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Hegseth reportedly gave an order to “kill everybody” on an alleged drug vessel, leading to a potentially illegal second strike to kill survivors.
Sen. Ed Markey called Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “a war criminal” after reports that he gave a spoken order to kill all crew members, including survivors, aboard a vessel accused of smuggling drugs in September.
Markey’s comment, which pointed to a Friday report from The Washington Post, echoes bipartisan concern, including from Republican-led congressional committees.
When drone footage showed two survivors of an initial strike, a Special Operations commander ordered another strike to fulfill Hegseth’s order “to kill everybody,” a source told the Post. CNN reported that while Hegseth ordered to kill everyone on board, it’s not clear whether he knew there were survivors before the second strike.
“Pete Hegseth is a war criminal and should be fired immediately,” Markey wrote on X.
Hegseth called the report “fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory” and emphasized his goal to “kill the narco-terrorists.”
“Biden coddled terrorists, we kill them,” he wrote. Over the weekend, Hegseth’s personal account followed up with a parodied children’s character Franklin with an AI cartoon image of the child’s show turtle shooting boats with a rocket launcher.
Sen. Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, and Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona all raised concerns that, if accurate, Hegseth’s orders could be illegal, POLITICO reported. Across the aisle, Alabama Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said in a joint statement Friday that the committee promises oversight and “bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question.”
According to the Department of Defense’s Law of War manual, “persons who have been incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack.”
Legal experts who spoke to the Associated Press said striking the survivors of an initial attack on an alleged drug boat would be a crime. According to Just Security, an independent law journal based at New York University, the second strike was not a war crime because the U.S. is not engaged in an armed conflict. However, if accurate, Hegseth’s order and the ensuing order by the Special Operations commander were unlawful and a violation of international human rights law.
The White House stood behind Hegseth Monday, with Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt saying the strike in international waters “in accordance with the law of armed conflict.”
“Secretary Hegseth spoke with members of Congress who may have expressed some concerns over the weekend, and there have also been 13 bipartisan briefings to Congress on the Venezuelan strikes,” Leavitt said.
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