Pete Hegseth is responsible for the murder of Venezualan survivors of the US ordered boat attack. He must be fired

Before he was secretary of defense — Pete Hegseth got it right.
Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe by Joan Vennochi

This isn’t the fog of war. It’s the fog of panic.

“There have to be consequences for abject war crimes,” Hegseth said in a video clip, during a talk he gave in 2016, that has resurfaced and is making the rounds on news stations.

“If you’re doing something that is just completely unlawful and ruthless, then there is a consequence for that. That’s why the military said it won’t follow unlawful orders from their commander in chief. There’s a standard, there’s an ethos. There’s a belief that we are above what so many things that our enemies or others would do.”

Now that Hegseth is facing questions about a possible war crime that occurred on his watch and under his command, he has jettisoned the ethos “that we are above what … others would do.” He pounced on six Democrats who posted a video saying that service members did not have to carry out illegal orders handed down by their commander-in-chief and referred to what was essentially a version of his own remarks from 2016 as “despicable, reckless, and false.” Donald Trump accused the lawmakers of “seditious behavior” and the Pentagon said it was launching an investigation into one of those Democrats, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a retired Navy captain.

In his job as defense secretary, Hegseth has also spent a lot of time talking about the “warrior ethos.” But as this controversy shows, he is far from a stand-up warrior, despite doing physical training with troops.

Rather than take ownership for the consequences of his order to strike a boat in the Caribbean on September 2, that he said was carrying drugs, and to kill everyone on it, as The Washington Post first reported, he is shifting accountability to an underling. Admiral Frank M. Bradley, commander of US Special Operations Command, has been identified as the official who made the decision for a follow-up strike that killed two survivors of the initial blast, and Bradley will be answering questions about it during a closed-door session with lawmakers.

The day after that September 2, operation, Hegseth told “(Fake❗)Fox & Friends,” “I watched it live.”  But now, he is saying he watched only the first strike live. At Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting, he said he watched the beginning of the strike before he “moved on” to his next meeting.

When he was asked if he saw any survivors after the first strike, Hegseth said, “I did not personally see survivors.”

Bradley, he said, authorized both strikes. “He sunk the boat, sunk the boat and eliminated the threat, and it was the right call.” Pressed for more information, Hegseth said, “This is called the fog of war.”

No, this is called the fog of panic and the ethos of self-preservation, no matter what the cost to others.

To put this debacle in context, it’s hard to beat this headline over George F. Will’s column in The Washington Post: “A sickening moral slum of an administration.” Or, Will’s opening paragraph: “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.”

Trump and Hegseth have invented a war, one they say gives them license to blow up boats suspected of drug smuggling, without the need to show proof or evidence or to even identify the suspects. 

This invented war has so far killed more than 80 people, a tally that the Trump administration has generally defended. Then came the report about the second September 2, strike to kill those two survivors, what military and legal experts say is a violation of international law.

Hegseth’s reaction shows that he knows that, too, and so does Donald Trump.

Since the story broke, about the second strike to take out the survivors, Trump has been hedging about Hegseth. As reported by The New York Times, on Sunday, aboard Air Force One, he said, “Pete said he did not order the death of those two men.” He added, “I believe him, 100 percent.” But he also said, “I wouldn’t have wanted that. Not a second strike.”

At the Cabinet meeting, Trump again distanced himself from the second strike, saying he didn’t know about it when it happened. 

Trump also said the United States is “going to start doing those strikes on land,” noting that “the land is much easier.”🙄❓

Meanwhile, as he pursues that questionable strategy against drug trafficking, Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who had been sentenced to 45 years in prison for his role in a conspiracy to traffic cocaine into the United States.

Hypocrisy, not to mention immorality, is the hallmark of the Trump administration. Even so, moving past the controversy over the strike that killed those two survivors on September 2, won’t be easy.

As Hegseth said back in 2016, “There have to be consequences for abject war crimes.”

But Hegseth, a champion of the warrior ethos, does not want to be the warrior who faces those consequences.