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.
