“Back in early September, he declared that the newly renamed Department of War would favor “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”
The secretary of war clearly meant it, judging from a story in The Washington Post. The paper reports that Hegseth issued verbal orders to the military forces striking suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean and Pacific to “kill everybody.”
When the inaugural strike in this campaign against a boat off the Trinidadian coast left two survivors clinging to the wreckage of the craft, the commander in charge of the operation, in accordance with Hegseth’s spoken directive, ordered a second strike to take them out too.
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The administration’s officially secret legal justification for these strikes asserts that “narco-terrorists” are using the money earned from trafficking drugs to finance their war against the United States and its allies. Suspected drug smugglers are therefore, it claims, a legitimate counter-terrorism target.
Many international law experts have retorted that the boats themselves pose no imminent threat to Americans, and that the people on board the boats are not combatants but suspected criminals who one would normally expect to be arrested, not executed.
The administration’s position “can justify almost anything the government wants to do to anyone,” wrote Reason’s Matthew Petti back in September.
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Even if one accepts the dubious idea that these strikes are legal, the second strike described in the Post report would violate the laws of war. More plainly, it would be murder.
An order to kill boat occupants no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations, told the Post.
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The Trump administration is using the military to target people suspected of breaking criminal laws against drug trafficking. It’s choosing to kill these suspected criminals when they pose to immediate threat to anyone, instead of simply arresting them.”
“Eight days after the September 2 operation that inaugurated President Donald Trump’s lethal military campaign against suspected drug boats, The Intercept reported that people who survived the initial missile strike were “killed shortly after in a follow-up attack.” On Friday, The Washington Post confirmed that account, saying the commander overseeing the operation, based on an oral directive from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to “kill everybody,” ordered a second strike on “two survivors” who “were clinging to the smoldering wreck.”
If that report is accurate, Reason’s Christian Britschgi notes, “the second strike on helpless survivors would add a degree of barbarism to the administration’s anti-drug campaign.” It also would further complicate the arguments that Trump has deployed to justify his unprecedented policy of summarily executing suspected drug smugglers, which so far has involved 21 attacks that killed 83 people in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. Even if you accept Trump’s dubious claim that the United States is engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with “narcoterrorists,” which supposedly means U.S. forces can legally attack vessels believed to be carrying illegal drugs, deliberately killing survivors would be contrary to the law of war.
“Both the giving and the execution of these orders” would “constitute war crimes, murder, or both,” the Former JAGs Working Group, which consists of lawyers who previously served in the military, said on Saturday. “If the U.S. military operation to interdict and destroy suspected narcotrafficking 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.”
The former military lawyers add that the situation is even graver “if the U.S. military operation is not an armed conflict of any kind.” In that case, they say, “these orders to kill helpless civilians clinging to the wreckage of a vessel our military destroyed would subject everyone from [the secretary of defense] down to the individual who pulled the trigger to prosecution under U.S. law for murder.””
Trump brags about deals that will save Medicare money by negotiating drug prices. He could do this due to a law signed by Biden that no Republicans supported.
Charter schools can cherry pick students by cherry picking parents. If the parents have the ability and willingness to show up at certain meetings at certain times, then their kids are likely to be better behaved and better students.
If reports are true, the Secretary of Defense broke the laws of war according to U.S. law by ordering killed, people in the water whose vessels had already been destroyed.
Also, because this war has not been authorized by Congress and criminal suspects are entitled to due process, not killed on suspicion, even those killed on the boat were murdered.
DOGE was a massive failure. It was run by arrogant people who didn’t think they needed to learn and understand the subject matter. DOGE misdiagnosed the problem. Fraud and waste isn’t the driver of the debt, legitimate payments to people for Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, and military spending, are the drivers. DOGE also broke the law. The executive cannot legally stop spending that has been passed by Congress and signed by a president.
DOGE did enduring harm to research. We lost valuable people who are hard to get back. The standing of the United States and its power to influence people through the State Department, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and foreign aid have been deeply damaged.