Murder
In the last few days, we’ve got allegations of murder against two men who worked in counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, Whiskey Pete Hegseth and Rahmanullah Lakanwal.
We don’t yet know why Lakanwal drove from Bellingham, WA, across the country, to allegedly ambush two members of the West Virginia National Guard, Sarah Beckstrom and Andrew Wolfe. Spencer Ackerman noted that if Lakanwal came to the US committed to terrorism, he learned that commitment — and a great deal of military skills — from Americans.
[T]he most sobering fact about Wednesday’s slayings is that the alleged killer, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was all too compatible with Western Civilization.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe issued an extraordinary statement revealing that the 29-year-old Lakanwal was a “member of a partner force in Kandahar.” While a knowledgeable source with deep experience in Afghanistan cautions that the US sponsored a variety of proxy forces in southern Afghanistan, much additional reporting has identified Lakanwal as a member of the Zero Units, death squads used by the CIA during the US’s longest overseas war.
In other words, contrary to Miller and Trump, Lakanwal’s shooting spree is not the result of importing Afghan culture to America. While much will surely be revealed in Lakanwal’s upcoming trial, it looks more like the result of importing American culture to Afghanistan. The realities of blowback – the violence America experiences as the unintended consequences of the violence of US foreign policy – are what the US needs to examine in the wake of this horrifying murder if it expects to prevent the next one.
But even Ackerman doesn’t consider the possibility that something happened since — quite possibly in the last year, as Trump keeps dicking around allies of all sorts who’ve helped the United States in the past — that led Lakanwal to drive across the country only to target members of the Guard who had been uprooted from their homes to avenge Ed “Big Balls” Coristine.
The list of Republican governors who will uproot Guardsmen from their home, family, and (for many of them) regular jobs to go to DC continues to grow:
- Ohio Governor Mike DeWine
- South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster
- West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey
- Tennessee Governor Bill Lee
- Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves
- Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry
All of these men believe protecting Big Balls is a higher priority than protecting their own constituents.
How soon we forget that the entire reason why Trump invaded DC is that Ed “Big Balls” Coristine, one of the DOGE boys hired by the richest man in the world to snoop through the private heath and social security data of Americans, got beat up by unarmed teenagers?
Contrary to what Trump and his propagandists keep squealing, Lakanwal was vetted over and over again.
The Afghan national accused of shooting two National Guard members near the White House this week underwent thorough vetting by counterterrorism authorities before entering the United States, according to people with direct knowledge of the case.
Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, arrived in the U.S. through Operation Allies Welcome (OAW), a Biden-era program that helped resettle Afghan nationals after the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
[snip]
A key question from critics has been whether any evacuees managed to enter the U.S. without proper vetting. Lakanwal, however, would not have been among them, according to the individuals, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation. One of the individuals said Lakanwal was vetted years ago, before working with the CIA in Afghanistan, and then again before he arrived in the U.S. in 2021. Those examinations involved both the National Counterterrorism Center as well as the CIA, the person said.
Lakanwal was also granted asylum earlier this year, a process that would have brought its own scrutiny, according to #AfghanEvac, a coalition that supported the relocation effort — an assertion the White House did not dispute.
But no amount of vetting can forestall every awful possibility of violence.
Similarly, we can’t even say what led our Crusader-tatted Secretary of Defense to personally order the murder of two men who survived the first murderboat operation on September 2.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.
A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.
The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.
Trump claims these murderboat operations combat drug trafficking. That was always suspect. Not only are many of the people killed at most low-level shippers, but killing traffickers was less useful than capturing them.
And Trump’s promise to pardon former President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was a major drug trafficker, suggests Trump is not so much opposed to drug trafficking, he just wants a cut.
What we do know about Hegseth, the man who ordered defenseless men to be murdered, is that the Fox News host repeatedly failed efforts to vet him — first when he was excluded from defending the Capitol after January 6, and then the multiple warnings of abuse, incompetence, and addiction reviewed during his confirmation process.
And so it was that Pete Hegseth happily uprooted Sarah Beckstrom from her home to serve as a prop for Trump’s authoritarian theater, where she was as predicted, targeted.
[M]ilitary commanders had warned that their deployment represented an easy “target of opportunity” for grievance-based violence. The troops, deployed in an effort to reduce crime, are untrained in law enforcement; their days are spent cleaning up trash and walking the streets in uniform. Commanders, in a memo that was included in litigation challenging the high-visibility mission in D.C., argued that this could put them in danger. The Justice Department countered that the risk was merely “speculative.” It wasn’t. There are costs to performatively deploying members of the military—one of which is the risk of endangering them.
Hegseth kept Beckstrom deployed even after Judge Jia Cobb ruled, six days before Beckstrom was shot, that state governors, including WV’s Patrick Morrisey, don’t have the authority to send their Guard to DC without being invited by DC.
[T]he out-of-state National Guards are likely operating in the District in a manner contrary to law. Under section 502(f), state law defines the permissible use of the National Guard under state control—i.e., which missions the governors can order their units to conduct. Here, the state governors whose units are currently operating in the District lack authority to order these missions because the District has not properly sought their aid under D.C. law and the EMAC.
This vetting failure, Pete Hegseth, happily obeyed Trump’s order to bring even more Guard troops to DC, whose mission of “crime deterrence and passive patrolling” will now require more Metropolitan Police Department effort to protect the Guard from being targeted again.
Two alleged murderers brought demons with them from Afghanistan to the US. Both together got a young woman with all her dreams and life ahead of her killed.
And yet we’re not removing the more obvious vetting problem to prevent further disasters.
OMG, thank you EW. Trump does not care about drug trafficking. “Drugs” are merely a pretext to throw around performative dominance: blabbing about force and then illegally killing people for no demonstrable reason. If he cared about drug trafficking one of his first acts in office would not have been pardoning Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road proprietor who trafficked more drugs than any fisherman in a boat in the Caribbean could in a lifetime.
Trump is a terrorist (or wannabe) who needs to kill in order to maintain the fear that keeps him powerful. Of course he has mostly given the operational details over to psychologically damaged or defective henchpersons like Stephen Miller and Hegseth and Kristi Noem, but the original impulses are Trump’s own. And they do indeed include murder–if not on Fifth Avenue, then ever closer to it.
An excellent analysis, but it would be irresponsible not to speculate that Hagueseth’s personal demon of compensatory hypermasculinity long predated his time in Afghanistan.
Thank you. I was thinking the same thing but forgot to mention it. That type and degree of personality deformation does not, in my experience, arise from experiences in (even early) adulthood.
This also applies to Kristi Noem, whose willingness (eagerness?) to shoot her own puppy–and goat–may have disqualified her as a VP candidate, but surely kept her in Trump’s quiver as someone with the Right Stuff for a cabinet of killers.
Pete Hegseth on Sept. 5 2025, at the rebranding of the DOD in the Oval Office declared our military would use, “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality; violent effect, not politically correct.” Let the War Crimes begin.
Weird that Hegseth seems to have forgotten that he is in America, that no administration lasts more than four years, and that the next administration may have excellent reasons for prosecuting him for murder. In other words, he seems to be acting as if he will always have the power he has this morning, rather than meditating on the fact that he will one day have to relinquish that power.
2 thoughts- Rep Maria Salazar plainly said a couple of days ago, at a press conference with Steve Scalice and someone else prominent I don’t remember who, that what is happening with Venezuela is about their government letting “our oil companies” onto their land to take their oil.
Can Hegseth’s former military branch reinstate him to active duty so they can court martial him? Now, or in 3 years?
Thank you for this article and your always amazing and necessary insight.
One thing about the GOP to keep in mind: Someone is *always* saying the quiet part out loud. And in public. To the press.
The trick is getting the press to pay attention and report it.
Taking their oil = another war crime
I wonder if someone pitched this theft as possible, reasonable, and parallel to Trump’s desire to take Syria’s oil.
Another in the series titled “Taking their oil = another war crime”
“Yes, the Iraq War was a war for oil, and it was a war with winners: Big Oil.
It has been 10 years since Operation Iraqi Freedom’s bombs first landed in Baghdad. And while most of the U.S.-led coalition forces have long since gone, Western oil companies are only getting started.
Before the 2003 invasion, Iraq’s domestic oil industry was fully nationalized and closed to Western oil companies. A decade of war later, it is largely privatized and utterly dominated by foreign firms….”
https://www.cnn.com/2013/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-oil-juhasz/
Venezuela’s oil industry has been nationalized since 1976.
Is there a statute of limitations on murder?
No, and FWIW on an earlier query, Hegseth can be recalled for a general court martial more reasonably than Mark Kelly can. He was a MN NG officer and is probably at least on the inactive list. So, he can be tried for murder, as can every military person in the chain of command that did the deed, especially the double tap.
The Geneva Conventions provide the legal rationale, and even if one believes these were enemy combatants (I do not), they got POW status once their ability to fight back became inoperative. You can’t just shoot prisoners. As a ratified treaty, the Geneva Conventions also have Constitutional status.
As for our alleged DC shooter, I have to wonder how he got to DC from Washington state without detection by DHS with its CBP and ICE goons, or Kash Patel’s FBI. Did he drive, fly, or what? I find it hard to believe he left no paper/electronic trail that he was on the move, and since the much ballyhooed crackdown on Muslims has been going for a while (including asylum seekers) I suspect we’ve seen another example of Convict-1’s incompetence in keeping America safe. This is what happens when Noem prioritizes easy pickings over doing the job right.
I read at AP that he drove. That’s several days of travel. Clearly all those license-plate readers aren’t useful.
One of the most abhorrent aspects of government by Trump is the floating of conspiracies to explain all that happens. That said, knowing the CIA is under Ratcliffe leads me to consider whether Lakanwal was sent from Washington to DC on a mission to create a false flag event. The peculiar circumstances surrounding the Butler shooting also contribute to my believe that there is zero presumption of regularity that can be afforded this regime.
Google is your friend. Answer: no, not in the US.
The formulaic reaction of Trump, Noem, Patel, etc. to awful news is to blame Biden and to make unsubstantiated and, usually wrong, claims. In the aftermath of the DC shooting, they all blamed Biden for admitting the shooter into the country without vetting. A day later the news media notes that he was vetted multiple times and, that while, he entered under a Biden program, he was granted asylum by the Trump Administration, after being vetted once again.
The news media seems to accept this knee jerk gaslighting by Trump and allies. And so they become complicit. The Administration’s gaslighting is an important story in itself because it means that Trump and his allies are inherently untrustworthy. Just as some federal judges are now no longer willing to give the DOJ the presumption of regularity in following the law, the news media needs to assume that Trump and his allies are not telling the truth. And to make sure its articles reflect the low level of trust.
The DC shooter may or may not have targeted the National Guard soldiers. But his presence in this country is blowback from 20 years of our involvement in Afghanistan. Blowback is a natural consequence of military adventurism. Trump and his allies probably don’t care.
I suspect we’ll learn more about motives, but I also wonder whether the recent posturing by the administration and its noise machine made it clear that he was no longer a friend who put his life on the line for us, but an enemy to be hunted down. His background in Afghanistan (he was one of our contract killers there, see LGM’s article on this) meant that deportation there was a death sentence so he acted as he was taught by the US. Still wrong, but knowing the why is important for future actions to stop this from happening.
We hear a lot about troops’ obligation to refuse to obey an illegal order. But I don’t know where in the UCMJ is the prohibition on *issuing* an illegal order. Must apply to Admiral Frank Bradley, at least?
Trump keeps railing about the millions killed in the Ukraine but he is really bloodthirsty here .
As to Ukraine, Timothy Snyder has a guest columnist, Nataliya Gumenyuk, on today’s post. Gumenyuk is a reporter who focuses on the Middle East and in Ukraine. She poses this provocative question:
In America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, we always root for the underdog, right? But what if Trump (and the billionaires) are supporting Goliath, not David?
https:// snyder.substack.com/p/what-if-trump-wants-goliath-to-win
None of the boats targeted by Hegseth have the range to make it to the US.
The Felon Guy seems to believe that the Caribbean is US-owned.
Lakanwal apparently had acquired the skills to commit murder more surely, swiftly, and unobtrusively. He chose to sacrifice his life and others to make a statement. What is it? It is surely not whatever Donald Trump’s fools claim it is.