How a single order — “Kill them all” — became the center of the most essential accountability trial in a generation. The story is fiction—but the path to it, shaped by the 2028 election, is alarmingly real.
By Bear Howard
Sedona, AZ — Prologue:
This story imagines a future America—2029—finally pulling itself back from a precipice it had pretended not to see. A new administration, carried into office by a landslide, confronts a truth too long ignored: power left unchecked will eventually turn against the innocent. And so Congress creates something that feels both radical and overdue—a tribunal built to judge the actions of those who believed the law could never reach them.
We tell this story now, in 2025, because it is not fantasy. It is a warning. The difference between a 2029 in which a nation demands accountability and a 2029 in which no one dares to speak of the crimes committed in its name depends entirely on who holds power after the 2028 election. One future investigates the truth; the other buries it. One restores the rule of law; the other smothers it beneath obedience.
This tribunal is only possible in a country that refuses to surrender its conscience. Whether such a country will exist in 2029 is the question the next three years must answer.
The Story:
The tribunal that opened in early 2029 marked a turning point in American political life. After a landslide election that restored a rule-of-law administration, Congress created a hybrid domestic–international court to investigate and prosecute senior officials who had used the machinery of the state to commit unlawful violence. The Special Tribunal for Unlawful Executive Actions—its very name a rebuke to years of eroded norms—was modeled, deliberately and soberly, in the shadow of Nuremberg. It served as a reminder that democracies must, at times, hold their own leaders to account before the world is forced to do it for them.
The most riveting of the tribunal’s early cases was the prosecution of former Secretary of War Pete Hegseth for actions taken during the Trump administration’s 2025 Caribbean strike campaign. What had once been brushed aside as a “national security incident” now appeared in the harsh clarity of fact: a cabinet officer had allegedly ordered the killing of defenseless men who posed no threat.
The central moment came on September 2, 2025. After a SEAL Team 6 missile strike destroyed a small boat in the Caribbean, two men survived—burned, dazed, clinging to debris as the ocean pulled at them. They were not armed. They were not resisting. They were simply alive. Testimony, call logs, and drone footage showed that Hegseth was informed of their condition and issued a brutal directive: “Kill them all.” A surveillance operation had, with three words, become an execution.
The charges reflected the gravity of that decision: murder of protected persons; issuing an illegal “no survivors” order; using military force outside any lawful armed conflict; deceiving Congress; and failing as a commander to prevent or correct unlawful acts. The unedited drone footage—far longer than the sanitized 29-second clip released in 2025—showed the initial strike, the burning wreckage, the survivors struggling, a long pause, and finally a second explosion that ended their lives. The courtroom’s reaction was immediate. Shock. Then quiet. Then came the realization that the United States government had nearly succeeded in hiding what had happened.
Two JSOC officers, testifying under limited immunity, described the directive as absolute. One said the second strike existed “only to comply” with Hegseth’s order. Legal experts emphasized that even in authorized war zones, killing injured survivors is illegal. Outside a warzone, it is murder. Diplomatic cables from Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico suggested that at least some victims may have been fishermen or trafficked migrants—noncombatants caught in a chain of decisions made far from them and utterly indifferent to their humanity.
The defense argued that the United States was engaged in a shadow conflict with narcoterror networks and that internal legal memos authorized the strikes. But the Tribunal rejected that claim. There was no recognized armed conflict. Executive memos cannot bless an inherently unlawful act. And the records made clear that the intent was not self-defense, not national security, but silence—the elimination of witnesses to an operation that should never have begun.
On April 22, 2029, the Tribunal found Pete Hegseth guilty on all counts. Chief Justice Mariana Ortiz delivered the verdict in a voice that carried not only judgment, but grief: “The Secretary’s words—‘kill them all’—transformed a lawful interdiction into an act of extrajudicial execution. No democracy can survive officials who kill beyond law, beyond conflict, and beyond accountability.” Hegseth received a thirty-five-year sentence, with possible supervised release after twenty-eight.
The verdict’s significance extended far beyond one man. Legal scholars soon called it the Caribbean Precedent—the moment the United States finally confronted how deeply the normalization of unreviewed lethal force had seeped into executive culture after the early 2000s. The ruling drew bright lines: that lethal force outside armed conflict requires oversight; that spoken directives carry legal weight; and that no official is insulated from the consequences of unlawful killing.
In its final effect, the Hegseth case delivered a stark reminder: when government officials grow comfortable killing non-threatening human beings in distant waters without scrutiny or consequence, democracy is already in decay. The tribunal did not reverse every harm. But it stopped the rot—and forced the nation to confront what it nearly lost.
Epilogue:
The Hegseth verdict was only the beginning. The tribunal proceeded to assemble the most sweeping accountability case since the mid-20th century—a collective trial of senior cabinet members and high-ranking officials from the second Trump administration. Among those called to answer for their roles were figures responsible for illegal surveillance programs,
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