Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, told soldiers under his command in Iraq to ignore legal advice about when they were permitted to kill enemy combatants under their rules of engagement.
The anecdote is contained in a book Hegseth wrote last year in which he also repeatedly railed against the constraints placed on “American warfighters” by the laws of war and the Geneva conventions.
Hegseth is currently under scrutiny for a 2 September attack on a boat purportedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean, where survivors of a first strike on the vessel were reportedly killed in a second strike following a verbal order from Hegseth to “kill everybody”.
Hegseth has denied giving the order and retained the support of Donald Trump. The US president said Hegseth told him “he did not say that, and I believe him, 100%”. But some US senators have raised the possibility that the US war secretary committed a war crime.
In the book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth relates a story about a legal briefing at the beginning of his service in Iraq, in which he told the men under his command to ignore guidance from a military judge advocate general’s (JAG) attorney’s guidance about the rules of engagement in the conflict.
He’ll make them do bad stuff and then throw them under the bus.
We now know that there are absolutely no laws for Republicans.
Now what has America ever done about presidents and administrative staff when they become war criminals?
…Nothing.
Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfield got to die peacefully, never accounting for their war crimes.
That’s because we actually don’t give a shit about war crimes but we do give a shit about money and profits for our billionaire club.
Pete hegseth is a fucking douche
Hang him
Publicly
He is at his point a mass murderer. Last I checked, mass murderers still get the death penalty in the US so why make an exception for this drunk shit stain on humanity?
Because US has laws to defend its mass murderers? They are way too comfortable defending killing of brown people, if you haven’t noticed last few decades.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-becomes-law
But some US senators have raised the possibility that the US war secretary committed a war crime.
A fairly minor quibble, I suppose, but whatever the hell he calls himself, Hegseth is not the Secretary of War.
It’s SSecretary of War.
I bet when he saw that he did a zieg heil…sorry, I meant big smile.
According to this sign, he is the ssecretary of war.
I think it’s funny how ignorant they are on what the name was changed to department of defense.
No one wants to cut defense spending. It’s politically unwise because who doesn’t want a strong defense.
War spending is far easier to question. Few would be upset to hear we avoided spending money on a war we could have picked.
Correct. It would take Congress to change that, which it seems like they wont get. Hence, the attempted name change is unlawful and - to the extent that they use DoD resources to do it- it is also likely illegal.
possibility
Yeah, we know exactly what went down, so that’s not “a possibility”, it’s “proven fact” that this drunk asshole committed war crimes
Any time a government official tells you to ignore legal advice run to your lawyer
That’s why he fired all the military lawyers
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
Removed by mod
That one doesn’t fit their current objectives.
Their current objective is Dems are responsible for everything the Republicans do.
Yeah criticizing the opposition party for refusing to oppose anything done by the ruling party definitely has all the marks of a psyop campaign by a foreign state.
I’m glad you’ve noticed.
Though I do agree that Schumer should have fought more instead of capitulating. The feds who were suffering were still up for the fight.
Yes, because we all have our own lawyers.
There are many times you can’t afford a lawyer, sometimes without your finances changing it suddenly switches to you not being able to afford not to get one. This is one of those times.
deleted by creator
Here’s my thing with the sudden outcry about the double tap: why is this the breaking point? These motherfuckers have been blowing up boats at random on allegations of drug trafficking, but has anyone actually seen a single shred of evidence to back that up? The double tap is horrible in the context of a legitimate military strike, but there hasn’t been anything to show that these are even valid military targets. Even if they were carrying drugs, that’s not a crime that carries a death penalty anywhere but the worst fascist backwaters of the world.
This entire thing reeks of hegseth just wanting to kill people on the flimsiest of rationalizations, and even with a blatant war crime, he’s being allowed to.
Shooting sailors in the water after their boat has been sunk is literally the example the military gives of an illegal order. This was made a war crime specifically in response to Nazis doing this exact thing in WW2.
Yeah, it’s how blatantly illegal it is.
With illegal things, there are always going to be lawyers who will bend over backwards and contort all the facts to try to make it seem legal. John Yoo was famous for doing that to justify literal torture. And not only did he get away with that, he’s now a law professor at Berkeley. So, even if it’s pretty obvious that attacking random boats on allegations of drug trafficking is illegal, it’s illegal in a way that would be difficult to prove in a court of law. In the court of public opinion it’s obvious, 95% of the world would say that it’s absolutely obvious, and even 67% of the US would agree. But, you get a creep like John Yoo in front of a GOP judge and who knows what might happen.
But, in this case they did the thing that the actual Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual (2023) gives as an example of something that would obviously be illegal:
18.3.2.1 Clearly Illegal Orders to Commit Law of War Violations. The requirement to refuse to comply with orders to commit law of war violations applies to orders to perform conduct that is clearly illegal or orders that the subordinate knows, in fact, are illegal. For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.
And that example has a footnote with both a legal case, and with an explanation:
Judgement in Case of Lieutenants Dithmar and Boldt, Hospital Ship “Llandovery Castle” (Second Criminal Senate of the Imperial Court of Justice, Germany, Jul. 16, 1921), reprinted in 16 AJIL, 708, 721-22 (1922) (“It is certainly to be urged in favor of the military subordinates, that they are under no obligation to question the order of their superior officer, and they can count upon its legality. But no such confidence can be held to exist, if such an order is universally known to everybody, including also the accused, to be without any doubt whatever against the law. This happens only in rare and exceptional cases. But this case was precisely one of them, for in the present instance, it was perfectly clear to the accused that killing defenceless people in the life-boats could be nothing else but a breach of the law. As naval officers by profession they were well aware, as the naval expert Saalwiachter has strikingly stated, that one is not legally authorized to kill defenceless people. They well knew that this was the case here. They quickly found out the facts by questioning the occupants in the boats when these were stopped. They could only have gathered, from the order given by Patzig, that he wished to make use of his subordinates to carry out a breach of the law. They should, therefore, have refused to obey.”).
This is so obviously against the law that they used it as an example of an illegal order. They also clearly identified the precedent. Then they spent more text in the footnote than in the paragraph itself, carefully explaining that there are some things that are just so obviously illegal that a member of the military can’t pretend they didn’t know it was a crime, and that shooting shipwrecked sailors is so obviously one of those that no sailor could ever claim they didn’t know the order was illegal.
Holy shit is that a clear case. A sad situation, but wow, the absolute amount of clarity made me chuckle.
It is like a sketch how that piled up, and you compiled it.
I think you’re missing the forest for the trees. The criticism being made is that no matter which way you look at it, crimes have been committed:
- if we accept the narrative that the US is at war with drug traffickers AND that’s who these people are: then the double-tap is a war crime
- else: it was murder to begin with
The Pentagon knows this. They are now trying to shift all the blame onto a specific Admiral, trying to make it look like he acted of his own accord, trying to retain plausible deniability. This article in particular is attempting to shift it back, to show that the official messaging from the Pentagon has always been encouraging war crimes, and that even if we take everything this administration has said at face value, they’re still culpable by their own standards.
I believe that events like these capture the public interest much more than the countless other likely lawless actions, because the legalities of those other actions and the reasons they are that way can be complex and philosophical.
In the case of firing on this shipwreck, it is a very simple event with a very straight line you can draw from “this is the law” to “this is why there’s this law” to “here’s an ever-increasing cavalcade of evidence indicating clear and knowing violation of that law”. The situation is simple, it involves very little philosophy beyond “murdering the helpless is a dick move”, and everyone pretty much gets it. A story that simplistic is also tenaciously resistant to media spin; about all they can do is try the “dick moves make you a badass” gambit, which mostly only works on those that are anti-intellectual, provincial, and insecure, so it is only getting traction with the constituencies that would already have followed their leader off a cliff anyway.
Yes, it’s kinda nuts.
In 2021, it was January 6 that infuriated so many people, though Trump had committed a thousand impeachable acts before that day. By now he’s up to 10,000+, but this one seems to stick more than the rest, when it’s probably not in the top twenty.
It’s kinda nuts, but I’ll welcome anything that gets people pissed off at any sliver of the Trump crime wave.
I think people are naive. I think america depends on naiveness and doesn’t allow people to live outside that naive lifestyle.
When you lose that naiveness you become an enemy simply because you started to understand the reality of things.
America doesn’t exist for humanity. It exists as a business and power of authority. It’s not inherently for us, the genuine human beings.
Are the democrats going to do anything about this because if you just sit on your hands you are just condoning this behaviour.
But democrats have been condoning trump and his lackeys from day 1 so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised
A strongly worded lett…no, a very strongly worded xhitter post is incoming. And when that mass murderer sees it he’ll be shaking in his boots, I can tell you.
Of course they condone the behaviour. This is shit they do too.
We all know the answer the answer to this is a definitive no.
A few Dem office-holders will say things. Maybe a random Dem will file a bill criticizing Hegseth. Other than that, nope, Dems won’t do anything, because doing anything would piss off their bosses, the Republicans.
US
wardefense secretaryDespite their bullshit lies, neither Hegseth nor Trump possess the authority to rename the Department of Defense. Their attempts to do so are unlawful and we should not kowtow to them by using it.
edit: to be clear, it is established in law and therefore making the change would require another law passed by Congress.
I hope he’ll eventually be liable for all the illegal orders he asked to willfully ignore one day.
Wait
Hold on
I’ve seen this one before
Uhh, but I won’t have your back.
Trump must not have known about this, otherwise he never would have put such a reckless psycho in charge
Hmmm, it looks like you forgot the /s at the end of your post?
I like to raw dog sarcasm sometimes.
I also refuse to use the /s
Textual sarcasm needs to be extra spicy to carry the tone.
There is an art to it and a /s is like splashing white paint on a beautiful canvas.
/s is for amateurs
Always been American policy he is just not supposed to say the quiet part out loud.
