In many ways, it was a cabinet meeting like any other. There was the typical preening by cabinet members to heap praise on Dear Leader Trump. There was Trump, fighting like just-fed baby to stay awake. And there were questions asked and not answered.
And, as has also become typical, there was a batshit crazy moment that SHOULD have Americans deeply, deeply concerned for the present and future of our democracy.
Sec. of Defense Pete Hegseth is under fire currently for a strike in September on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean that many – including from the right – are calling a war crime.
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On Sept 2, the US bombed a boat off the coast of Trinidad, and according to the Washington Post, Hegseth ordered everyone on board killed. The first strike left two survivors, clinging to what was left of the boat, and it’s alleged that Hegseth directed Admiral Frank Bradley to conduct a second strike to kill the survivors. Killing survivor non-combatants is, according to US and international law, illegal.
Here’s what Judge Andrew Napolitano said about it on Newsmax:
“[I]t gives me no pleasure to say what I’m about to say because I worked with Pete Hegseth for seven or eight years at Fox News. This is an act of a war crime, ordering survivors who the law requires be rescued instead to be murdered. There’s absolutely no legal basis for it. Everybody along the line who did it, from the Secretary of Defense to the admiral to the people who actually pulled the trigger should be prosecuted for a war crime for killing these two people.”
Here’s what National Review columnist and Fox News contributor Andrew McCarthy wrote in a scathing column:
“If this happened as described in the Post report, it was, at best, a war crime under federal law. I say ‘at best’ because, as regular readers know, I believe the attacks on these suspected drug boats — without congressional authorization, under circumstances in which the boat operators pose no military threat to the United States, and given that narcotics trafficking is defined in federal law as a crime rather than as terrorist activity, much less an act of war — are lawless and therefore that the killings are not legitimate under the law or armed conflict.”
And here’s what former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on CNN:
“I don’t think there’s any question that that’s a war crime, if it happened in that way.”
On Sunday, Trump was asked about the report and said, “Number one, I don’t know that that happened. I wouldn’t have wanted that, a second strike. The first strike was very lethal… but Pete said that [second strike] didn’t happen.”
In a statement, Hegseth also said no illegal strike took place.
But by Monday night, Hegseth was blaming Admiral Bradley, like a coward, tweeting:
“Let’s make one thing crystal clear:
Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made — on the September 2 mission and all others since.
America is fortunate to have such men protecting us. When this @DeptofWar says we have the back of our warriors — we mean it.”
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Now, if you noticed that Hegseth took zero responsibility here and instead threw Bradley under the bus, you weren’t the only one. Here’s what Fox News’s Brit Hume posted:
Which brings us to today, and the wild cabinet meeting.
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Here’s, in part, what Trump had to say. It is nothing short of ASTONISHING.
“As far as the attack is concerned, I didn’t—you know, I still haven’t gotten a lot of information because I rely on Pete. But to me it was an attack. It wasn’t one strike, two strikes, three strikes. Somebody asked me a question about the second strike. I didn’t know about the second strike. I didn’t know anything about people. I wasn’t involved in it. I knew they took out a boat.
But I would say this: they had a strike. I hear the gentleman that was in charge of that is extraordinary. He’s an extraordinary person. I’ll let Pete speak about him. But Pete was satisfied. Pete didn’t know about a second attack having to do with two people, and I guess Pete would have to speak to it. I can say this: I want those boats taken out. And if we have to, we’ll attack on land also, just like we attack on sea.
So, to sum up…the President of the United States didn’t then and STILL doesn’t know about the details of a potentially illegal strike that happened THREE MONTHS AGO.
As he admits, the President doesn’t know about it because he relies on Pete Hegseth, his Secretary of Defense, to brief him, and apparently he has not.
AND the President is saying that Pete Hegseth, again, the Secretary of Defense, also didn’t know about a second attack.
That is either one of two things, neither of which are good: either the Trump administration is duplicitous or patently incompetent.
But then Hegseth takes the reins, and offers up a THIRD defense, after initially denying there was an illegal strike, and then blaming Adm. Bradley. And believe me, it begs more questions than answers.
“How do you treat Al-Qaeda and ISIS? Do you arrest them and pat them on the head and say, “Don’t do that again”? Or do you end the problem directly by taking a lethal kinetic approach?
And that’s the way President Trump has authorized the War Department to look at these cartels. And I wish everybody could be in the room watching our professionals, our professionals like Mitch Bradley, Admiral Mitch Bradley and others at JSOC and SOCOM and other commanders. The deliberative process, the detail, the rigor, the intel, the legal, the evidence-based way that we’re able to—with sources and methods that we can’t reveal here—make sure that every one of those drug boats is tied to a designated terrorist organization.
We know who’s on it, what they’re doing, what they’re carrying. All these white bales are not Christmas gifts from Santa. This is drugs running on four-motor fast boats or submarines that we’ve also struck. No one’s fishing on a submarine. And I have empowered them to make that call.”
Got that? They were deliberative, detailed, rigorous. They had the intel, they had the legal, they had sources and methods. They know who’s on the boats, they know EVERYTHING.
So therefore, we have to assume they knew what they were doing, and killed these two survivors intentionally, right?
Pete wasn’t done, though. Believe it or not, it gets WORSE.
“Now, the first couple of strikes, as you would—as any leader would want—you want to own that responsibility. So I said I’m gonna be the one to make the call after getting all the information and make sure it’s the right strike.
That was September 2nd. There’s a lot of intelligence that goes into building that case and understanding that—a lot of people providing information. I watched that first strike live. As you can imagine, at the Department of War, we got a lot of things to do. So I didn’t stick around for the hour and two hours, whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs.”
He didn’t “STICK AROUND?” He had another meeting that took him away from bombing a narco-terrorist? We’re meant to believe that this work of eradicating narco-terrorism from our country is both so urgent and important that the Defense Department doesn’t even need due process to carry out operations, but ALSO not important enough for the Defense Sec. to STICK AROUND to watch it to completion??
There’s more.
“So I moved on to my next meeting. Couple hours later, I learned that that commander had made the—which he had the complete authority to do, and by the way, Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat. He sunk the boat, sunk the boat, and eliminated the threat. And it was the right call. We have his back, and the American people are safer because narco-terrorists know you can’t bring drugs through the water and eventually on land, if necessary, to the American people. We will eliminate that threat, and we’re proud to do it.”
So he learned of the second strike hours later. But didn’t brief the president? He didn’t bring Trump the good news that they eliminated the threat? Bullshit.
Pete ended on a predictably indignant note, with the so-called “tough talk” of a guy who just threw his own Admiral under the bus:
“I did not personally see survivors, but I stand—because the thing was on fire. It was exploded and fire and smoke. You can’t see anything. You got digital. This is called the fog of war. This is what you and the press don’t understand.
You sit in your air-conditioned offices or up on Capitol Hill, and you nitpick, and you plant fake stories in the Washington Post about “kill everybody” phrases on anonymous sources, not based in anything, not based in any truth at all. And then you want to throw up really irresponsible terms about American heroes, about the judgment that they made.
I wrote a whole book on this topic because of what politicians and the press does to warfighters. President Trump has empowered commanders to do what is necessary, which is doing difficult things in the dead of night on behalf of the American people. We support them, and we will stop the poisoning of the American people.”
This is BANANAS. It’s no way to run a cabinet meeting, let alone the Defense Department. There are no positive spins on it. Either Hegseth authorized a potentially illegal strike, which would make him a war criminal, or he didn’t know one happened, and withheld that information from the President, which makes him an incompetent moron unfit for office. I’ll let him pick which he prefers.
