The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraftfollowed the boat, the more confident intelligenceanalysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive,according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.
A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.
The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.
Hegseth’s order, which has not been previously reported, adds another dimension to the campaign against suspected drug traffickers. Some current and former U.S. officials and law-of-war experts have said that the Pentagon’s lethal campaign — which has killed more than 80 people to date — is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to future prosecution.
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 ofthe men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations 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.
Hegseth has always been a huge fan of war crimes. He’s the guy who persuaded Trump to pardon war criminals in his first term. (He did it eagerly.)
I guess enough Americans think murderous sociopaths are fine leaders as long as they don’t have to pay a few more cents for eggs that they wanted to put them back in power. No one should be surprised by any of this.
We’ve never been perfect, far from it. Slavery, Jim Crow, all of it should have been a clue. But I think we’re seeing now that it’s such an indelible part of our national character that any progress we think we have made will be erased once we get a taste of blood. And we are so powerful now that I wonder if the only answer will be for the entire world to band together in opposition. That possibility seems very remote right now.
The American people can stop it. But it’s going to take courage and commitment similar to what the original revolutionaries mustered to extricate themselves from their king. They’ll have to see that there’s even more at stake than “affordability.” I’m still hopeful that they will. What choice do we have?