Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on September 26 that twenty men who were awarded the Medal of Honor for their participation in the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre would keep their medals, despite more than a century of controversy over them.

The defense secretary who preceded Hegseth, General Lloyd Austin, had ordered a review of the awarding of those medals to “ensure no awardees were recognized for conduct inconsistent with the nation’s highest military honor.” Hegseth called the men “brave soldiers” and said: “We’re making it clear that [the soldiers] deserve those medals.”

It’s fitting that Hegseth, a political appointee whose tenure has been marked by incompetence, would defend the awarding of those particular Medals of Honor, because they were awarded to cover up the incompeten

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