Pete Hegseth yearns for a tribunal.
On Dec. 1, it was confirmed by the White House that the United States conducted a second strike on an alleged drug boat off the coast of Venezuela Sept. 2 that killed the survivors of a previous strike.
Lawmakers and legal military experts have subsequently scrutinized whether the second attack could constitute a war crime. Most of whom, including myself — if you couldn’t tell by the article’s title — are calling Hegseth a war criminal.
The question about whether it was Hegseth himself who ordered the U.S. Navy to “kill everybody” has also been floated — half-jokingly, half-terrifyingly — and thus putting him, the Pentagon and the Trump administration under fire. In light of that, Hegseth has shifted the blame of the “lawful” and “justified” strikes on purported “narco-terrorists” made by U.S Navy four-star Adm. Mitch Bradley.
Comforting, isn’t it? Knowing that for those in the Department of Defense, even the secretary of sefense won’t have your back. Even if you are a four-star officer.
On Dec. 6, however, at the Reagan National Defense Forum, Hegseth doubled down and defended the military actions against the alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, saying they show “the strength of American resolve.”
It takes a special kind of moral rudderlessness to not only watch but justify and throw someone under the bus for the obliteration of two people posing zero threat, clinging to the wreckage of one of the supposed drug boats and still herald it as evidence of “American resolve.”
What a sick joke.
The senseless murder of the survivors by this moral vacuum of an administration should make the stomachs of every American churn. We’ve seen this play out with things from the My Lai Massacre to the Abu Ghraib scandal, only for it to be brushed aside once the news cycle moved on.
Not sure if this makes it better or worse, but you would think that Hegseth can’t be convicted or designated a war criminal since we are not at war, given these strikes are done without Congressional approval, as the Trump administration declared that the U.S is in a “non-international armed conflict,” right?
No.
Following the War Crimes Act of 1996 and Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which the War Crimes Act incorporates, “intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities” and “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds” constitute the international community’s most straightforward red lines.
These pieces of law, just like any other guardrails governing armed conflict — keyword: armed conflict — exist for a reason: They are the baseline moral and legal expectations governing every country, including the U.S., of military conduct in any armed conflict — keyword, again: armed conflict — declared war or not.
The Trump administration’s flimsy framing of a “non-international armed conflict” with shadowy “narco-terrorists” — a designation slapped on Venezuelan gangs like Tren de Aragua without a shred of congressional say — doesn’t magically legitimize executions at sea.
If anything, it exposes the slum of a president bypassing Article I of the Constitution to wage his own private war, all while his handpicked fox in the defense henhouse, Hegseth, flaunts it on.
Designation aside and solely looking at it from a humanitarian standpoint, the facts still remain: the survivors of the first strike were unarmed, they were incapacitated, they were clinging to debris in open water and they were not firing weapons, maneuvering or resisting capture. They were, in every sense, recognized by the aforementioned international humanitarian law as noncombatants.
So yes, Hegseth yearns for a tribunal. For when the day comes when the muddy water clears and the videos drop unredacted, justice will be done, though the heavens fall. The survivors’ blood isn’t on Bradley’s hands alone; it’s on the guy who set the lethal tone, watched the sparks fly and then pivoted to podium-pounding bravado.
This is egregious recklessness wrapped in red, white and blue rhetoric. Should we somehow let it slide by claiming “narco-terrorists” as a get-out-of-The Hague-free card, we’re not just excusing war crimes — we are authoring them.
