SECRETARY OF DEFENSE Pete Hegseth is under increasing fire for a double-tap strike, first reported by The Intercept in early September, in which the U.S. military killed two survivors of the Trump administration’s initial boat strike in the Caribbean on September 2.
The Washington Post recently reported that Hegseth personally ordered the follow-up attack, giving a spoken order “to kill everybody.” Multiple military legal experts, lawmakers, and now confidential sources within the government who spoke with The Intercept say Hegseth’s actions could result in the entire chain of command being investigated for a war crime or outright murder.
“Those directly involved in the strike could be charged with murder under the UCMJ or federal law,” said Todd Huntley, a former Staff Judge Advocate who served as a legal adviser on Joint Special Operations task forces conducting drone strikes in Afghanistan and elsewhere, using shorthand for the Uniform Code of Military Justice. “This is about as clear of a case being patently illegal that subordinates would probably not be able to successfully use a following-orders defense.”
I guess I don’t understand why the second strike is worse than the first one?
Because the vast majority of Western nations (including the US) consider it to be a war crime to deliberately make a military strike against survivors of an attack that pose no active threat.
Even that assumes that the original strike has military merit in the first place, which isn’t really the case when they are blowing up unarmed boats that might or might not be carrying drugs.
The UCMJ uses “firing on shipwrecked persons” as a specific example of an illegal order.
Firing on an operating crewed ship is, in a very, very broad sense, potentially justifiable. Firing on a disabled ship whose crew is not firing back is not.
The loophole they will try to use is those are war crimes.
We are not at war.
They are going to try to frame this as killing criminals, not enemy combatants. It’s transparently evil, but that’s what they’ll do to get away with it.
Or just say fuck it and issue pardons for all involved. If they even get charged in the first place.
It’s not that it’s worse in any way, a person killed is dead either way, it’s that there’s no possible defense and it clearly demonstrates the intentional and likely premeditated illegality, making it possible to actually make a substantive case against it. It’s not realistic to apply a full legal process to every individual military misdeed or act of war, no matter how much many people might wish it were. We don’t live in a perfect world. The list of actual war crimes is intended to include things which are clearly demonstrable with enough evidence that a conviction could be realistic.
It’s the difference between running someone over once, which could be a simple accident and we can’t and probably shouldn’t prosecute every single pedestrian death as first degree murder, it might serve justice to try to do that in some ways, but it’s not realistic and also has the potential to be unjust.
Compare that to someone then stopping, backing up and running the same person over again. It removes any possibility of doubt whether the action was an intentional targeted crime and makes it a lot more worthwhile to prosecute. Neither one makes the person any more dead than the other. But one is almost certainly a lot easier to prove to be murder.