The News You Need on Tuesday, March 24th, 2026.
The news you need today from Scott Horton and Charles Kaiser.
Why is the DOD so quiet about the Minab girls’ school bombing?
The US missile attack on a school in Minab looks like a war crime
Prospect
Scott: Even if the school was not deliberately targeted as a school, there is still a requirement under international law for an attacker to do what they can to make sure they know what they are attacking. As Professor Janina Dill of Oxford explains, an attacker has to do everything feasible to verify the status of a targeted object. And here it is significant that the weapon of choice was a guided missile: this was a pre-selected target. The Minab double-strike falls into a category of reckless negligence that constitutes a war crime even if intentionality is not proven. Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote on this in a column for The Guardian earlier in the week, but this piece in The Prospect provides a more detailed discussion.
Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 instrument using five different filters
Charles: A small section of the Veil Nebula, the debris of a supernova remnant formed roughly 8,000 years ago by the death of a star 20 times the mass of our sun. As massive stars tend to do, it “lived fast and died young,” ending its life in a cataclysmic release of energy. The shockwaves and debris from that supernova sculpted the Veil Nebula’s delicate wisps of ionized gas. In this image, red corresponds to hydrogen, green to sulfur, and blue to oxygen.
S&P swings by $3 trillion in 56 minutes
Scott: Just as markets were opening Monday morning, Trump abruptly walked back his ultimatum to Iran. A number of sharp market observers note a series of high volume, extremely suspicious trades were executed just before Trump’s walk back. This constitutes prima facie evidence of market manipulation by Trump administration insiders, again. Adam Cochran has collected details on the specific highly suspicious trades.
In The Guardian, Princeton Professor Jan-Werner Müller gives us the Broadside we need against an increasingly violent and utterly lawless regime
Pete Hegseth is promoting a nihilist cult of death
The Guardian
Charles: Müller writes: “It appears that members of Trump’s cabinet get chosen not despite their endorsements of violence, but because of them. Pete Hegseth was primarily known as a dapper TV host willing to defend war crimes. Markwayne Mullin is apparently still proud of challenging a witness to a fistfight at a Senate hearing; he also refuses to apologize for “understanding” an assault on fellow senator Rand Paul. Never before has an administration so openly glorified outright killing as the current White House propaganda machine does with its obscene snuff videos of the Iran war and the destruction of small boats.
Unlike with fascism in the 20th century, there is no attempt to promote or symbolically reward self-sacrifice—it is just video game-style killing at a distance, justified not with strategic objectives, but with seemingly uncontrollable emotions (“fury” and a thirst for vengeance). And all accompanied by open admissions that basic laws of warfare will be broken. Actual soldiers with longstanding codes of honor, as opposed to the fantasy world Hegseth is creating with his cliche-ridden chatter on TV, would not punch enemies when they are down.
Trump has never hidden his desire for domination and the related willingness to have his followers engage in violence, from the call to rough up people at his rallies to the pardons of even the most brutal January 6 insurrectionists…
It seems that Hegseth and company are also promoting an ultimately nihilist cult of death. But it celebrates killing by pressing a button thousands of miles away; meanwhile, America’s own dead are dishonored, as Trump has used their repatriation to display his Maga merch and fundraise off the victims of war.
Hungary’s PM Became Fansastically Wealthy by Plunder and Looting
How Viktor Orbán’s oligarchs reaped billions in public contracts
Financial Times
Scott: The fascist international is assembling in Budapest to show the support for Viktor Orbán. In the past few days this includes the Pétainiste leader Marine Le Pen, Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. JD Vance will hit the campaign trail alongside Orbán in just a few days. Why do they love Orbán so much? In part it’s because of his success in maintaining power while robbing Hungary blind. Here the FT offers a remarkable exposé of how Viktor Orbán and his inner circle of 13 became fantastically wealthy by plunder and looting, the old fashioned way. Few people in Hungary know this because he completely dismantled and took control of Hungarian broadcast media.
‘Vile’ Trump condemned for gloating over Robert Mueller death
The Guardian
Charles: Trump had bone spurs, Mueller, a Purple Heart.
Donald Trump: “Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!”
Rick Wilson to Trump: “When you die, Americans, and people around the world, will dance in the streets for weeks because you’re a low, degenerate, criminal fraud who left a full stain on the presidency.”
In the Times Tim Weiner wrote a a good obituary of Mueller which pinpointed the moment the special prosecutor lost his nerve during his investigation of Trump’s connections to the Russians:
“Mr. Mueller sought to interview the president under oath, to determine why in fact he had fired Mr. Comey.
At this crucial juncture, Mr. Mueller hesitated.
He did not issue a grand-jury subpoena to compel Mr. Trump’s sworn testimony. He settled for written questions, and allowed the White House lawyers to limit them to events before Mr. Trump became president.
When the responses finally arrived on Nov. 20, 2018, Mr. Trump failed to respond to almost every crucial question, citing a failure of memory. Mr. Mueller once again sought an interview on 10 key areas of his investigation. Mr. Trump’s lawyers refused. And so the investigation never entered the minefield of the president’s mind.”
But Mueller still confirmed the vast connections between the Trump campaign and the Russians:
“The report concluded that Russia had systemically sought to help Mr. Trump win the election, and that the candidate and his campaign had encouraged their clandestine assistance. It laid out 10 cases in which the president and his aides had sought to impede the F.B.I. investigation. Its key passage read: “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
My own personal favorite Mueller moment came at the end of 2008. In this period The New York Times ran a long series of stories planted by CIA agents who pretended that torture had produced important life-saving information. The stories were false and Mueller, then the FBI director, said so: he told David Rose torture had never produced any information preventing any new terrorist attacks in the United States.
In 2014, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence closed the book on this subject with its final, much delayed report on the CIA: “The CIA’s brutal interrogations of terrorism suspects from 2002 to 2008 led to false confessions and fabricated information, produced no useful intelligence about imminent terrorist attacks and were so badly run that the CIA lost track of captives, according to a long-delayed Senate report released Tuesday,” as the LA Times reported.
Remarkably, in his most recent book about the CIA, Tim Weiner rejected the Senate Committee’s conclusion. Instead he wrote that it caused CIA veterans “seething fury…It required an open mind and an even temper to consider that two opposing ideas might be true: that the CIA had tortured prisoners, and that it also had saved lives.” The problem is, neither Weiner nor anyone else has ever provided any hard evidence that the second half of that sentence is true.
Scott and I first bonded twenty years ago when we were both blogged about the torture that we violently opposed.
Trump Predicts ‘Palestinian Leader’ Chuck Schumer Will Lose Next Primary
Yahoo News
Scott: “The Democrats are putting our country at great risk during this period of time, a period that they call a war. They call it a war, we call it a military operation,” Trump speaking in Memphis, TN. Trump is quoting Putin, who calls his Ukraine war a “special military operation” (Специaльная воeнная оперaция, спецоперaция for short) and imprisons anyone who says it is a war. Trump also signals that he will soon crack down on all criticism of his “military operation” by Democrats.
Supreme Court appears ready to limit mail-in balloting ahead of midterms
The Washington Post
Charles: Unraveling democracy, one decision at a time.
The Washington Post: “The Supreme Court on Monday appeared likely to embrace a conservative challenge to tallying mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, a move that could upend election procedures in states across the country as voters prepare to cast ballots in the midterm elections.”
Your Online Moment of Zen
Bob Dylan - Tomorrow Is a Long Time
Bob Dylan Town Hall April 1963
Charles: When I told Bob this was one of my favorite songs, it seemed to be the only time I might have impressed him.
“Elvis did it too!” he replied.
Edited by Imogen Sayers.
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