Let God sort ’em out
One would have to be culturally illiterate not to see it coming. Men like Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller would be comically cartoonish, B-movie villains if their statements and behaviors were the least bit funny. People are dead and disappeared. Men killed in the Caribbean on Sept 2 by U.S. forces were murdered, according to a statement released Saturday by “Former JAGs Working Group.”
Secretary Pete Hegseth gave verbal orders to kill everybody aboard a small boat in the Caribbean targeted as smuggling drugs, according to two unnamed sources “with direct knowledge of the operation.” The Washington Post reports that Donald Trump and the Pentagon claim that “the Sept. 2 strike targeted members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua but have not provided evidence to support those claims.”
Once a missile struck the boat, drone footage showed two survivors clinging to the burning wreckage. The Washington Post reported, “The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack [Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley, per the Post] … 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, unsurprisingly, declared the reporting “fake news.” The man with the Crusader tattoos called the story “fabricated, inflammatory and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland.”
The former JAGS presumably know more about the laws of war than a former Fox News Weekend host. “The Former JAGs Working Group unanimously considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both,” reads their statement:
- If the U.S. military operation to interdict and destroy suspected narcotraficking vessels
is a “non-international armed conflict,” as the Trump Administration suggests, orders to
“kill everybody,” which can reasonably be regarded as an order to give “no quarter,” and
to “double-tap” a target in order to kill survivors, are clearly illegal under international
law. In short, they are war crimes.- If the U.S. military operation is not an armed conflict of any kind, these orders to kill
helpless civilians clinging to the wreckage of a vessel our military destroyed would
subject everyone from SECDEF down to the individual who pulled the trigger to prosecution under U.S. law for murder.
A former Pentagon associate general counsel concurs, telling CNN that it is a crime either way you slice it:
“They’re breaking the law either way,” said Sarah Harrison, a former associate general counsel at the Pentagon who now serves as a senior analyst at the Crisis Group think tank. “They’re killing civilians in the first place, and then if you assume they’re combatants, it’s also unlawful — under the law of armed conflict, if somebody is ‘hors de combat’ and no longer able to fight, then they have to be treated humanely.”
Harvard Law Professor and former head of the Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush, Jack Goldsmith, writes at his Substack, “One can imagine stretching Article II of the Constitution to authorize the U.S. drug boat campaign.” One might also, he writes, “possibly, stretch the laws of war to say that attacks on the drug boats are part of a ‘non-international armed conflict,’ as OLC has reportedly concluded.”
But, Goldsmith concludes, “there can be no conceivable legal justification” for the killings reported by the Post. He quotes chapter and verse:
Section 5.4.7 of the DOD Law of War Manual says:
Prohibition Against Declaring That No Quarter Be Given. It is forbidden to declare that no quarter will be given. This means that it is prohibited to order that legitimate offers of surrender will be refused or that detainees, such as unprivileged belligerents, will be summarily executed. Moreover, it is also prohibited to conduct hostilities on the basis that there shall be no survivors, or to threaten the adversary with the denial of quarter. This rule is based on both humanitarian and military considerations. This rule also applies during non-international armed conflict.
Hegseth denies he gave the “kill everybody” order. Those who carried out the supposed non-order are not talking. Leaders of the House Armed Services Committee stated on Saturday that they intend to investigate. So does the Senate Armed Services Committee:
A top Republican senator, Roger Wicker, has joined his Democratic counterpart in calling for “vigorous oversight to determine the facts” of allegations that the military intentionally killed survivors of a boat strike.
“The Committee has directed inquiries to the Department, and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances,” said Sen. Wicker, R-Miss., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
What makes the Sept. 2 strike even more curious is an Oct. 18 statement from Donald Trump. Survivors of a strike on an alleged drug-carrying submarine were captured and would be “returned to their Countries of origin, Ecuador and Colombia, for detention and prosecution.” But survivors from an alleged drug boat from Venezuela had to die. Wouldn’t survivors of an alleged Tren de Aragua drug boat be a source of valuable intelligence on cartel smuggling operations? The committees will surely ask that question.
Hegseth has directed the killing of dozens in the Caribbean, possibly illegally, including Columbian fishermen. Secretary Kristi Noem’s masked Customs and Border Patrol and ICE have launched a reign of terror against Latinos and other non-white U.S. residents. Both the undocumented and U.S. citizens have been impacted. Donald Trump wants and chief advisor Stephen Miller is likely directing deportations without due process, defying court orders, instituting a new kind of extraordinary rendition, and now targeting duly naturalized citizens for denaturalization and deportation.
If this were a movie, they’d plainly be the villains. They are making all of us villains by proxy. This is the part of the movie where the heroes stand up and fight back. That’s you.
Update: Oh, by the way
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