Pete Hegseth's Illegal 'Kill Everyone' Order in the Caribbean Strikes Led to the Cold-Blooded Execution of Survivors
The Trump administration has been acting as if it expects never to experience any consequences, ever, for its abuses of executive power. Yet it seems to be getting a little nervous about its policy of air strikes against supposed smuggling boats in the Caribbean, especially now that the evidence indicates that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gave an obviously illegal order.
The Washington Post got the scoop with a key detail:
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. …
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 US, 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 Operations forces for seven years at the height of the US counterterrorism campaign.
Even if the US 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.
A “no quarter” order is an actual technical term for an order to kill people who pose no threat. This is so obviously and seriously illegal—U-boat officers were literally sentenced to death at Nuremberg for doing this in World War II—that the administration is starting to panic.
Pete Hegseth is now nobly trying to shift the blame to the admiral who gave the direct order—but he can’t run, because everyone in the chain of command is on the hook for this, and not just under American law but under international law, where presidential pardons offer no protection.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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