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Trump’s war crimes scandal, briefly explained
War crimes allegations are engulfing the Pentagon after a deadly strike in the Caribbean.
Cameron Peters is a staff editor at Vox.
Welcome to The Logoff: The Trump administration is facing renewed scrutiny over an apparent war crime committed in its campaign against alleged drug traffickers.
What happened? The US has been striking alleged “drug boats” in the Caribbean and the Pacific since early September, killing at least 83 people. But it’s the first strike, on September 2, that has become an object of particular scrutiny after the Washington Post reported last week that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave an order to “kill everybody” on the boat.
Here’s what has been reported so far:
- The strike killed 11 people in a small boat in the Caribbean.
- The US fired four missiles in the strike, including a follow-on attack that killed two survivors.
- The Pentagon knew at the time of the second attack that there were survivors and launched the follow-on strike anyway.
What does international law say? Killing helpless people at sea — and with their boat disabled in the first attack, the survivors would have been helpless — is unambiguously a war crime, as well as a violation of the Pentagon’s own law of war manual. The major dispute is who ordered the follow-on strike on September 2. Hegseth has said he was not in the room when it happened and that it was ordered by Adm. Frank Bradley.
What’s the big picture? There’s a broader issue underlying the current war crimes debate: The Trump administration has no legal authority for any of the strikes it has conducted. Legal experts have widely dismissed its argument that the US is engaged in a “noninternational armed conflict” with the cartels responsible for the alleged drug boats as baseless.
What happens next? Congress is, somewhat unusually, pursuing bipartisan oversight into what happened on September 2. On Thursday, lawmakers viewed video of the attack and heard testimony from military officials. Democratic Rep. Jim Himes described it as “one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service.”
And with that, it’s time to log off…
I really enjoyed the latest episode of PBS’s new podcast Settle In. Host Geoff Bennett speaks with actor Nick Offerman of Parks and Recreation fame about “the whole point of being a human” and the value of making things and being an active citizen. I hope you enjoy it, too, and as always, have a great evening. We’ll see you back here tomorrow.
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