Department of War Crimes
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War Crimes Act of 1996
11 min read
The article directly references this U.S. federal law that makes it a criminal offense to commit war crimes. Readers would benefit from understanding its scope, history, and how it incorporates Geneva Convention protections into domestic law.
Since September 2, the Department of Defense (DOD) has used drones to kill more than 80 people traveling by boat in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. The government claims strikes targeted “terrorists” trafficking drugs into the United States.
According to a New York Times report, the military does not know the names of all the people it has killed. Instead, the military carries out a strike on a boat if it “knows that someone on the boats has a connection to a drug cartel, and it has some level of confidence that drugs are on the vessels.” No evidence has been presented to the public and Colombia’s government says that at least one of the strikes killed an innocent fisherman.
Even if every person killed by the drone strikes was in fact a drug trafficker, it is unclear what authority the DOD has to kill them. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has argued that cartels are trafficking drugs to finance a “non-international armed conflict” against the U.S., giving the executive branch the authority under Article II of the Constitution to kill the drug traffickers without Congress signing off on a declaration of war. Lawmakers and legal experts have raised doubts that smuggling drugs into the U.S. constitutes initiating an “armed conflict.”
Recently, new information has surfaced with the strongest evidence yet that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth committed a war crime in ordering at least one of the strikes.
Last week, the Washington Post reported that Hegseth gave a verbal order to leave no survivors in the first strike of the DOD’s campaign against drug smuggling boats, which took place in the Caribbean on September 2. Several minutes after striking the boat for the first time, the Special Operations commander overseeing the attack ordered a second strike to kill two men hanging on to the burning remains of the boat in order to comply with Hegseth’s order, according to the Post.
That narrative describes a likely violation of the Geneva Conventions, which states, “Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed ‘hors de combat’ by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall
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