“Kill everybody.”
That, according to two sources, was the order given by US Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth before American forces destroyed a civilian vessel in international waters. He denies issuing the command, but that’s exactly what the Navy personnel did: After blowing the boat up, they sent a second missile to kill two survivors hanging onto the wreckage.
Let’s get the easy part out of the way: If the US were at war, this would be a war crime. It isn’t, so this was likely an act of murder. In a nation governed by the rule of law, there would be severe punishment for everyone in the chain of command — from the secretary or admiral issuing an obviously-lawless order to the enlisted sailor carrying it out. In the US today, there will be no legal accountability towards anybody.
How do we know the “double-tap” strike was a blatant violation of core military law? Section 18.3.2.1 of the Pentagon’s own Law of War manual says so: In explaining how service members can know when they have been given an illegal order, the manual gives what it posits is the clearest possible example: “Orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.”
How do we know that nobody will ever face accountability? Because the Commander-in-Chief of the US military is President Donald Trump. In October, he gave essentially the same order: “We’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. OK? We’re going to kill them, you know? They’re going to be, like, dead.” Thanks to a legally-laughable Supreme Court ruling last year, Trump himself enjoys complete immunity for all official actions. His Justice Department will never prosecute anyone for following his directive, and before he leaves office, Trump will issue any pardons necessary to preclude future investigation.
That part is easy to predict. The slightly more difficult question: What about the other civilians Trump has executed in international waters over the past three months — and those he’s vowed to continue executing in the months to come?
The Trump administration has launched 21 strikes so far, killing at least 83 people. Its justification rests on a string of falsehoods: That the victims were narco-terrorists who pose an existential threat to America and whose status as uber-villains grants the government licence to terminate at will. Not one part of this rationale is true.
It’s possible that some of the victims were low-level drug-runners, although their boats didn’t have the range to reach anywhere near the US. Journalists tracking down the families of the victims have found that some of them were simple fishermen. If they were moonlighting as drug traffickers, the threat they presented was negligible: Venezuela provides only 10 per cent of the cocaine entering the US — and 0 per cent of the (far deadlier) fentanyl cited by Trump as the specific threat.
More damning to the argument: Just last week, Trump showed how much he truly cares about drug trafficking when he granted a full pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández — a former Honduran president serving a 45-year sentence in an American prison for helping ship over 400 tonnes of narcotics to the US.
Hernández isn’t the only high-level narcotraficante to enjoy Trump’s favour: Earlier this year, the US President granted sanctuary to 17 relatives of notorious Mexican cartel boss El Chapo. Whatever Trump’s motive may be for killing dozens of penny-ante criminals while showing leniency to billionaire kingpins, it clearly isn’t a zero-tolerance drug policy.
The Administration calls its targets “narco-terrorists” based on its own decision to put the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua on its list of Foreign Terrorist Organisations — right alongside Al Qaeda, Lashkar-e Taiba and Jaish-e Muhammad. This makes no sense: If the same term can be applied to ordinary street thugs and the perpetrators of 9/11 or 26/11, then the word has no meaning. More importantly, such a designation doesn’t bring with it the right to slaughter at will: The US, like every other law-abiding nation, frequently captures suspected smugglers (or even terrorists) and puts them on trial. It does not simply execute civilians at whim — for drug offenses that don’t even carry the death penalty.
The danger here is not merely that we’ll see hundreds more murders, or even an unprovoked US invasion of Venezuela (a perilous prospect, but the subject of another column). The danger unfolding before our eyes is this: A reality in which the president, and anyone carrying out his orders, has no obligation to follow US law or international law.
Trump has long been trying to turn America’s military into his personal militia. In his first term, his Secretary of Defense had to walk him down from ordering troops to open fire on citizens protesting peacefully outside the White House. He has deployed troops in combat gear to intimidate the residents of Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, and Washington DC. He has constantly injected partisan rhetoric into military gatherings, openly referring to some officers as “my” generals and inciting enlisted soldiers to cheer against his political adversaries.
If he plans to illegally stay in office after his term ends (as he has frequently expressed the desire to do), he will need the US military to participate in such a coup; when he attempted to do exactly this on January 6, 2021, his plan was foiled only by the deployment of the National Guard.
Nobody will ever be held accountable for the killing of dozens of men so far, or for however many more Trump decides to kill in the months and years to come. The real question is much larger: Now that the commander of the US military has already induced American troops and their officers to obey his clearly illegal orders, why should we believe he’ll stop there?
The writer is author of Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God: Retracing the Ramayana Through India and Mullahs on the Mainframe: Islam and Modernity Among the Daudi Bohras
