Pete Hegseth’s ‘Kill Everyone’ Command Called a ‘War Crime’ by Conservative Commentator
If Secretary of War Pete Hegseth ordered U.S. troops to “kill everyone” aboard a boat suspected of transporting drugs off the coast of Venezuela, he committed a war crime, conservative commentator Andrew C. McCarthy wrote Saturday evening.
In a lengthy article for The National Review, McCarthy wrote: “If this occurred as described in the Post report, it would be, at best, a war crime under federal law. I say ‘at best’ because, as regular readers know, I believe that attacks on these suspected drug boats – without congressional authorization, under circumstances in which the boat operators pose no military threat to the United States, and given that narcotics trafficking is defined in the federal law as a crime rather than as a terrorist activity, much less as an act of war – are contrary to the law and that these killings are therefore not legitimate under the law or the armed conflict.
“I do not accept that the ship operators are enemy combatants, even if we forget that the administration has not proven that they were drug traffickers or members of designated foreign trade organizations,” he also wrote.
But even if they were members of the FTOS, which he described as an “untenable assertion,” it would still be “a war crime to intentionally kill combatants who have been rendered incapable of fighting. It is not permissible, under the laws and customs of honorable warfare, to order that no quarter be given – to apply deadly force to those who surrender or who are wounded, shipwrecked or incapable of fighting.”
Hegseth called the Post’s reporting “fake news” in a lengthy post shared on X.
“As we have said from the outset, and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be ‘lethal kinetic strikes,'” he wrote. “The stated intent is to stop deadly drugs, destroy narco ships, and kill the narco terrorists who are poisoning the American people. Every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a designated terrorist organization.”
He added: “Our current operations in the Caribbean are legal under U.S. and international law, with all of our actions consistent with the law of armed conflict – and approved by top military and civilian lawyers, up and down the chain of command. »
A Washington Post article this week claimed that Hegseth ordered U.S. troops to kill 11 people suspected of drug trafficking. The Pentagon has killed 80 people so far in a campaign the Post called “illegal.”
Former military lawyer Todd Huntley also described the potential killing as a war crime to the Post. The report was based on interviews with seven people who had “knowledge of the September 2 strike and the operation as a whole.”
