WAS A WAR CRIME COMMITTED IN AMERICA’S NAME?

“Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all” If WaPo reporting today is correct, Secretary Pete Hegseth should be charged with a war crime. On Sept 2 the US destroyed the first boat suspected of running drugs. Before the first missile was launched, Def Sec Pete Hegseth gave a verbal directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said. The boat was destroyed. And the Joint Special Operations commander followed the defense secretary’s order to leave no survivors even though, when the smoke cleared, two men clung to the demolished boat. A second strike was ordered to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water. The boat in the first strike was hit a total of four times, twice to kill the crew and twice more to sink it, four people familiar with the operation said. The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., these officials and experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any of the men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Ops forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign. Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law. Later in the day, Trump released a redacted 29-second surveillance drone video showing the attack. The video does not include any footage of the subsequent strike on the survivors. There are also gaps in the videos the administration has released of the strikes. Some show little beyond an initial violent explosion. There has been no public release of a subsequent strike video, and the Pentagon has not fulfilled a bipartisan request from lawmakers to see unedited footage — making it impossible to verify any of the administration’s claims. In classified briefings to members of Congress, Pentagon officials have not provided any specific names of traffickers or syndicate leaders they have targeted, lawmakers have said, nor have they publicly released further information beyond surveillance videos of the strikes themselves. As one Representative on the armed Services Committee who received a classified briefing from Pentagon officials said, “Mark my words: It may take some time, but Americans will be prosecuted for this, either as a war crime or outright murder.” Are you comfortable with the knowledge in your possession that that prediction won’t come to pass? Or more importantly are we watching the death of everything America is supposed to value? Humanity. Integrity. Justice. Murder will not make America great.