Commander Ordered Strike On Alleged Drug Boat Survivors To Comply With Hegseth Demand
My Note: When will enough be enough? Is not congress also guilty of abdicating its authority to Trump? I have friends that think that Trump's actions are acceptable. In what political world are actions like this OK?
In early September, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a U.S. strike force command to kill everyone on board a suspected drug-trafficking boat in the Caribbean, The Washington Post reported, leading to a second strike on a pair of incapacitated survivors that appears to constitute a war crime.
“The order was to kill everybody,” one source with knowledge of the operation told the Post [Washington].
The Sept. 2 attack represented the first of many strikes on alleged drug traffickers in the region, even though fentanyl — a prime contributor to overdose deaths — does not tend to come from Central and South America.
U.S. military commanders were apparently shocked to see two survivors clinging to the flaming boat once smoke from the first strike cleared. The second strike, apparently to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, reportedly killed the two survivors.
To date, the Trump administration’s hotly controversial strikes on supposed drug boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean have left some 80 people dead, although little is known about their identities or whether they were, in fact, trafficking drugs.
BBC: A former chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC) has told the BBC that US air strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats would be treated under international law as crimes against humanity.
