The administration has a plausible defense to war crimes allegations. Still, people have every reason to be suspicious.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says he watched the first strike against a suspected drug-trafficking boat on September 2 after giving the order approving the attack but then left the Pentagon viewing area and neither ordered nor saw the more controversial second strike that, the Washington Post has reported, resulted in the killing of two shipwrecked survivors of the first strike.
Secretary Hegseth gave his version of events today, while sitting next to President Trump at a White House cabinet meeting.
To repeat what I detailed over the weekend, the Post reported, based on anonymous sources, that Hegseth had orally conveyed that he wanted no survivors from the strike. The Post, however, did not quote Hegseth as actually saying, “Kill everybody”; rather, the paper reported that an unidentified source had described the situation as “the order was to kill everybody” — intimating that this was the gist of what was said but not a verbatim report of what was said.
The administration’s defense against the allegations in the Post story has come into sharper focus during the past 24 hours.
Last night, in a startling rejoinder to the Post’s account, the New York Times reported:
According to five U.S. officials, who spoke separately and on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter that is under investigation, Mr. Hegseth, ahead of the Sept. 2 attack, ordered a strike that would kill the people on the boat and destroy the vessel and its purported cargo of drugs.
But, each official said, Mr. Hegseth’s directive did not specifically address what should happen if a first missile turned out not to fully accomplish all of those things. And, the officials said, his order was not a response to surveillance footage showing that at least two people on the boat survived the first blast.
The Times elaborated that Hegseth issued a written order, consistent with which he directed commanders to engage the boat with lethal force. According to its anonymous sources, neither the written order nor the oral briefing addressed what should happen if there were survivors of the first strike.
The Times faulted the Post for failing to “provide context on when Mr. Hegseth gave what its sources described as a spoken order to kill everyone.”
Before the holiday weekend was over (as I related here), President Trump insisted that Hegseth had never ordered that everyone on the boat be killed, based on what he said he’d been told by the secretary himself. Hegseth and others were consistent, moreover, in maintaining that the order for the so-called double-tap — i.e., the second strike — had not been given by Hegseth; rather, it was given by the mission commander, Admiral Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley.
That remains Hegseth’s account, but there is more nuance now.
Last night, Hegseth posted that “Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support.” But he took pains to add, “I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made — on the September 2 mission and all others since.” (Emphasis added.) Many commentators interpreted this coda to be scapegoating. Indeed, that has now become the theme of the Post’s reporting. But this overstates the case. Ever since Hegseth finally addressed head-on the substance of the Post’s report (more momentarily on his initial failure to do that), he has consistently said that he did not give the double-tap order, and there seems to be no credible evidence that he did. Furthermore, since there seems to be no doubt that Bradley did give the order, Hegseth has not only backed the commander aggressively; he has helped to put the order in a context that rebuts war crimes claims — to wit: Bradley was targeting the boat and its cargo, not possible survivors.
In his remarks today, after repeating that Bradley had full authority to give the order for the second strike, Hegseth forcefully argued that it had been the right order, with the objective of destroying the remnants of the boat. The government’s account appears to be that, at the time Bradley gave the order for the second strike, he did not know there were survivors; rather, he understood that enough of the vessel remained after the first strike to potentially (a) be a hazard for ships navigating the sea, and (b) contain retrievable, illegal narcotics. Only after the second strike was launched or hit the target did it become clear that there were survivors.
This matches up with the White House’s message. On Monday, parrying questions from the media, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt asserted that Bradley had “worked well within his authority and the law directing the engagement to ensure that the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated.” She elaborated that Hegseth had authorized Bradley “to conduct these kinetic strikes.” The absence of the word “lethal” was notable — especially after three months of Hegseth incanting it as if it were the first two syllables of the word “kinetic.”
I noted over the weekend that two anonymous sources had told the Post:
Bradley told people on the secure conference call that the survivors were still legitimate targets because they could theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo.
The Post does not give a clear, temporal account of the secure conference call; even assuming this claim is accurate, it’s unclear whether Bradley said this (a) to justify going through with the second strike before it happened, or (b) to rationalize the strike in the aftermath, once the realization dawned that survivors of the first strike had been killed.
In any event, the administration’s version of events in countering the Post’s explosive allegations is plausible. We’ll see how it holds up under congressional examination. Still, it’s puzzling: If the administration’s plausible account is true, why didn’t Hegseth divulge it when he decided to respond to the Post story on X? If he had a good story to tell, why not undertake to refute the Post’s factual claims beyond just dismissing them as “fake news”?
Instead, Hegseth made multiple statements stressing that the objective of the September 2 attack, and the subsequent 20-plus attacks in which approximately 83 people have perished, is to kill drug traffickers that the administration has dubiously labeled terrorists.
Hegseth put it this way on Friday evening:
As we’ve said from the beginning, and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be “lethal, kinetic strikes.” The declared intent is to stop lethal drugs, destroy narco-boats, and kill the narco-terrorists who are poisoning the American people. [Emphasis added.]
He added in another post, “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.”
I’m hardly cherry-picking here. The unabashed determination to kill alleged terrorists has been a leitmotiv of Hegseth’s public rhetoric for the past three months. As he put it after a November 6 strike:
Today, at the direction of President Trump, the Department of War carried out a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization.
The vessel was trafficking narcotics in the Caribbean and was struck in international waters. No U.S. forces were harmed in the strike, and three male narco-terrorists — who were aboard the vessel — were killed.
To all narco-terrorists who threaten our homeland: if you want to stay alive, stop trafficking drugs. If you keep trafficking deadly drugs—we will kill you. [Emphasis added.]
I get it that Hegseth sees his job as pleasing the president, who revels in this style of tough-guy, take-no-prisoners, death-to-all-the-seditionists BS. If you’re going to play that game, however, and especially if you’re going to play it for the ostensible purpose of “defending” yourself from war crimes accusations, you can’t be too surprised if people suspect that you just might have given an order to kill everybody.
And bigger picture: We are dealing with an activity — cocaine trafficking — that is not an act of war, is not terrorism, is not killing thousands of Americans (that’s fentanyl), and is traditionally handled in the United States by criminal prosecution under an extensive, decades-old set of laws. Yet, President Trump, Secretary Hegseth, and the administration have speciously claimed that cocaine shipments — many of which are not even destined for our country — are the functional equivalent of mass-murder attacks; that, they claim, authorizes them to invoke the laws of armed conflict so they can kill people rather than prosecute them.
Under the circumstances, it is hardly unreasonable for people to conclude that the administration is not especially fastidious about who is and is not a legitimate target under the laws of war.