|
 |
Pete Hegseth: “I watched that first strike live. As you can imagine at the Department of War, we’ve got a lot of things to do. So I didn’t stick around for the hour to two hours, whatever, where all the sensitive sight exploitation digitally occurs. I moved on to my next meeting. A couple hours later I learned ...”
That was the Secretary of Defense’s attempt, during today’s Cabinet meeting, to distance himself from events he has previously boasted of.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Hegseth was the TEA for the operation. TEA stands for Target Engagement Authority and refers to the person in the chain of command with the authority to approve the use of force and fire upon a target. The TEA can also stop the action—for instance, giving an order to hold fire to prevent a war crime from being committed. There is always a specific commander with this responsibility, and the WSJ says that here that it was the Secretary. If the reporting is correct, that makes the claim that he was too busy to “stick around” for the first use of lethal force in the Trump administration’s self-proclaimed war on narcoterrorism tough to believe.
In an Op Ed on Tuesday, titled “Shooting The Wounded On Drug Boats,” the Editorial Board at the conservative leaning Journal weighed in to say “The charge of deliberately killing the defenseless is serious enough to warrant a close look from Congress. That includes Mr. Hegseth giving an account under oath. The Administration so far seems to think it can ride out the story with ritual denunciations of the media.”
Conservative columnist George Will, writing in The Washington Post, did not mince words. Hegseth, he wrote, “seems to be a war criminal.”
 |
While experts debate whether the original “kill order” The Washington Post says Hegseth delivered ahead of the strike, directing that everyone on the boat should be killed, was legal or not, it’s clear that the “double tap,” the order to kill the two survivors of the first strike, was not. If we were at war, it was a war crime. If we were not, it was murder. We discussed this in the immediate wake of the Post’s report: The Moment To Pick A Side Has Come.
Hegseth might want to consider, in the words of MAGA, lawyering up. His comments today in the gold-streaked Oval Office may end up haunting him:
Q: So you didn’t see any survivors after that first strike?
HEGSETH: I did not personally see survivors. The thing was on fire. This is called the fog of war. This is what you in the press don’t understand. You sit in your air-conditioned offices and plant fake stories in the Washington Post
Q: On the second strike, you said it happened more than an hour after the first?
HEGSETH: I couldn’t tell you the exact amount of time
The military has a strong tradition of truth-telling in the most difficult circumstances. So information about who issued the order, why no one stopped it from being carried out despite the clear guidance in the Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual, and so forth, is all coming out. It’s only a matter of time. It’s clear that there are already people inside of the Department, the military, or both who want to make sure the story becomes public, or we wouldn’t know about it. Among the compelling reasons for congressional investigation is that military records of the strike, the documentary evidence of what in fact happened and who was involved, can be collected and an accurate picture of the events and who is responsible will emerge. Trump’s first impeachment happened because of the effort to hide the record of his not-so-perfect call with Ukraine’s president and the response of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who put his own career in jeopardy to tell the truth.
Trump dozed off at his Cabinet meeting today, as Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio looked on. Aaron Rupar shared that news and this image on social media. (If you don’t already follow him, he’s essential reading.)
 |
Trump told reporters who were present at the meeting that he wasn’t consulted in advance of the strikes, and even though they occurred back in September, he still hasn’t been fully briefed on them. That’s simply not credible. The echoes of first-term Trump distancing himself from people like George Papadopoulos, the aide Trump dismissed as a mere coffee boy, despite photographic evidence to the contrary, after he entered a plea deal during the Mueller investigation. “I have no idea who that guy is,” Trump said when that happened. Covfefe.
 |
Trump painted a similar picture in regard to the strikes today. “I didn’t know about the second strike. I didn’t know anything about the people,”