1. United States
2. Va.
3. Letter

The Washington Post has reported that Pete Hegseth personally ordered U.S. forces to “kill everybody” on a small wooden boat off the coast of Trinidad on September 2. What the Post reports is almost too grotesque to absorb. After the first U.S. missile ripped the boat apart and set it burning, commanders watched on a live drone feed as two survivors clung desperately to the charred wreckage. They were unarmed. They were wounded. They were no threat to anyone. And so, according to two officials with direct knowledge of the strike, the Special Operations commander overseeing the operation ordered a second missile. It hit the water and blew those two men apart. Instead of telling Congress that the second strike was designed to finish off wounded survivors, Pentagon officials claimed it was to “remove a navigation hazard.” The Post quotes Todd Huntley, a former Special Operations military lawyer now at Georgetown Law, saying exactly what any first-year law student would immediately recognize: because the United States is not legally “at war” with drug traffickers, killing the people on that boat “amounts to murder.” Even if a war did exist, Huntley notes, the order to kill wounded, unarmed survivors “would in essence be an order to show no quarter,” which is defined under the Geneva Conventions as a war crime. This isn’t an obscure legal debate. This is basic civilization. Armed states do not execute helpless people in the water. And yet somehow, this is now U.S. policy. The boat strike on September 2 was not a one–off. The Post reports that since that first attack, Trump and Hegseth have ordered more than 20 similar missile strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing at least 80 people. The administration insists the victims were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. But in classified briefings to Congress, Pentagon officials have not provided even one single verified name of a trafficker or gang leader they’ve killed. Lawmakers from both parties say they’ve been shown nothing beyond grainy videos of small boats being destroyed from the air. If these men had truly been high–value cartel operatives, Trump would be parading names and photos across every rally stage in America. The silence tells its own story. Experts warn that many of the dead may not have been traffickers at all. They may have been border–crossing migrants, subsistence fishermen, or small–scale smugglers whose crimes did not remotely justify summary execution. International human rights groups are already calling these killings extrajudicial and illegal. Some foreign governments are asking whether the United States has effectively created a free-fire zone over parts of the Caribbean, and several have limited intelligence sharing with us for fear of being complicit in prosecutable war crimes and crimes against humanity. The strike on September 2 is not just a policy failure; it’s a moral collapse. If the Post’s reporting is accurate — and multiple congressional offices say it is consistent with what whistleblowers have told them — then the United States has engaged in the deliberate killing of wounded, unarmed men floating in the sea. That is the kind of conduct that topples governments, triggers war-crimes investigations, and leaves scars on nations for generations. Nobody elected Donald Trump or Pete Hegseth to serve as judge, jury, and executioner for impoverished people in wooden boats. Nobody gave them the authority to murder suspects without trial. And nobody gave them the right to lie to Congress about it. Congress must not let this pass. These allegations demand immediate public hearings, subpoena power, and full investigative authority. If Hegseth gave an order to “kill everybody,” he must be removed and prosecuted. If U.S. commanders falsified reports to mislead Congress and the public, they must be held accountable. And if Donald Trump approved or encouraged these actions, then impeachment and criminal referral are not optional: they’re required to defend the rule of law.