The Trump administration's use of military force to attack alleged "drug traffickers" on boats in the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico were plainly illegal from the outset. The Washington Post's new revelation that Trump Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth personally gave the order to "kill everybody," in intercepting the first such boat, appears to be the first direct proof of an illegal military order being carried out.
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.
The commander is named as Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley, overseeing the operation from North Carolina. If the Post's reporting can be proven accurate, there is not much analysis to be done here.
1. A command to kill opponents who cannot resist is an unambiguously illegal order.
2. Pete Hegseth must immediately be removed from his post, by impeachment if necessary.
3. Pete Hegseth must be tried and, if convicted, imprisoned for giving the illegal order.
4. Those in the chain of command who followed the order must face similar consequences.
That's it. There's no nuance here, no "but" written onto some memo that might complicate things. Killing human beings on the high seas, whether over unproven accusations of smuggling or without those claims, is an act of murder. We are not at war with "alleged smugglers." Soldiers and their civilian commanders do not get to float around the world's oceans assassinating boatfuls of civilians, whether it be to sate personal power fantasies or as Judge Dredd-style judge, jury, and executioner of anyone within radar range.
Because there is no war and, therefore, no combatants, it is an act of murder. If the D-rank legal pretenders filling the administration want to slither their way through a fancy argument arguing that it is an undeclared war and the targets were combatants, than a "no quarter" command that orders the execution of wounded or surrendering opponents becomes a war crime.
It is either one or the other. There is literally no scenario in which the Hegseth order to "kill everyone" is not a criminal act, both in the United States and by international law. None. Zero. It does not matter if the 11 people on the vessel were armed. It does not matter whether they were drug traffickers, migrants, fishermen, or Ocean Nazis. Make whatever argument you like; it is criminal in all such circumstances.
This is the categorical assessment of every expert. In a statement by former U.S. military Judge Advocates General, the group asserts:
The Former JAGs Working Group unanimously considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both. Our group was established in February 2025 in response to the SECDEF’s firing of the Army and Air Force Judge Advocates General and his systematic dismantling of the military’s legal guardrails. Had those guardrails been in place, we are confident they would have prevented these crimes.
• If the U.S. military operation to interdict and destroy suspected narcotraficking 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.
• If the U.S. military operation is not an armed conflict of any kind, these orders to kill helpless civilians clinging to the wreckage of a vessel our military destroyed would subject everyone from SECDEF down to the individual who pulled the trigger to prosecution under U.S. law for murder.
"There's clear precedent dating back to World War II trial of Germans for that very act, which lawyers know well," writes Just Security co-editor-in-chief Ryan Goodman. "The Peleus World War II War Crimes Trial."
The Senate Armed Services Committee scrambled to promise "vigorous oversight" of the accusations in the Post's report, and it is anyone's guess as to whether that means committee Republicans intend to investigate the crime or cover it up.
But the likelihood of an international probe and attempted prosecution of Hegseth is, again presuming the Post's anonymous witnesses can be summoned to give on-the-record testimony, nearly 100%. And now that Hegseth has provided such a brazen example of a lawless regime committing extrajudicial killings for funsies, senators who still intend to vacation overseas at some point in the future will be obliged to either seek accountability or be held to account themselves.
I am tired of it all. That is my punditry: I am tired of it all. I am tired of being governed by malevolent children who think themselves agents of a pretended-at new age. I am tired of the pissants scuttling through Congress and the White House, smug and self-important, vandalizing not just laws but the nation's very decency, over and over again.
And I am tired, impossibly tired, of the putrid and festering faux-morality of the Mike Johnsons and Karoline Leavitts, of having them pretend at pious wisdom while they ally with those who rape children, and those who terrorize immigrants, and those that invent new causes for murder with the hollow-eyed look of a child torturing a fly.
The justification that Trump's inner circle—truly the worst of us, in every form and mannerism—is attempting to erect is too idiotic to even be called juvenile; according to Hegseth, Marco Rubio, and other accessories to the murders the only effort needed to turn coldblooded murder into justifiable military might is to attach "narco" to the beginnings of words. These were "narco-"humans in "narco-" boats doing "narco-"terrorism on behalf of "narco-"states. They believe themselves to be magical princesses, able to wave their little sparkling wands and bend reality through the power of prefix.
Even if every word of it was true, it would still be murder. And we know it is not true, because we have seen these exact same people lie, over and over again, about supposed drug or gang ties of their non-white targets.
There is close to zero chance that this small craft carrying 11 people was filled solely with "drug smugglers," experts have repeatedly noted, because there is no value to exposing 11 people to death or capture in a boat that can be crewed by 2-4. There would be no point in slowing the boat, in taking only a small cargo, for that weight.
It is almost certain, then, that what Hegseth and the most dishonest pseudo-"intelligence" dunces in the nation interdicted was a boat smuggling humans—and that when Hegseth ordered the murder of survivors, it was smuggled humans who were being executed for the sake of his flabby visions of power. But we may never know, because the order to execute survivors was intended to ensure there would be no trial and the government would never be pressed to prove its claims.
These fetid self-proclaimed moralists, preening as they slobber over each new murder, posting photos of their Thanksgiving dinners after abandoning their oaths and indulging whatever new horrors these meme-obsessed shit-for-brains unleash on the nation next. I am so damn tired.
“The idea that wreckage from one small boat in a vast ocean is a hazard to marine traffic is patently absurd, and killing survivors is blatantly illegal,” said Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Massachusetts), a Marine Corps veteran and vocal Trump critic who received a classified briefing from Pentagon officials on the strikes in late October with other members of the House Armed Services Committee. “Mark my words: It may take some time, but Americans will be prosecuted for this, either as a war crime or outright murder.”
There's no question. At this point we are only waiting to see how many accomplices will be named.
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