What Melissa Corrigan, she/her and Nick Paro walked us through is nothing short of a five-alarm fire for anyone who cares about the rule of law, the U.S. military, or basic human decency. This isn’t some abstract policy dispute. This is the Department of Defense ordering sailors to delete evidence of living, wounded human beings rescued after an unlawful boat strike — and a group of brave service members refusing, pushing back, and documenting exactly how wrong it was. Hello, #DeleteGate.
Melissa and David Shuster previously reported on the brewing scandal in this piece:
Melissa starts by laying out how this bombshell landed in her lap: a trusted DOD source sent her a document 46 days prior, describing what happened aboard the USS Iwo Jima on October 17. And from the moment she saw it, the veteran in her kicked in. Orders to delete anything — especially photos and video of detainees — are a giant, screaming red klaxon.
She knew instantly this wasn’t just a story; this was a moral emergency. Her first priority was protecting the whistleblowers who risked their careers to come forward. Through a quiet chain of veterans, she got the document into the hands of the Senate Armed Services Committee before anyone ever said a word publicly.
That’s how you do it when the stakes are this high.
Then Nick — Army sergeant, trained interrogator, expert on detainee procedures — breaks down just how profoundly illegal all of this is. The United States is not in a congressionally authorized armed conflict with Venezuela. No war declared, no authorization, no oversight, no nothing.
Which means every person seized at sea is legally a civilian until proven otherwise, not some magically self-justifying “narco-terrorist.” And the law — U.S. law, military law, international law — could not be clearer: you document everything. You collect biometrics. You record medical status. You keep chain-of-custody logs. You do not delete evidence. You do convene a competent tribunal. None of that happened.
Instead, someone — almost certainly above the Admiral level — ordered everything wiped. And the enlisted sailors and Marines on that ship knew immediately it was wrong. They fought it. They went to JAG. And they were overridden.
Nick had previously, graciously, allowed us to republish a story he’d written about “Unprivileged Belligerents”:
Melissa points out the devastating downstream consequences. One of the detainees was returned to Colombia basically comatose. Another was released by Ecuador because the U.S. had no evidence he’d done anything wrong. Think about that: if these men were the “narco-terrorists” the Pentagon claims, they would have been paraded around as proof.
Instead, the Defense Department destroyed the only documentation that could have helped their own argument — or cleared the innocent. That’s not just suspicious; that’s catastrophic leadership failure.
They both hammer the heart of the issue: this isn’t on the lower-ranked service members. They tried to do everything right. This is a top-down moral collapse under Pete Hegseth and whoever in the Trump orbit green-lit these illegal strikes. And let’s be clear: if a private citizen killed 85 people with no legal authority, we wouldn’t debate terminology — we’d call it murder.
Melissa and Nick end with a call to action: whistleblowers have legal avenues (like the Orders Project), Congress has the responsibility to intervene, and journalists — especially veteran-journalists — have the obligation to keep shining light on this. Because this isn’t just about foreign policy.
It’s about whether the United States still follows its own laws or lets a handful of political arsonists use the military like a video game.
A game we’re all losing.
