Under the Trump Garbage Truck

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has tumbled into a political garbage compactor. And his career could get crushed as a result.

Reporting on Friday by the Washington Post, backed by two sources familiar with the operation, stated Hegseth ordered SEAL Team 6 to “kill them all” after the U.S. military destroyed an alleged drug smuggling vessel off the coast of Venezuela in early September. That order included two survivors who reportedly were still in the water, clinging to the wreckage of their craft.

There aren’t many things that people on the opposite ends of the political spectrum, let alone the entire civilized world, agree on. But the immorality and illegality of firing upon defenseless people floating in the ocean after you’ve sunk their ship, giving them “no quarter” in their time of greatest distress, is one. And there is no one, outside of lawless or fascist regimes, who would defend it today.

This is where we now find ourselves. The prohibition on “no quarter” orders is such a bright line that even the increasingly lawless and fascist Trump regime won’t be able to stand behind it. And that has Hegseth’s opponents eager to press the crush button on his garbage leadership.

Any way you slice this bread, Hegseth is toast

If the reporting is accurate—and as I’ll discuss below, there is strong reason to believe it is, and the specifics will soon become clear—this presents quite a conundrum for the ”War Secretary.”

If we are at war, as Hegseth claims, then his order was a war crime. A “Former JAG Working Group,” comprising officials that Hegseth conveniently pushed out of their military legal oversight roles just before the illegal strikes began, “unanimously considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both.”

Here’s why. If the U.S. military operation to destroy vessels suspected of narco-trafficking is in fact a “non-international armed conflict” as the White House claims, then Hegseth’s orders to “kill them all” can “reasonably be regarded as an order to give ‘no quarter,’ and to ‘double-tap’ a target in order to kill survivors”—something that is “clearly illegal under international law.”

“In short,” the Former JAG Working Group concludes, “they are war crimes.”

If we want a clear textual statement of this, we need look no further than the Defense Department’s own Law of War Manual, which ...