Remember how Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth got all publicly butthurt a couple of weeks ago about a group of congressional Democrats advising members of the U.S. military that they’re bound by law to not carry out illegal orders?
Turns out, the Democrats weren’t speaking theoretically about there being illegal orders.
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A report in the Washington Post has it that the first in a series of missile strikes aimed at killing randos from Venezuela running small quantities of illegal narcotics on fishing boats, back on Sept. 2, left two survivors, and a Special Operations commander overseeing the attack ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions to “kill everybody.”
U.S. law and international law views killing even actual enemy combatants who have been rendered ineffective as a war crime – and we’re not accounting there for the fact that, randos running small quantities of illegal narcotics in fishing boats aren’t actual enemy combatants.
“If that reporting is true, it’s a clear violation of the DOD’s own laws of war, as well as international laws about the way you treat people who are in that circumstance, and so, this rises to the level of a war crime, if it’s true,” U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in an interview with CBS “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
Hegseth, of course, is trying to talk his way around being put on trial for murder, writing in a post on social media that the Trump administration’s current operations in the Caribbean “are lawful under both U.S. and international law, with all actions in compliance with the law of armed conflict – and approved by the best military and civilian lawyers, up and down the chain of command.”
Notably, nothing in his lengthy defense denied the key element in the Post’s reporting, that an order was given, and then carried out, to kill two neutralized randos clinging to life on what was left over from fishing boat that had already been decimated by a missile strike.
Hegseth tried to make it all sound kosher by referring to the strikes as “lethal” and “kinetic,” which won’t actually help either Hegseth or Admiral Mitch Bradley, the head of Special Forces Command, when they’re standing before the military tribunal.
Significant on that point is how Donald Trump appears to be trying to put distance between himself and Hegseth on this.
Yeah, sure, Trump’s first instinct, learned from sitting at the feet of Roy Cohn, is to deny everything – he told reporters that he doesn’t know what happened, and that “Pete said he did not want them, he didn’t even know what people were talking about. “
But then, this: “We’ll look at, we’ll look into it.”
And next, after a pause: “But no, I wouldn’t have wanted that, not a second strike. The first strike was very lethal, it was fine, and if there were two people around, but Pete said that didn’t happen. I have great confidence in him.”
A reporter pressed Trump with a follow-up, asking if he thought “there was no second strike.”
“I don’t know, I am going to find about it,” Trump replied, adding: “But Pete said he did not order the death of those two men.”
So, Trump says he’s going to “look into it” and “find out about it,” which, no, he’s not actually, but he doesn’t want to be brought up on war-crimes charges, either, so, he needs to feign ignorance, to begin to establish his legal innocence.
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Of note is that congressional Republicans, emboldened by Trump’s lethal and kinetic decline in popularity resulting from the Epstein files fallout, do seem interested in looking into and finding out what they can about the Sept. 2 strikes.
House Armed Services Committee Chair Mike Rogers, R-Alabama, issued a statement announcing that the committee “is committed to providing rigorous oversight of the Department of Defense’s military operations in the Caribbean.”
“We take seriously the reports of follow-on strikes on boats alleged to be ferrying narcotics in the SOUTHCOM region and are taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question,” Rogers said.
We also got a joint statement from U.S. Sens. Roger Wicker, R-Mississippi, and Jack Reed, D-Rhode Island, the chair and ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, confirming that the committee has directed inquiries to the Department of Defense, “and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”
U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, is going a step further, saying Hegseth either needs to “resign or be fired.”
“These reports about Pete Hegseth potentially ordering a second lethal strike, what kind of symbol does that send about America?” Warner said today. “I obviously have called for Pete Hegseth to be fired since early in the days of Signalgate. The fact that he’s still there is an embarrassment as well. Now we have this constant buildup of military forces off Venezuela‘s coast, and again, I can tell you, there is no authorization for the president to do anything around Venezuela. We live in a great country, and that great country has to be built on values and principles. Those are not the values and principles that this administration exhibits virtually and ever.
Oh, yes, that obviously pending military action in Venezuela – which Trump is targeting, why, because its president, Nicolás Maduro, hasn’t agreed to grift him a new plane or a couple billion in worthless crypto?
To be clear here, Maduro is a sonofabitch, but so is Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was convicted in the U.S. in 2024 for conspiring to traffic more than 400 tons of cocaine and weapons charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison.
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This Hernández guy helped move more than 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S. in exchange for millions in bribes from major traffickers, among them the infamous drug kingpin Joaquín Guzmán, aka “El Chapo,” and during his trial, it was revealed that he’d said he wanted to shove drugs “right up the noses of the gringos” by flooding the United States with cocaine.
Trump pardoned that guy, a close personal and political ally of the current far-right president of Honduras, Nasry Asfura – who, at this writing, is in a neck-and-neck race with former TV sportscaster Salvador Nasralla in his re-election bid.
As Trump announced his pardon of Hernández, he made clear that he would cut U.S. aid to Honduras if Asfura doesn’t win.
If that’s not a clear signal that the ruling party is in bed with Trump’s grift, nothing is.
I wouldn’t want to be a fisherman in Honduras if the sports guy wins.