Hegseth's Alleged Order To 'Kill Everybody' Complicates Trump's Defense of His Murderous Anti-Drug Campaign
Even if you accept the president's assertion of an "armed conflict" with drug smugglers, blowing apart survivors of a boat strike would be a war crime.
Eight days after the September 2 operation that inaugurated President Donald Trump's lethal military campaign against suspected drug boats, The Intercept reported that people who survived the initial missile strike were "killed shortly after in a follow-up attack." On Friday, The Washington Post confirmed that account, saying the commander overseeing the operation, based on an oral directive from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to "kill everybody," ordered a second strike on "two survivors" who "were clinging to the smoldering wreck."
If that report is accurate, Reason's Christian Britschgi notes, "the second strike on helpless survivors would add a degree of barbarism to the administration's anti-drug campaign." It also would further complicate the arguments that Trump has deployed to justify his unprecedented policy of summarily executing suspected drug smugglers, which so far has involved 21 attacks that killed 83 people in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. Even if you accept Trump's dubious claim that the United States is engaged in a "non-international armed conflict" with "narcoterrorists," which supposedly means U.S. forces can legally attack vessels believed to be carrying illegal drugs, deliberately killing survivors would be contrary to the law of war.
"Both the giving and the execution of these orders" would "constitute war crimes, murder, or both," the Former JAGs Working Group, which consists of lawyers who previously served in the military, said on Saturday. "If the U.S. military operation to interdict and destroy suspected narcotrafficking vessels is a 'non-international armed conflict' as the Trump Administration suggests, orders to 'kill everybody,' which can reasonably be regarded as an order to give 'no quarter,' and to 'double-tap' a target in order to kill survivors, are clearly illegal under international law. In short, they are war crimes."
The former military lawyers add that the situation is even graver "if the U.S. military operation is not an armed conflict of any kind." In that case, they say, "these orders to kill helpless civilians clinging to the wreckage of a vessel our military destroyed would
subject everyone from [the secretary of defense] down to the individual who pulled the trigger to prosecution under U.S. law for murder."
Rep. Michael R. Turner (R–Ohio), a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, likewise recognized the import of the Post's article during a Face the Nation interview on Sunday. "If that occurred," he said, it would be "very serious," and "I agree" it "would be an illegal act." He noted that "there are very serious concerns in Congress about the attacks on the so-called drug boats" and about "the legal justification [that] has been provided." But he said the follow-up strike described by the Post "is completely outside of anything that has been discussed with Congress."
The Senate Armed Services Committee "is aware of recent news reports—and the Department of Defense's initial response—regarding alleged follow-on strikes on suspected narcotics vessels in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility," Sen. Roger Wicker (R–Miss.), the committee's chairman, and Sen. Jack Reed (D–R.I.), the committee's ranking minority member, said in a statement on Friday. "The Committee has directed inquiries to the Department, and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances."
On Saturday, the House Armed Services Committee said it also would look into the incident. "We take seriously the reports of follow-on strikes on boats alleged to be ferrying narcotics in the SOUTHCOM region and are taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question," said Rep. Mike Rogers (R–Ala.), the committee's chairman, and Rep. Adam Smith (D–Wash.), the committee's ranking minority member.
Based on information from four unnamed sources "with direct knowledge of the matter," the Post reports that "the elite counterterror group SEAL Team 6 led the attack," which killed a total of 11 people, under the command of Adm. Frank M. Bradley at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Here is how the Post describes the attack: "A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck." According to two of the Post's sources, Bradley "ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth's instructions," and "the two men were blown apart in the water."
Such instructions "would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime," former military lawyer Todd Huntley, "who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign," told the Post. The second strike described by the Post also contrasts with what happened after subsequent attacks on suspected drug boats.
After an October 16 attack in the Caribbean that killed two people, The New York Times notes, "two men from the boat were rescued by the U.S. military and repatriated within days to Colombia and Ecuador." And after an October 27 attack that killed 15 people in the eastern Pacific, "U.S. surveillance spotted one of the men clinging to wreckage and alerted the Mexican Navy," which "tried to find and rescue him for four days but could not."
Why didn't U.S. forces take the same approach on September 2? "In briefing materials provided to the White House," the Post says, the Joint Special Operations Command "reported that the 'double-tap,' or follow-on strike, was intended to sink the boat and remove a navigation hazard to other vessels—not to kill survivors." According to "two congressional aides," the paper reports, "a similar explanation was given to lawmakers in two closed-door briefings."
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell nevertheless declined to answer the Post's questions about Hegseth's instructions or the circumstances of the second strike. But Parnell suggested that any criticism of Trump's bloodthirsty anti-drug campaign was misguided. "This entire narrative is completely false," he told the Post. "Ongoing operations to dismantle narcoterrorism and to protect the Homeland from deadly drugs have been a resounding success."
Hegseth likewise dodged the legal issues raised by the Post's report. "As usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland," he said in an X post on Friday. "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. Every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization."
The Pentagon has not named any of the men whose deaths Trump has ordered. But it said all 11 people killed in the September 2 attack were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which is on the State Department's list of "foreign terrorist organizations" (FTOs). That designation is puzzling as applied to drug cartels, which are criminal organizations motivated by profit rather than religious or ideological groups that use violence to achieve political goals. And contrary to Hegseth's implication, an FTO designation, which authorizes the Treasury Department to block transactions involving a listed group's assets and triggers criminal penalties for providing it with "material support or resources," is not a license to kill that transforms murder into self-defense.
In addition to describing his targets as "narcoterrorists," Trump conflates drug smuggling with violent aggression, saying the cartels' activities "constitute an armed attack against the United States." But the "non-international armed conflict" he perceives has not been recognized by Congress, and it departs from the United Nations definition of that term, which requires violent confrontations between "organised Parties" that possess "organised armed forces." The violence must "meet a minimum threshold of intensity" that distinguishes it from threats such as "riots," "banditry," "unorganized and short-lived insurrections," and "terrorist activities."
The "armed conflict" that Trump describes does not meet these criteria. "This is not stretching the envelope," Geoffrey Corn, formerly the U.S. Army's senior adviser on the law of war, told The New York Times. "This is shredding it."
Trump's assertion of an "armed conflict" also seems to contradict his administration's claim that U.S. forces are not engaged in "hostilities" when they blow up suspected drug boats, meaning the operations are not covered by the War Powers Resolution. According to the Justice Department, that law's constraints do not apply in this situation because American service members face no plausible threat of casualties, which underlines the point that Trump is killing people in cold blood without moral or legal justification.
Trump and Hegseth have publicly argued that drug smugglers can be legally killed because they are "combatants" in an "armed conflict"—albeit one that somehow does not involve "hostilities." But a confidential memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) reportedly takes a different tack. Citing "people who have read it," The New York Times reports that the memo "is said to focus instead on the purported shipments of narcotics aboard, portraying those as the specific targets of the strikes based on the theory that their sale would generate revenue that cartels would use to finance their alleged war efforts."
According to the OLC, in other words, the boats are legitimate military targets because the drugs they carry provide financial support for the cartels' "armed attack against the United States." But that "armed attack," according to Trump, consists of supplying Americans with the prohibited intoxicants they want, a business that is simultaneously warfare and the means of financing warfare.
All of this is pretty confusing, especially as a justification for killing criminal suspects instead of intercepting and arresting them, a practice that Hegseth derides as "the kid gloves approach" and Trump complains has been "totally ineffective." But even if Trump can avoid due process and obliterate the distinction between civilians and combatants by portraying drug smuggling as an "armed attack," the military response to that purported attack is still constrained by the law of war, which frowns on killing defenseless people clinging to a boat's wreckage.
On Sunday, Trump implicitly acknowledged that point. "I wouldn't have wanted that," he told reporters. "Not a second strike." But Trump said he has "great confidence" that Hegseth did not issue the "kill everybody" order described by the Post. Trump said Hegseth told him "he did not say that, and I believe him, 100 percent."
On Monday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt reiterated that Hegseth issued no such order but added: "President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have made it clear that presidentially designated narcoterrorist groups are subject to lethal targeting in accordance with the laws of war. With respect to the strikes in question on September 2, Secretary Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes. Admiral Bradley worked well within his authority and the law, directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated."
So no, Trump is not having second thoughts about the morality of killing suspected drug smugglers. "The first strike was very lethal," he said on Sunday, and "it was fine."
Was it? Huntley joins many other experts on the law of war in rejecting Hegseth's claim that "our current operations in the Caribbean are lawful under both U.S. and international law, with all actions in compliance with the law of armed conflict." Because the longstanding effort to stop illegal drugs from entering the country does not qualify as an "armed conflict," Huntley told the Post, killing suspected smugglers, whether in a boat or in the water, "amounts to murder."
