbe Minister, dieselbe Woche, zwei Publika, zwei Botschaften.

„Importiert” benutzt er seit Oktober 2023. Das Wort zeigt weg von der AfD, weg von der heimischen Rechten, hin zu Migranten. Und sobald es dorthin zeigt, wird es zum Argument für Abschiebung. Wer Antisemitismus im Netz erforscht, beschreibt diesen Zug seit Jahren: einräumen, dass es Antisemitismus gibt, und ihn dann einer Zielgruppe zuschieben, meist Muslimen. Shahak Shapira hat es im September schlichter gesagt. Deutschland hat mehr als genug Antisemitismus. Man muss nichts importieren.

Eine Gedenkstunde

Am 9. November 2023, dem Tag, an dem Deutschland an die Pogrome von 1938 erinnert, hielt der Bundestag seine Gedenkdebatte. Dobrindt sprach, festgehalten im Plenarprotokoll 20/134, Seite 16792:

Die Jüdinnen und Juden gehören unverbrüchlich zu unserem Land, ihr aber nicht.

Das Protokoll vermerkt den Zwischenruf von Saskia Esken von den SPD-Bänken: „Nicht mal in so einer Gedenkstunde können Sie das lassen!”

Er machte trotzdem weiter. In dieser Stunde forderte er eine Mindeststrafe von sechs Monaten für Israelhass, die Regelausweisung ausländischer Täter und den Passentzug für Doppelstaatler. Dann der Satz, für den die Forderungen gebaut waren:

Wer nicht mit Israel leben will, wer nicht friedlich mit Juden leben will, der kann auch nicht in Deutschland leben.

Das Protokoll vermerkt Beifall bei CDU/CSU, FDP und AfD. Die AfD klatscht einem CSU-Minister in einer Gedenkstunde sonst nicht.

Die Gesetzentwürfe, die seine Fraktion daraufhin einbrachte, wurden im April 2024 abgelehnt. Seit Mai 2025 ist er Innenminister. Er hat sie nicht wieder vorgelegt.

Zwei Tage nach einer Wahl

Am 20. September 2026 gewann Die Linke die Berliner Wahl. Am 22. September sagte Dobrindt, die Berliner Linke dulde „ganz offensichtlich” Antisemiten und Extremisten in ihrem Umfeld.

Zwei Tage. Keine Prüfung, kein Befund, ein Bundesminister, der den Parteien in Koalitionsverhandlungen eines Landes sagt, mit wem sie nicht reden sollen.

Am 24. September korrigierte die Moderatorin in der ZDF-Sendung maybrit illner ihren eigenen Versprecher über die Spitzenkandidatin der Linken, Elif Eralp:

Sie ist keine Antisemitin.

Der Präsident des Zentralrats der Juden hat gesagt, er halte ihre persönliche Haltung für glaubwürdig.

Dobrindt antwortete: „Na doch.” Worauf er das stützt, sagte er nicht.

Eralp ist nicht jüdisch. Sie hat Strafanzeige wegen übler Nachrede und Beleidigung gestellt. Die vollständige Antwort des Ministeriums:

Die Worte stehen für sich.

Sie stehen für sich, als müsse niemand für sie geradestehen.

Am 7. Oktober, beim Gedenken am Bebelplatz an das Hamas-Massaker, sagte Dobrindt es noch einmal, ohne die Partei zu nennen: Man müsse alarmiert sein, wenn in Berlin eine Partei über eine Regierungsbeteiligung spreche, die offen Antisemiten in ihrem Umfeld dulde.

Wenn das sein Maßstab ist, müsste er ununterbrochen über die AfD reden. Ihre Leitfigur Björn Höcke ist zweimal wegen einer SA-Parole verurteilt. Auf ihren Kundgebungen wird dieselbe Parole mit einem ausgetauschten Wort skandiert, „Alice für Deutschland.” Ihre interne Post, von Correctiv geprüft, liest sich, wie man es erwartet. Die Akte ist öffentlich.

Rund 150 Berliner Jüdinnen und Juden, darunter Deborah Feldman und Susan Neiman, haben in einem offenen Brief die Kampagne gegen die Linke eine zynische politische Instrumentalisierung genannt. Der Zentralrat der Juden sagte, die Berliner Linke habe ein echtes Problem, was in Berlin ungefähr so viel heißt wie: das Wetter ist schlecht, und hat „Na doch” nicht übernommen. Das trifft es. Es gibt Antisemiten in der Berliner Politik, bei der Linken auch. Der Minister arbeitet nicht gegen sie. Er benutzt sie.

Das Wort, das er aufhebt

Die AfD gibt es seit 2013. Der Verfassungsschutz stuft sie als gesichert rechtsextremistisch ein, und deutsche Gerichte lesen ihren „Remigration”-Plan als ethnische Säuberung. Dobrindt nennt sie ebenfalls „rechtsextremistisch” und ist gegen ein Verbot. In dreizehn Jahren, in nichts, was wir finden konnten, hat er die AfD je antisemitisch genannt.

Nur die Linke bekam dieses Wort, zwei Tage nach einem Wahlsieg. Die Partei, die seiner Gedenkrede applaudierte, hat es nicht ein einziges Mal bekommen.

Und in den Wochen der Warnungen vor Berlin war das Amt der Bundesregierung gegen Antisemitismus unbesetzt. Felix Klein ging Ende August. Die Nachfolge wurde am 14. Oktober beschlossen. Im Juli hatte Dobrindt eine „in Kürze” versprochen.

Der Minister, den der Antisemitismus einer Partei alarmiert, ließ also das Amt, das für Juden sprechen soll, während des Alarms leer. Wer wissen will, wie „Nie wieder” mit all dem zusammengeht, muss nicht lange suchen.

Das Muster

Seine anderen berühmten Formeln passen dazu. „Konservative Revolution” 2018, der Name der Weimarer Rechten, beibehalten, als Historiker widersprachen. „Anti-Abschiebe-Industrie” im selben Jahr, für die Anwälte von Asylsuchenden, Unwort des Jahres, gefolgt von Tausenden Hassmails an einen Anwalt in Ellwangen mit dem Begriff in der Betreffzeile. „Migrantische Chaoten” in diesem Monat, woraufhin sein eigenes Ministerium einräumte, es habe keine Zahlen.

Die Ziele wechseln. Juden sind nie das Ziel. Juden sind jedes Mal die Begründung für eines.

Es ist nicht das erste Mal, dass dieser Blog ihn nach links zeigen sieht, während rechts gearbeitet wird. Im Juni, nach dem Brand im Umspannwerk Reutlingen, sprach der Innenminister von Linksextremisten, bevor irgendjemand wusste, wer das Streichholz gehalten hatte.

Das ist der Zug, den Esra Özyürek in Subcontractors of Guilt beschreibt: Die Last des Holocaust wird nach unten weitergereicht, an die, die am wenigsten Macht haben, sie zurückzuweisen, und am Ende halten Muslime in Deutschland die Rechnung. „Importierter Antisemitismus” ist dieser Transfer in zwei Wörtern. Es ist derselbe Reflex, mit dem der Kanzler im September bei einer Berliner Kundgebung Antisemitismus unter Ausländerfeindlichkeit ablegte. Dobrindts Version geht einen Schritt weiter in den Betrieb: Die Juden gehören zu uns, als Grund, den wir in der Hand halten, damit „ihr aber nicht” folgen kann.

Deutsche mit türkischem oder arabischem Hintergrund müssen Erinnerung als Bedingung der Zugehörigkeit vorführen, während ethnische Deutsche ihren eigenen Antisemitismus als historisch abgeschlossen behandeln dürfen. Die Schuld wird nach unten weitervergeben, an die, die am wenigsten Macht haben, den Schuldtransfer abzulehnen.

Was wir veröffentlichen

Dobrindt wird im Antisemitismus-Tracker mit null antisemitischen Aussagen erscheinen. Das ist die ehrliche Zahl, und eine Zählung, die schummelt, ist wertlos. Neben der Null steht eine zweite Spalte: Aussagen, die Antisemitismus gegen andere einsetzen. Dort steht er bei acht. Die Gedenkrede, denkwürdig wegen derer, die applaudierten, ist die erste.

Wir haben auch gesucht, ob er je etwas über die Rolle seiner eigenen Familie im Nationalsozialismus gesagt hat, wie wir es bei allen tun. Nichts ist veröffentlicht, und er hat nie darüber gesprochen. Auch diese Leerstelle kommt auf die Seite.

Die Lehre aus einer Saison des Lesens ist einfach. Die Wörter sind nicht das Einzige. Ein deutscher Rechtspolitiker kann vierundzwanzig Jahre ohne ein böses Wort über Juden auskommen und sie trotzdem benutzen, wann immer es sich „lohnt”.

Poetry, Security

Dobrindt Left the Antisemitism Post Empty to Do the Job Himself

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English | Deutsch

I have been up to my eyeballs in German political speeches this autumn, shocked by the antisemitism. The work is slow and mostly dull. We pull the Bundestag protocols, we read what people said, we note what makes a claim about Jews and what does not.

The AfD gives plenty to note. That was expected. Every other party combined doesn’t come anywhere close to the AfD. They crank it out as if it’s been enabled. But by whom, and how, and why?

What was not expected was a man who fell out of the tree when we shook it, because his record is clean on the exact terms we had been checking.

Alexander Dobrindt is Germany’s interior minister. CSU, in the Bundestag since 2002. We read everything he said in parliament over those twenty-four years. He has never said anything coded as antisemitic there. None of the dogwhistles or trigger words, no winks. When he mentions Jews, he condemns Judenhass. He says Jews belong to Germany. By any fair reading of his words, he shouldn’t be in this fruit bowl.

So why did he keep landing there? Because of what he consistently does around and with the subject. A small set of examples shows the method.

One day apart

On 20 May 2025 he presented crime statistics on politically motivated offences. The government published his line: “Egal, wo der Antisemitismus herkommt – er ist unter keinen Umständen zu akzeptieren.”

So the man says wherever it comes from.

Wherever. Hold that word.

The next day, 21 May, he took questions in the Bundestag. Protocol 21/6, page 405: antisemitism exists “sowohl im rechtsradikalen Bereich als auch in Bereichen des importierten Antisemitismus.”

Imported. Not wherever.

Same minister, same week, two audiences, two messages.

He has used “importiert” since October 2023. It is a word that points away from the AfD, away from the homegrown far right, and at migrants. Once it points there it becomes an argument for deportation. Researchers who study online antisemitism have described this move for years: concede that antisemitism exists, then hand it to a target group, usually Muslims. Shahak Shapira said it more plainly this September. Germany has plenty of antisemitism already. Nobody needs to import any.

A memorial hour

On 9 November 2023, the day Germany remembers the pogrom of 1938, the Bundestag held its memorial debate. Dobrindt spoke, as captured in Protocol 20/134, page 16792:

Die Jüdinnen und Juden gehören unverbrüchlich zu unserem Land, ihr aber nicht.

The protocol notes Saskia Esken calling out from the SPD benches: “Nicht mal in so einer Gedenkstunde können Sie das lassen!” Not even in a memorial hour.

He went on anyway. In that hour he asked for a six-month minimum sentence for hatred of Israel, automatic expulsion of foreign offenders and loss of citizenship for dual nationals. Then the sentence the demands were built for:

Wer nicht mit Israel leben will, wer nicht friedlich mit Juden leben will, der kann auch nicht in Deutschland leben.

The protocol notes applause from CDU/CSU, FDP and the AfD. The AfD does not usually clap for a CSU minister in a memorial hour. Apparently a whistle was heard.

The bills his party then tabled were voted down in April 2024. He has been interior minister since May 2025. He has not brought them back.

Two days after an election

On 20 September 2026 Die Linke won the Berlin election. On 22 September Dobrindt said the Berlin Linke tolerates antisemites and extremists in its circles, “ganz offensichtlich.”

Two days. No inquiry, no finding, a federal minister telling the parties negotiating a state government whom not to work with.

On 24 September, on the ZDF talk show maybrit illner, the host corrected her own slip about the Linke’s lead candidate, Elif Eralp:

Sie ist keine Antisemitin.

She is no antisemite. The president of the Central Council of Jews has said he finds her personal position credible.

Dobrindt answered, “Na doch.” She is. On what basis, he did not say.

Eralp is not Jewish. She filed a criminal complaint for defamation and insult. The ministry’s full response was:

Die Worte stehen für sich.

The words stand on their own, as if nobody has to answer for them.

On 7 October, at the memorial on the Bebelplatz for the Hamas massacre, Dobrindt said it again without naming the party: be alarmed when a party in Berlin talks about joining a government while tolerating antisemites in its circles.

If that is his standard he should be talking about the AfD non-stop. Its figurehead Björn Höcke has two convictions for using an SA slogan. Its rallies chant the same slogan with one word swapped, “Alice für Deutschland.” Its internal mail, verified by Correctiv, reads the way you would expect. The record is public.

Around 150 Jewish Berliners, Deborah Feldman and Susan Neiman among them, signed a letter calling the campaign against the Linke a cynical political instrumentalisation. The Central Council of Jews said the Berlin Linke has a real problem, which in Berlin is like saying the weather is bad, and did not endorse “Na doch.” That seems about right. There are antisemites around Berlin politics, the Linke included. The minister is not working against them. He is wielding them.

The word he saves

The AfD has existed since 2013. The domestic intelligence service calls it confirmed right-wing extremist, and German courts have read its “Remigration” plan as ethnic cleansing. Dobrindt calls it “rechtsextremistisch” too, and opposes a ban. In thirteen years, in nothing we could find, has he ever called the AfD antisemitic.

Only the Linke got that word, two days after winning an election. The party that applauded his memorial speech has not gotten it once.

And during the weeks of warnings about Berlin, the federal government’s own post for fighting antisemitism was empty. Felix Klein left at the end of August. The successor was approved on 14 October. In July Dobrindt had promised one “in Kürze.”

So the minister alarmed about antisemitism in one party let the office meant to speak for Jews sit vacant through the alarm. If you want to know how “never again” coexists with all of this, the pattern is not hard to see.

The pattern

His other famous phrases fit. “Konservative Revolution” in 2018, the name of the Weimar far right, kept after historians objected. “Anti-Abschiebe-Industrie” the same year, for the lawyers of asylum seekers, a term that won Unwort des Jahres and was followed by thousands of hate mails to one lawyer in Ellwangen with the phrase in the subject line. “Migrantische Chaoten” this month, after which his own ministry admitted it had no numbers.

The targets change. Jews are never the target. Jews are forever the reason given for one.

It is not the first time this blog has watched him point left while the right does the work. In June, after the Reutlingen substation fire, the interior minister talked about left-wing extremists before anyone had evidence of who struck the match.

This is the move Esra Özyürek describes in Subcontractors of Guilt: the Holocaust’s weight gets passed down to the people with the least power to refuse it, and Muslims in Germany end up holding the bill. “Importierter Antisemitismus” is that transfer in two words. It is the same reflex that had the Chancellor filing antisemitism under hostility to foreigners at a Berlin rally in September. Dobrindt’s version goes a step further into operations: the Jews belong to us, as a reason we hold, so that “ihr aber nicht” can follow.

What we will publish

Dobrindt will appear in the antisemitism tracker with zero antisemitic statements. That is the honest number and a count that cheats is worthless. Next to the zero will be a second column: statements that use antisemitism against somebody else. He is at eight so far. The memorial speech, memorable for who applauded it, is the first.

We also looked for anything he has said about his own family’s place in Nazi Germany, as we do for everyone. Nothing is published, and he has never spoken of it. That blank will be on the page too.

The lesson from a season of reading is simple. The words are not the only thing. A German right-wing politician can go twenty-four years without one bad word about Jews and still use them whenever it “pays”.

Turkish- and Arab-background Germans are made to perform remembrance as a condition of belonging while ethnic Germans get to treat their own antisemitism as historically closed. The guilt gets subcontracted downward to the people with the least power to refuse the transfer of blame.
History, Poetry, Security

No Quarter: High Time We Hold Hegseth to Hegseth

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In the matter of Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War. Brief for the prosecution.

I. The charge

Ordering the killing of shipwrecked survivors on September 2, 2025. The charge is the unlawful killing of persons hors de combat. Treason is set aside for the moment because it needs an army in the field or adherence to an enemy. The charge the record supports so far is enough.

II. Statement of facts

  1. On September 2, 2025, United States forces struck a boat in the Caribbean. Reporting places a verbal order from Hegseth before the operation: “kill everybody.”
  2. Two survivors were seen clinging to wreckage. Roughly two hours later a second strike killed them. The White House confirms the second strike and attributes the order to Admiral Bradley, acting under Hegseth’s authorization.
  3. Hegseth first said he watched the operation live, then said he left before the second strike and saw no survivors in the “fog of war.” Both statements are his.
  4. The campaign continued. Just Security’s running timeline put the count at 72 strikes and 243 dead by late October 2026.
  5. On September 15, 2026, Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican, read eight articles of impeachment on the House floor, charging that Hegseth directed the unlawful use of deadly force in the boat strikes. The Speaker sent the House home a day early to avoid a vote.

III. The rule

The Department of War’s own Law of War Manual forbids attacking the shipwrecked. Legal experts reviewing the September 2 orders found them self-evidently unlawful, because they ordered no quarter, and found the second strike an attack on persons hors de combat. Representative Mike Turner, a Republican, put the civilian version plainly: had the survivors been captured and convicted, they would have gone to jail, not been executed.

IV. The defendant’s own standard

The tribunal is asked to apply the standard the defendant has applied to others.

  • Exhibit A, 2019. Hegseth privately lobbied the President to pardon Clint Lorance, convicted of murdering two civilians, Mathew Golsteyn, charged with murdering a detainee, and Edward Gallagher, charged with stabbing a prisoner. He told his audience “these are the good guys.” Three trials, erased.
  • Exhibit B, 2025. “Kill everybody.” Two men in the water, no capture, no trial.
  • Exhibit C, 2026. Hegseth announced the Pentagon would livestream the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, a man who received a court-martial, a conviction and thirteen years of appeals. Hegseth took a lawful sentence and tried to make it a broadcast. The President withdrew it.

The pattern across all three exhibits is the removal of the trial. The pardons removed trials already held. The order removed a trial that should have followed capture. The livestream removed the dignity a trial had already secured.

V. Precedent

On October 19, 1864, Robert E. Lee wrote to Grant that captured Black soldiers belonging to Confederate citizens would be returned to their owners rather than exchanged as prisoners of war. Grant refused every exchange on those terms. Lee put in writing that captured men were property, and he commanded on that basis to the end.

In June 1865 a federal grand jury indicted Lee for treason. Grant stopped the trial. Lee died obscured, at home in 1870, with barely a thousand mourners. Within two years the men who lost the war began fabricating him into a myth that now sits on a Georgia mountain protected by statute. The absence of the trial is the only thing that ever saved Lee, and the cost of that absence ran a century.

VI. Relief sought

A trial. Charge, evidence, witnesses, verdict. The September 2 video and the Justice Department memo entered into the record. Admiral Bradley under oath. The sentence belongs to the court and to no one else.

That is the one thing the defendant has denied to every person he has judged. It is the one thing the record now demands for him.