Welcome to the beat. I'm Ari Melbert. We begin with something that began serious, involves a tragedy, and now is a full-blown catastrophe on multiple levels for the Trump administration and also the United States Pentagon.

There are clouds clearly gathering around Pentagon Chief Hagseth. And we are getting the new details, which is partly a bad thing. There's a problem here.

And most people see that the government has a problem.

But there's also transparency, accountability, and even bipartisan pressure at work,

something that Donald Trump, on his worst autocratic days, has tried to argue, claim,

or pretend doesn't happen anymore, that he could be, as some of the

protesters say, a king not subject to oversight. And yet here we are dealing with matters of life

and death and war. And the oversight is, in a way, working because we're learning things.

Doesn't mean we're in the clear. I'm not telling you this is all fixed and some of the lives

lost are lost for good. But that brings me to how we are basically ending this week with some

chilling new details about the deadly strike that, according to legal experts and many veterans

who work in this space, appears on its face from the video evidence to constitute a war crime

committed by the United States under the Trump administration.

There are serious questions about the two shipwrecked survivors of what was that first attack and whether, once they were survivors, right, that's the term of art in law and combat.

We've all heard about having survivors of war and having detainees. If you think back

and you're not a legal expert, why do we have so many discussions about detainees, even in the

greatest wars, the World War II or the so-called war on terror, where we were told these terrorists

were terrible and they were terrible, and they were,

but if they were caught alive, we followed the rules, the Geneva Conventions.

You can think of examples where we didn't, and those were multi-year scandals, but in general,

we have detainees, we have survivors of war, enemy combatants, and the rest, because we don't execute everyone. I say that as the baseline to remind you why this is such a big deal.

The September 2nd attack involved on video the apparent killing or execution of those ship direct survivors.

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