White House finally senses (some) real legal peril in illegal boat strikes

Last week, the Washington Post reported that Trumpian Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth personally issued the order to leave no survivors during the first of what would become a campaign of extrajudicial murders targeting alleged "drug dealers" on boats in the Gulf of Mexico and Pacific Ocean. It was that spoken order that, according to the Post, led Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley to order a second strike on the first just-bombed small boat in order to kill two apparent survivors, killing them.

That news appeared to startle both the press corps and even Senate Republicans into action, as a so-called "no quarter" order to execute wounded or surrendered adversaries is one of the clearest and among the most longstanding examples of an illegal military order. Not only were three German submarine officers executed for that war crime after World War II, but the United States' own Law of War Manual explicitly uses "orders to fire upon the shipwrecked" as its example of a "clearly illegal" order that subordinates are required to refuse to carry out.

It is perhaps the definitive example of an illegal order, both in the United States and in international law, and Hegseth almost certainly will now face an international probe and possible indictment. And it is the clarity of the crime that appears to have spurred Republican lawmakers into at least tepid action; the White House can gesture towards secret legal analyses and bluster about being in an alleged "war" with "narco-terrorists" as (false) justification for the boat strikes, muddying the discourse all it likes, but even if the whole of the White House argument were accepted, executing wounded shipwreck victims still remains as clear-cut a case of illegal murder as before.

It is, with certainty, an international crime and U.S. military crime alike. And while Senate Republicans may be willing to appease Trump in a thousand different ways, and have, most of those lawmakers would still like to be able to leave the country without immediately being arrested at whichever airport their plane touches down in. They cannot afford to be seen as accomplices to the crime, which means even this sorry bunch has now been forced into the pretense of oversight. The Senate Armed Services Committee is now seeking the testimony of Adm. Bradley—who is now in a precarious position, because his civilian leadership seems to have already settled on making him the fall guy.

Even our much-withered press corps is peppering the White House with questions about the strikes. In an extended back-and-forth on Monday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt looked out of her league as she tried to bluff her way through with a handful of cheap talking points.

If the White House did not sense legal danger from the Hegseth-overseen strikes beforehand, that press briefing would have made it clear. And you have probably never seen anyone get thrown under a bus as quickly as Pete Hegseth rushed to throw Bradley under one.

Love ya, admiral! I'll be supporting you in this time of crisis the whole way! From back here! Waaaay back here! Far away from these "combat decisions" I certainly had nothing to do with!

By Tuesday, the Trump team game plan became clear. Even as Trump and his presidentially appointed memelords continue to boast about their much-sought campaign of random murders, responsibility for this particular act falls with Not Them.

So Trump himself is denying any knowledge of the order. What about you, Pete?

And that appears to be the game being played. Hegseth will admit to giving the order for the initial strike, and is willing to say that he watched it play out, but when it comes to the part that is used in our military manuals as the literal textbook example of an illegal order he, uh, wasn't there for that part. He had to skip out, you see, doing War stuff.

Hegseth's denials became more animated as he insisted he Did Not See Shit.

Hmm. There's a whole lot you can say about that little rant, and I'm not going to say it. But the man sounds quite anxious, for someone who until a few days ago was loud and proud about his illegal murder campaign.

So the plan of action appears to be simple: Trump is going to (probably correctly) insist he has no idea what's going on other than what Pete tells him, Pete is (quite falsely) going to insist that he knows about everything except the drop-dead explicit international crime, and the investigation is going to hinge on whether or not Hegseth issued the spoken order to "kill everybody" and, if he did, whether it was fault of the entire military chain of command except him that the order was interpreted to mean "do an explicit war crime."

There are a few problems with this plan, though it's hard to imagine the Trump team coming up with any other.

The first problem is that in Hegseth's angry attempts to distance himself from the obvious textbook warcrime, he's willingly admitting his part in everything that led up to that moment. But everything that led up to that moment is also an international crime; targeting civilians, even civilians engaged in alleged criminal activity, is an illegal act. And Hegseth's admission that he watched the first boat strike live may be especially jeopardizing, because that boat had 11 passengers and crew aboard when it was targeted—an implausible number of people for an alleged drug-running operation, and a likely case of the military targeting trafficked humans for execution.

The United States may be too corrupt to care about those things, but international prosecutors won't be. And the military decision to follow a plainly illegal order does not make the institutional decision to execute the rest of the illegally premised strikes look better.

The second issue is that now that Pete and Trump have demonstrated to the military that they will throw their soldiers under the bus without hesitation, it's not likely to endear the already mostly-despised Hegseth to his subordinates. They already (reportedly) consider him a danger and a fool; there will likely be considerably more drama in the ranks as even more commanders retire in disgust or are demoted after voicing opposition to illegal orders, and eventually, as with the Washington Post report, those officers are going to start talking.

That opposition to illegal orders within the military is necessary, if military law is to survive. But it leaves us once again wondering how a military in a massive behind-the-scenes battle over those laws is going to function, as Trump and Hegseth continue to demand more and more illegality from commanders. The Hegseth plan has, transparently, been to fire non-white, non-male, non-MAGA commanders in large numbers before any of them have a chance to dispute the legality of his orders.

We'll have to presume that there's a limit as to how many people can be fired without destabilizing U.S. military might worldwide; when the battle becomes one in which commanders are being asked to engage in the literal textbook examples of illegal orders, one would hope more commanders would object to those orders than would not. So all of this keeps getting more and more hairy, most of it outside our field of vision.

If there's one thing that seems certain, though: The White House now knows that there is some serious damn legal jeopardy involved in their no-evidence, no-prosecution, no-survivors campaign of maritime terror. All those alleged memos allegedly laying out the legality of the campaign don't even count as kindling when put up against the go-to example of an illegal order that Pete Hegseth, according to the Washington Post's witnesses, was stupid enough to verbalize.

Apparently there are still laws after all—if only a few. Perhaps.

We'll see if Senate Republicans agree, or if all this talk of "oversight" is meant only to placate the press and the military until the news cycle gets rocked by the next national catastrophe.