U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth launched a rant on X last night in defense of his murderous boat strikes, in which he charged that “the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland.”
“As we’ve said from the beginning, and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be ‘lethal, kinetic strikes,’” he went on. “The declared intent is to stop lethal drugs, destroy narco-boats, and kill the narco-terrorists who are poisoning the American people. Every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization,” he claimed without providing any evidence.
“The Biden administration preferred the kid gloves approach, allowing millions of people—including dangerous cartels and unvetted Afghans—to flood our communities with drugs and violence,” he raged on. “The Trump administration has sealed the border and gone on offense against narco-terrorists. Biden coddled terrorists, we kill them.
“Our 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.”
Hegseth’s rant followed the mid-day appearance of a Washington Post story in which unnamed sources accused Hegseth of ordering the killing of survivors in the water after the first boat strike on Sept. 2. Two unnamed sources “with direct knowledge of the operation” told the Post that Hegseth gave a spoken directive. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said. The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.
The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., these officials and experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any of the men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign. Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.
