What's The Legal Term For Pete Hegseth's Latest (Alleged) Violent F*ckup? Congress To Investigate!
It’s a low bar, but he found it.
Just when you think this administration could not be more of a stomach-churning horror movie, on Friday, the Washington Post published a report about a boat attack Secretary of WAR Defense (for now) Pete Hegseth ordered in the Caribbean Sea near Trinidad and Tobago on September 2. Reportedly there were two survivors of the 11 on board, and Hegseth directly ordered them finished off while they clung to pieces of the boat.
If you buy Hegseth’s claims that the US is at war with narco-terrorists, and a narco-terrorist is anybody he says is a narco-terrorist, then this is is a war crime. No wonder Admiral Alvin Holsey, in charge of the Southern Command, noped out for early retirement soon after! And if you don’t buy that we are in some kind of a war and those people were enemy combatants, and this reporting is true, then Pete Hegseth may just be a murderer.
Acts of evil incarnate, if true! Imagine being the mother of 26-year-old Chad Joseph, or the relative of anyone on the boat, finding out after your loved one didn’t come home that Pete Hegseth might have watched footage of them clinging to burning jetsam, and issued an order to FINISH HIM. Something, somewhere, went really fucking wrong in Pete Hegseth’s brain. Even his own mother knows it, if that letter she sent him back in the day is any indication.
No wonder Donald Trump has been losing his fucking shit and pounding nonstop TREASON SEDITION on his web platform at the six Democrats who filmed a PSA telling members of the military and intelligence community that they MUST refuse illegal orders, and is sending Kash Patel and the FBI to go harass-investigate them. Watch the ad and imagine Trump’s eyeballs exploding out of his head and steam shooting out of his ears:
It’s an order from Trump, so it can’t be illegal, wah wah wah! But that is not the law, and there’s no statute of limitations for murder. Should Hegseth start hoping for a preemptive pardon?
Massacring unarmed survivors in a conflict is a war crime that perpetrators have been put to death for. It was when the Nazis and Japanese did it to Americans in World War II. In 1944, future president George Herbert Walker Bush narrowly escaped that fate, and also possibly being cannibalized. Uh oh, Pete Hegseth, let’s not get any ideas!
And it is simply repugnant to human decency, to the point that even the Republican-led Armed Services Committees in the House and Senate have noticed, and vowed to conduct “vigorous oversight,” to see if this occurred.
The Former JAGs Working Group, made up of military lawyers Hegseth fired first thing when he got into office — huh, what that was all about! — issued a statement:
We call upon Congress to investigate and the American people to oppose any use of the U.S. military that involves the intentional targeting of anyone — enemy combatants, non-combatants, or civilians — rendered hors de combat (“out of the fight”) as a result of their wounds or the destruction of the ship or aircraft carrying them. We also advise our fellow citizens that orders like those described above are the kinds of “patently illegal orders” all military members have a duty to disobey. Since orders to kill survivors of an attack at sea are “patently illegal,” anyone who issues or follows such orders can and should be prosecuted for war crimes, murder, or both.
Meanwhile, Trump has announced the airspace above Venezuela closed, after saying on Thanksgiving that invasion was imminent: “The land is easier. That’s going to start very soon.” Oh yeah, land wars, easy peasy. What does Pete Hegseth want to shoot at next? Will he consider any plane that violates Trump’s order to be a super-bad enemy combatant “narco-terrorist”? What if it’s a commercial airliner? We are just asking! (Also, Donald Trump can’t close other countries’ airspaces, by the way.)
After backlash to this news all weekend, Trump is showing signs of distancing himself. But Hegseth doubled down: “Biden coddled terrorists, we kill them.” And crowed that he had only just begun:
On Sunday, on the way back from a weekend of golf, Trump claimed Hegseth told him he never gave any such order. “He did not say that, and I believe him, 100 percent.” And he said he wouldn’t give that order — “I wouldn’t have wanted that, a second strike” — and he’s looking into it.
Uh oh, Pete Hegseth or whoever Pete Hegseth will blame, like a typical Pete Hegseth who doesn’t take responsibility for his alleged actions! But if he’s about to get thrown under the bus, he seems unaware, and posted this sicko shit Sunday night:
How we yearn for when sane adults were in charge, who at least did us all the courtesy of coming up with some kind of legal something to fig leaf their war crimes.
And why is Trump trying to make war with Venezuela anyway, besides helping Hegseth make new content? It is not the drugs! Over the weekend Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who actually did enable all of the narco-trafficking that Trump is accusing Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro of doing.
If your guess was The Oil, you were correct!
GOP Rep. Maria Salazar said the quiet part out loud: “Venezuela for the American oil companies will be a field day.”
No blood for oil? No! Blood for oil!
Americans do not want this. Seventy percent of disapprove of military action in Venezuela. And Trump’s approval rating itself has hit an all-time low of 36 percent. But like tariffs, deposing Maduro and getting all Venezuela’s oil is a big-brain idea Trump has had since his first term, and once the old man gets hold of a nut, he hangs on.
Will Congress grow a spine and do something about this? What kind of violent fuckups is Pete Hegseth planning next? Stay tuned for the next humiliating chapter in America’s humiliating decline!
[Washington Post gift link / New York Times gift link]
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Get ready for "If you're against invading Venezuela, you hate the troops" bullshit that we've seen every other time Republicans decide to start invading places.
In Pete’s defense, he can’t be held accountable for what he does after drink number 6