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After spending several months bragging about killing people by bombing random boats in the Caribbean, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is suddenly far less interested in taking credit for the “double tap” strike that occurred on September 2.
Why is Hegseth backing off? Turns out that even Republicans are not so comfy with murdering survivors of a boat strike.
Yesterday, CNN reported that after the initial September 2 strike killed nine people, a second one 41 minutes later killed two survivors who “did not appear to have radio or other communications devices,” which undercuts any notion they were legitimate targets. The Washington Post previously reported that Hegseth gave a spoken directive to “kill everybody” on the vessel.
It’s tempting to say that Hegseth is a war criminal committing an ongoing series of war crimes, with the killing of survivors being especially horrific. But as George Will — not exactly a liberal anti-war type — put it, he “seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.”
It’s a testament to how egregiously indefensible Hegseth’s actions are that we now find common cause with George Will. (A cautionary note to the reader: this only gets worse below, where we are forced to nod along with John Yoo.)
There is no legal controversy
When there’s no war, you aren’t committing war crimes when you kill people indiscriminately. You’re just a straight-up murderer. And Hegseth and everyone else participating in these boat strikes are responsible for the deaths of 87 people on 23 boats (and counting).
Sure, President Donald Trump has tried to invent a war for Hegseth to fight, saying that the United States is in a “non-international armed conflict with these designated terrorist organizations” and therefore “we must use force in self-defense and defense of others against the ongoing attacks by these designated terrorist organizations.”
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Trump even got the Office of Legal Counsel to whip up an opinion insisting that his Article II authority allows him to say, out of thin air, that we’re in an armed conflict with gangs who traffic drugs. The opinion justifies this by claiming cartels are selling drugs so they can make money to commit violence and extortion.
Let’s pretend, for a moment, that cartels are indeed packing these boats with thousands of pounds of drugs and setting sail for the United States — a thing which is very much in doubt. There’s still no evidence that Venezuelans traffic fentanyl to the US in any meaningful amount. The DOJ has never indicted anyone for trafficking fentanyl from Venezuela.
The administration has, of late, shifted to saying that the boats are carrying cocaine to our shores, but that’s equally unlikely. Roughly five percent of Colombian cocaine goes through Venezuela, but most of that goes to the Caribbean or Europe. It’s just as likely that all we are doing is bombing fishing boats and killing fishermen.