There is no dearth of criticism of the Trump Administration’s most recent attack on a boat departing Venezuela, allegedly carrying drugs and “narcoterrorists”. The editors of the Washington Post are not happy about it:
The U.S. military’s summary killing of more than 80 people suspected of transporting drugs in the waters around South America rests on a shaky legal foundation. Transporting drugs is a crime, not an act of war. Suspected criminals — even the guilty — ought to be apprehended when possible, not shot on sight.
The Post reported Friday that the military is not just bombing the small boats, but in at least one instance intentionally killed shipwrecked survivors. After Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly gave a spoken order to kill everyone on board a boat in September, the Special Operations commander overseeing the mission ordered a second strike that killed two men clinging to the wreckage.
The revelation ought to prompt a recognition that these killings were rotten from the start. It seems to at least be puncturing the complacency of several congressional Republicans who have previously bit their tongues about the attacks. The leaders of the Senate and House Armed Services committees are promising inquiries.
The editors of the Wall Street Journal are perplexed about it:
Congress is mostly a media circus these days, so credit the members who take their duties seriously. Lawmakers are doing a public service by trying to get to the truth on whether the Trump Administration killed defenseless survivors of a drug-boat strike.
The controversy involves a Washington Post report that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered that no one survive a Sept. 2 missile strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean. The story cites unidentified sources claiming that the U.S. military, on Mr. Hegseth’s orders, conducted a second strike to finish off survivors clinging to the destroyed boat.
Mr. Hegseth called the story “fabricated, inflammatory and derogatory,” and said U.S. actions have been “in compliance with the law of armed conflict—and approved by the best military and civilian lawyers, up and down the chain of command.”
President Trump added Sunday that the Secretary “said he did not say that, and I believe him, 100%.” Mr. Trump added that he’ll “look into it, but no, I wouldn’t have wanted that, not a second strike.”
The Pentagon is certainly full of people who might leak a derogatory story because they’d like to see Mr. Hegseth fired. The U.S. campaign against drug boats has also riled civil libertarians and progressives who want to constrain the President’s ability to conduct military action.
But the charge of deliberately killing the defenseless is serious enough to warrant a close look from Congress. That includes Mr. Hegseth giving an account under oath. The Administration so far seems to think it can ride out the story with ritual denunciations of the media.
and George Will is apoplectic about it:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.
In 1967, novelist Gwyn Griffin published a World War II novel, “An Operational Necessity,” that 58 years later is again pertinent. According to the laws of war, survivors of a sunken ship cannot be attacked. But a German submarine captain, after sinking a French ship, orders the machine-gunning of the ship’s crew, lest their survival endanger his men by revealing where his boat is operating. In the book’s dramatic climax, a postwar tribunal examines the German commander’s moral calculus.
No operational necessity justified Hegseth’s de facto order to kill two survivors clinging to the wreckage of one of the supposed drug boats obliterated by U.S. forces near Venezuela. His order was reported by The Post from two sources (“The order was to kill everybody,” one said) and has not been explicitly denied by Hegseth. President Donald Trump says Hegseth told him that he (Hegseth) “said he did not say that.” If Trump is telling the truth about Hegseth, and Hegseth is telling the truth to Trump, it is strange that (per the Post report) the commander of the boat-destroying operation said he ordered the attack on the survivors to comply with Hegseth’s order.
Forty-four days after the survivors were killed, the four-star admiral who headed the U.S. Southern Command announced he would be leaving that position just a year into what is usually a three-year stint. He did not say why. Inferences are, however, permitted.
The killing of the survivors by this moral slum of an administration should nauseate Americans. A nation incapable of shame is dangerous, not least to itself. As the recent “peace plan” for Ukraine demonstrated.
I don’t think that “moral slum” quite covers it. The Trump Administration does not feel constrained by law, custom, mercy, or even common decency. Note, too, how consistent it is with President Trump’s pardoning of drug trafficking Honduran President Orlando: clearly, he does not believe that heads of government should be constrained. That is among the reasons I have been wary of electing rich guys to the presidency (see my posts when Mr. Trump was running). The rich are different from you and me.
As I stated earlier, I don’t believe the attack on the Venezuelan boats are really related to drugs. It’s all about Guyanese oil. Thinking back to the Panama invasion in 1989, if you remember, that justification was drugs as well. I don’t think that was really about drugs either.
It’s all about Russian, Chinese, and Iranian involvement and cooperation with Maduro’s regime.
I’ve no inside information but watch, when Maduro leaves the country we’ll all be friends with Venezuelans again.
Everyone says oil, well sure it’s about oil but more importantly geopolitical influence and the Monroe Doctrine must be enforced or we lose our ability to control our own hemisphere.
@Charlie, I suspect Maduro’s adventurism; like sending his navy inside Guyana waters as recent as March(!), or making a claim to the part of Guyana where is oil-rich is why he isn’t getting much sympathy in Latin America.
Ruining a country causing 10% of the country to flee and causing a continent wide refugee crisis is also a good way to make your neighbors despise you.
That’s good context on the peculiarities of the situation.
I’ll wait until all the facts are in before making a final judgment, but if events happened as described, then many people in the chain of command, to include Hegseth, are criminally liable.
This is on top of a “military” operation that is – at best- dubious on Constitutional, legal, moral, and logical levels.
As for the reasons, I think it is almost entirely performative. Trump needed to do something to appear to be battling the Fentanyl crisis, and he and his team like the appearance of being tough guys. Blowing up drug boats that have nothing to do with fentanyl and calling them “narcoterrorists” works for both.
Venezuela looks mainly like a another “maximum pressure” campaign to me. Trump wants Maduro out, he’s been consistent about that since his first term. I get skeptical of the “it’s about oil” argument because of how frequently it’s deployed as the supposedly “real” reason for this or any US action. Usually that’s bunk.
That’s certainly my opinion. Add that it’s an expensive way of solving whatever problem it’s attempting to solve.
And the BS blew up this morning. Just politics, with a short lived assist from media. The Dems may feign moral outrage, but Obama did this hundreds of times. This is Russiagate II.
Zerhedge covered Charlie’s point this weekend. More than meets the eye, as CM said.
Speaking of politically and media driven bull.
https://irrationalfear.substack.com/p/the-warming-stripes-that-kill-the
And I guess Bill Gates understands that AI and the green revolution don’t mix.
There is a categorical difference between “double-tap” strikes on land and those at sea. IMO such strikes are questionable in either case but at sea they are expressly prohibited.
“There is a categorical difference between “double-tap” strikes on land and those at sea. IMO such strikes are questionable in either case but at sea they are expressly prohibited.”
This is the important point that I’m surprised so many people who should know better are not getting.
Shipwrecked survivors are a special category, and the rules for the naval and air domains are not the same as the land domain. I participated in several “double-taps” of enemies on land, which are permitted in that domain, but are much more restricted in the sea and air domains.
For air, survivors of a plane being shot down are never legal targets, even after reaching the ground, unless they commit a hostile act, and they must be given a chance for surrender. Even evading capture is not considered a hostile act.
For shipwreck survivors, the rule is even clearer – they “shall be respected and protected in all circumstances” and similarly may not be attacked unless they take up arms or engage in hostile acts.
The admin’s justification, as well as the Admiral’s that gave the order that they may potentially engage in a hostile act, or use a radio to call for help, and so the strike was justified, is not an exception to the very clear rules and categories.
Based on the information that came out of the Congressional hearing, there is really zero doubt now that striking the two survivors was a criminal act. The Geneva Convention and other agreements to which the US is a party are very clear.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gcii-1949/article-12/commentary/2017
Furthermore, the comparisons to Obama’s drone war are mostly ignorant.
There was a lot of questionable stuff there, including the authority for the President to unilaterally order the assassination of a US citizen, but those acts were problematic and questionable for different reasons, both practically and legally. And even in that case, it’s incontrovertible that al-Alwaki was an enemy of the US engaging in hostilities. And, it should be noted that the war against AQ and affiliates that the drone strike program was part of was authorized by Congress. There is no authorization from Congress for what the Trump admin is currently doing. There is no real historical or legal precedent for the President getting to unilaterally recategorize criminal activity as terrorism and using military force against it.
So the foundation of this entire enterprise is – at best – questionable from a legal and Constitutional standpoint. Killing shipwrecked survivors just adds to this and is much more clearly illegal and criminal behavior.
My guess is that the admin will not be able to ignore this and that Trump will have to pardon the whole chain of command.
Thank you for that contribution, Andy. I have spent some time searching for other examples of the Navy doing such “double-taps” at sea and have found none. I would very much like to know if this is now standard practice for the Navy and when that happened.
The only examples I’m aware of are from WW2, and they are looked upon in hindsight as what not to do. We’ve had few naval conflicts since, notably with Iran in the 80’s and Iraq in the early 90’s, and in both we rescued the shipwrecked – sometimes even under fire.
But it’s important to point out that it’s not the US Navy doing these current strikes. While the whole operation is under the geographic command, SOUTHCOM, the strike operations are being done by the special operations command, and specifically JSOC, which is the command that contains the most elite forces like Delta and Devgru (seal team 6). And it looks like it’s the Seals that are doing this from MV Ocean Trader (google it).
So it’s not really the Navy – seals and special ops are functionally and culturally separate from the host service.
This is, IMO, an unusual command arrangement and it’s certainly there isn’t any operational necessity to task our most elite counterterrorism assets to blow up some
boats.
SEALs aren’t Navy? That IS a weird command structure.
They are Navy administratively, but almost all special operations forces from each service fall under SOCOM for operations. Additionally SOCOM has special authority in Title 10 in terms of organizing, training, and equipping its forces (a role that normally belongs to the services). It also has its own acquisition and budget lines for various SOF-specific things which again, is normally a service function for other types of forces. So Socom is arguably a quasi-service while also being a combatant command.
For the tier 1 operators like devgru in JSOC this is even more the case, and they are the most distant from their parent services, having very little in common with the conventional Navy.