Defense secretary shares anecdote in The War on Warriors and rails against ‘rules and regulations’ governing war

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.

  • Assassassin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    341·
    8 小时前

    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.

    • badgermurphy@lemmy.world
      6·
      4 小时前

      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.

    • ChonkyOwlbear@lemmy.world
      37·
      7 小时前

      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.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        6·
        2 小时前

        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.

    • Doug Holland@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      5 小时前

      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.

    • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
      22·
      6 小时前

      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.