It’s just a matter of time before Pete Hegseth is put on trial for his war crimes.
The internal and external dissent is so loud now, it matters for future accountability. A senior military lawyer raised objections to the legal rationale and was sidelined. Admiral Holsey, the operational commander, announced objections and offered to resign in October. These aren’t anonymous sources speculating, these are people inside the chain of command who found Pete Hegseth untenable. When your own JAG officers are telling you it’s unlawful, that’s not a difference of opinion; that’s evidence for your future tribunal. The British and Canadians cutting off intelligence from Hegseth over concerns the strikes are illegal, means Nuremburg-level calculations of who will be going to trial.
His big idea that “every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization” is primitive circular reasoning. He created a category to include anyone on these boats, then uses that as justification for killing them.
Straightforward moral questions such as “is it legal to execute civilians” are intentionally being buried under cynical layers of bogus unaccountable terrorism designations, false self-defense claims, and assertions about protecting our white women from Blazing Saddle rustlers.
It’s like Hegseth is saying non-white people use drugs, therefore it’s legal to murder any non-white person.
Even under the laws of armed conflict, you can’t execute survivors or kill people who pose no immediate threat. Yet, that’s exactly what Pete Hegseth is doing. Former military lawyer Todd Huntley, director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law, has said Hegseth’s order to kill all the boat’s helpless passengers is unambiguously a crime:
…would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime.
Hegseth has killed 80+ people without a single American court ever examining evidence, even long after the fact, that any individual was actually a threat. It’s not counter-terrorism; he’s executing people based on their race, nationality and location.
America, now spending billions on the most advanced weapons in history to execute survivors of a sunken boat who are clinging to wreckage, appears to be a militant dictatorship without any judicial process.
The hors de combat principle that you cannot attack those who are defenseless, including survivors of a sinking vessel, is among the oldest rules of armed conflict. It predates the Geneva Conventions. Naval powers agreed to this in the 1800s precisely because everyone understood that executing shipwreck survivors was barbarism.
When will Hegseth go to trial?
Pinochet was untouchable for decades until he wasn’t. Milosevic died during trial. Charles Taylor is serving 50 years. Accountability sometimes comes late, often imperfectly, but the documentation matters. The evidence accumulates. Witnesses remember. And political conditions change in ways that seem impossible until they happen.
Reagan’s “special units” in Guatemala operated with similar impunity until Santos López was sentenced to 5,160 years for the Dos Erres massacre.
Reagan’s “bulwark” in Chad, Hissène Habré, was convicted in 2016, despite hiding for 26 years in exile.
The documentation that made prosecution possible was contemporaneous. It accumulated for decades before political conditions allowed accountability. That’s because Presidents used to outsource atrocities to foreign thugs in distant countries. Trump now does it with American forces, American weapons, and a clown who calls himself “War Secretary” when he posts immoral kill shots to social media himself.
The victims in Guatemala and Chad waited decades. Hegseth is building his own war crime prosecution file in real time.