Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, currently under scrutiny for reportedly overseeing “at best” an alleged war crime in the Caribbean, argued from his Fox News perch in 2019 of an American soldier who admitted to the extrajudicial execution of an alleged Taliban bombmaker: “If he committed premeditated murder … then I did as well. What do you think you do in war?”
The Washington Post reported Friday that on September 2, Hegseth gave a spoken order “to kill everybody” on board a boat that U.S. intelligence analysts suspected was carrying drugs off the coast of Trinidad. After confirmation that the first strike left two survivors “clinging to the smoldering wreck,” the Navy special operations commander overseeing the action “ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions,” according to the Post’s sources. The paper further reported that “current and former officials within the U.S. military and DEA have expressed doubt that all 11 people aboard the first vessel were complicit in trafficking.”
The bipartisan leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees quickly issued statements promising investigations into the report. Legal experts argue the ordered killings would constitute “at best, a war crime under federal law,” as Hegseth’s former Fox colleague Andy McCarthy put it.
“Even if you buy the untenable claim that they are combatants, it is a war crime to intentionally kill combatants who have been rendered unable to fight,” McCarthy wrote Saturday at National Review. “It is not permitted, under the laws and customs of honorable warfare, to order that no quarter be given — to apply lethal force to those who surrender or who are injured, shipwrecked, or otherwise unable to fight.”
Indeed, “orders to fire upon the shipwrecked” are the textbook example of “Clearly Illegal Orders to Commit Law of War Violations” provided in the Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual.
(McCarthy further states that beyond Hegseth’s specific alleged order, “the 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 federal law as a crime rather than as terrorist activity, much less an act of war — are lawless and therefore that the killings are not legitimate under the law or armed conflict.”)
Hegseth said Friday that the Post’s story was “fabricated” and that the U.S. operations in the Caribbean “are lawful under both U.S. and international law, with all actions in compliance with the law of armed conflict,” but also bragged that “Biden coddled terrorists, we kill them,” and subsequently appeared to make light of the allegations. On Sunday, President Donald Trump said he “wouldn’t have wanted … a second strike” and claimed Hegseth “said he didn’t do it.”
Such weak denials are not terribly credible given Hegseth’s infamous support for U.S. service members accused of war crimes in his previous job as co-host of Fox’s weekend editions of its Fox & Friends morning show.
“Put us all in jail”: Hegseth rejects war crimes as a legitimate category
Hegseth, in one particularly striking example, vigorously defended Army Maj. Mathew Golsteyn during a February 2019 Fox & Friends appearance.
Golsteyn, who had been charged with murdering a captured Afghan man who was allegedly a Taliban bombmaker during a 2010 deployment, had “allegedly told CIA interviewers that he and another soldier took the alleged bomb-maker off base, shot him and buried his remains,” and replied “yes” during a 2016 Fox interview when asked if he had killed the man.
Referring to Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA), a fellow veteran who supported Golsteyn, Hegseth said: “If he committed premeditated murder, then Duncan did as well, then I did as well. What do you think you do in war?” He added: “Put us all in jail.”