The WaPo is down but not completely out. Thanks to Jeff Bezos’ Trump appeasement, it has lost some fine reporters and pundits but it’s still capable of a big scoop. The scoop in question bears this headline: Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all.
The featured image comes from the WaPo story which confirmed that Hegseth’s fake tough guy posturing and posing isn’t just for public consumption: It’s who he is.
“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 claims to be a Christian. Whatever happened to Christian charity and mercy? I guess he skips those chapters of The Bible in favor of this unconvincing Dirty Harry impression. It makes me glad to be an atheist.
Hegseth claims to be a serious person. Would a serious person do this?
“But even as Mr. Trump was answering questions aboard Air Force One about whether his defense secretary had stepped over the legal lines with the Venezuela killings, the same defense secretary was on social media cracking jokes about the affair. Mr. Hegseth posted a meme on Sunday depicting Franklin, the turtle from a children’s book series, firing a weapon at a vessel laden with cargo from a helicopter.
“For your Christmas wish list,” Mr. Hegseth wrote on social media.”
Oy, just oy. It’s all a game to them. Team MAGA trivializes everything with their trite trolling. Tom Nichols nails it:
“Posting stupid memes after being accused of murder is not the response of a patriot who must answer to the public about the security of the United States and its people in uniform. It is not the response of a secretary of defense who values the advice of the officers who report to him. It is not the response of a human being who comprehends the risks—and the costs—of ordering other people to kill helpless men clinging to the wreck of a boat.
It is, instead, the response of a sneering, spoiled punk who has been caught doing wrong and is now daring the local fuzz to take him in and risk the anger of his rich dad—a role fulfilled by Donald Trump, in this case.”
Neither the White House nor the DOD have denied the story. Instead, they’ve thrown an Admiral under the bus. Who do we believe: people who lie about everything or the whistleblowers? I know who I believe.
Let’s circle back to the rhetorical question posed in the post title: War Crime Or Murder? The Trump regime claims to be at war with so-called narco-terrorists. It’s another lie. If they cared about drug interdiction, the Insult Comedian wouldn’t have pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez who reportedly once said: “[Let’s] stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos.”
That pardon is breathtakingly hypocritical even by the low standards of Team MAGA. Consistency is not Trumpism’s strong suit: cruelty, stupidity, and incompetence are.
The Trump administration’s violent variation on the war on drugs is illegal. Hence the crime is murder most foul on the high seas. It shows the wisdom of the video made by Senator Mark Kelly and his colleagues urging the military to follow the law and NOT obey illegal orders. If we were actually at war this would be a war crime as well as murder.
Pete Hegseth is an evil and stupid man whose mission at the Pentagon has been to purge high-ranking Black and female officers. He claims to have renamed the Defense Department but it’s part of a pattern of moronic delusion. It’s time for him to go before he drags our armed forces down with him. They deserve better; so does America.
The last word goes to Anita O’Day and Gene Krupa: