Donald Trump and maga Republicans must fire Pete Hegseth for incompetence ASAP before he makes another mistake

Echo editorial opinion pubished in the Boston Globe: 

Amounting to murder- US killing shipwrecked sailors raises urgent questions for Congress;  Two people survived the Pentagon’s first strike against drug boats in the Caribbean in September. Clinging to the wreckage, they were no longer a threat. So,why were they killed❗❓😠😳😧😢

Pete Hegseth Is A War Criminal

Hegseth is no stranger to controversy, but the emerging deadly scandal over a war crime he reportedly ordered the US military to commit in the Caribbean, is grave enough that many of his fellow Republicans have joined Democrats in sharply questioning his judgment. Even by the degraded standards of the Trump administration, ordering the murder of shipwrecked sailors, as Hegseth reportedly did in September, would be an abomination. Congress must quickly get to the bottom of what happened and hold Hegseth accountable.

The killings happened at the beginning of the Trump administration’s ongoing violent campaign against what it says are drug traffickers ferrying narcotics through the Caribbean Sea. The offensive has so far killed at least 80 people.

The legality of the operations in the first place is questionable. No evidence has been presented against the people who have been killed. Even if they were running drugs, due process demands that they be arrested and tried through the criminal justice system. In defending the use of military force instead, the Trump administration insists that the drug cartels are terrorists with whom the United States is at war, making the strikes legal.

But even if you accept Trump’s (flawed, wrong minded, evil❗) rationale — especially if you accept Trump’s rationale — it follows that,if this is a war, then the military’s actions must obey the laws of war. Yet The Washington Post reported last week that during the first planned strike on an alleged drug boat in early September, Hegseth gave a clear verbal order: Kill everybody.

“A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. 

For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck,” the Post reported. So the commander who was overseeing the attack allegedly ordered a second strike, and the two survivors were killed.

The double-tap strike likely constitutes a war crime under international law. The two were clinging on the boat and posed no tangible threat to the United States. 

As Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, said, “this was an extrajudicial killing amounting to murder or a war crime.” Under the Geneva Conventions and other international treaties, not only can militaries not kill prisoners of war or incapacitated enemy sailors or soldiers, they must protect and rescue them if possible.

“We have always been trained to believe that folks who surrender, we don’t just mow them down for the sake of mowing them down,” Senator Jim Justice, Republican of West Virginia, said. “You have a situation like this where you’ve got survivors evidently in the water and we pulled a second strike off? It’s just not acceptable.”

Hegseth has tried to distance himself from the incident, instead throwing Admiral Frank Mitchell Bradley — who was leading the Joint Special Operations Command at the time of the strike — under the bus. But the good news is that Congress seems to be stepping up to do its job as a check on the executive branch in a bipartisan fashion. GOP-led committees in both the House and the Senate have launched inquiries into the reports.

It’s too early to know whether those congressional inquiries will lead to any tangible consequence for Hegseth. But, it’s precisely this kind of incident that shows why Pete Hegseth's history of irresponsible behavior makes him unfit for this job. 

Hegseth's Senate confirmation process was nearly derailed by reports of sexual misconduct, financial mismanagement, and a history of drinking on the job. 

Just a few months later, he was embroiled in Signalgate, where he was sharing sensitive and classified information — related to planned and imminent airstrikes in Yemen — on a Signal group chat that accidentally included The Atlantic’s editor in chief. According to The New York Times, the Pentagon’s acting inspector general found that the use of a private messaging service had put American troops at risk.

Donald Trump has so far defended Hegseth, though he has also tried to distance himself from the alleged war crime, saying he “wouldn’t have wanted that, not a second strike.” Meanwhile, though the Trump administration’s violent assault on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean continues under the guise of putting an end to drugs getting smuggled into the United States, unbelievably, Trump just recently pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been previously convicted in the United States on charges of drug trafficking.

Hegseth, formerly a Fox (Fake❗ ) News fill in host, made a show of his job in the Trump administration, aggressively flaunting American military might. Alarmingly, he’s even publicly shown a disregard for international law and rules of engagement. “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct,” Hegseth said earlier this year, after rebranding (senslessly 😟😠) the Defense Department into the “Department of War.”🙄

That sort of reckless attitude toward norms and codes of conduct makes an incident like the double-tap strike unsurprising and indicates that the defense secretary might be capable of doing something far worse.

Republicans are starting to tire of Hegseth’s tough-guy act. “Secretary Hegseth said he had no knowledge of this and it did not happen. It was fake news. It didn’t happen. … And then the next day, from the podium of the White House, they’re saying it did happen,” Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, said of Hegseth and the alleged war crimes. “Either he was lying to us … or he’s incompetent and didn’t know it had happened.”

Of course, this might not be an either-or situation. Hegseth could very well be guilty of lying and incompetence, as evidenced by his other scandals. So whether it comes from Congress or the president himself, Hegseth has to face some form of accountability for his dangerous and potentially illegal actions. Otherwise, Americans should expect only more recklessness and dangerous irresponsibility from the very top of the Pentagon.