“The order was to kill everybody”

Here’s Donald the Dove’s Secretary of Defense ordering a second round of extrajuridical killings, against clearly defenseless civilians:

The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraftfollowed the boat, the more confident intelligenceanalysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive,according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.

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.

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

Hegseth’s order, which has not been previously reported, adds another dimension to the campaign against suspected drug traffickers.AI Icon

 Some current and former U.S. officials and law-of-war experts have said that the Pentagon’s lethal campaign — which has killed more than 80 people to date — is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to future prosecution.

The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., these officials and experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any ofthe men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign.

Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.

As I said at the time, the incentives created by the fact that a lot of prominent “anti-war” voices on the nominal left not only gave Biden no credit for grounding the drones but implied or outright argued that Donald Trump was the real peace candidate were really not good. (I regret to inform you that Jenkins personally is still collecting Fell For It Again awards.) Politically, Trump’s bet that almost nobody is going to care about this if a Republican is in the White House is probably going to be right — but that doesn’t make these strikes any less lawless or indefensible.