The Hegseth Killings Must Stop
Last week the Pentagon, under “War Secretary” Pete Hegseth, carried out yet another military attack on a boat in the high seas that the Administration claims is smuggling drugs. That makes 23 boats blown up by the US military in the waters off Latin America – most near Venezuela – and nearly 100 persons killed.
To date the US government has provided no evidence to back up its claim that these boats are smuggling fentanyl and other dangerous drugs into the United States. The US Drug Enforcement Administration has reported that Venezuela neither manufactures nor transports fentanyl to the US. In fact, the DEA still concludes that Venezuela is barely a minor player in the drug game.
Is this really about drugs? Or is it about “regime change” for Venezuela?
When Adm. Alvin Holsey, the commander of US Southern Command, raised concerns about the legality of bombing boats on the high seas and extrajudicial killing, he was pushed out by Hegseth. His concerns were ignored.
When lawyers at the National Security Council, Pentagon, and Justice Department raised objections to the boat attacks they were reassigned or fired, according to press reports. Finally, President Trump’s own appointed lawyers at the Justice Department came up with a justification for killings. But it’s classified.
Last week the media reported on an incident from September where two survivors of the US strike were left clinging to the wreckage of their boat when the orders came to kill them too. It was clearly an illegal order, even according to the Pentagon’s own Laws of War manual.
Many Americans will not want to hear this, but this entire operation is illegal and immoral – from blowing up survivors to blowing up the boats in the first place. There is no legal justification to use military force against boats on the high sea that pose no imminent military threat to the United States.
Many supporters of this policy argue that the killings are “self-defense” because “narco-terrorists” are using narcotics as weapons against the American people. That is certainly what the Administration is claiming, having invented “narco-terrorist” as a new term to justify the killings.
Sadly, this shows how effective government war propaganda still is. It was used when both Republican and Democratic Administrations wanted to launch wars against Saddam Hussein, against Gaddafi, against Assad, and so on. New slogans are invented and a good deal of the public happily adopts them as their own. Anyone who challenges the new slogans is deemed unpatriotic or weak. When the war goes badly they pretend they were never fooled by government lies. Then it happens again and they repeat the new war slogans.
The “war on drugs” was launched by President Nixon a half century ago. It is obviously another failed government policy. Raising the stakes in a failed war is foolish and counterproductive. The solution to smuggling during alcohol prohibition was not to start bombing the bootleggers. It was to come to terms with basic economics: you cannot kill demand by killing supply.
More Americans die each year from alcohol use than from fentanyl use. Will strikes soon be launched against “alco-terrorists” who are killing Americans? Of course not… we hope. That is the danger of throwing away the laws of war: anything can happen next.
Congress has the authority to stop Secretary Hegseth from killing people on the high seas. It should do so without delay
Ron Paul is a former Republican congressman from Texas. He was the 1988 Libertarian Party candidate for president
‘Kill Them All’
by Andrew P. Napolitano | Dec 11, 2025
“Does anyone know where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?”
— Gordon Lightfoot (1938-2023)
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”
As we learn more about the events on Sept. 2, 2025, in international waters 1,500 miles from the United States, the behavior of the United States military becomes more legally troubling than at first blush. We have learned from members of Congress and others who have seen the videos of the attacks on the speedboat that day that the first strike mainly — but not completely — destroyed the boat and killed 9 of the 11 persons aboard.
The two survivors clung to the wreckage for 45 minutes, during which they frantically waved at what they hoped were American aircraft, expecting to be rescued. This attack was the first of many since ordered by President Donald Trump, and it was done without warning. After the passage of 45 terrifying minutes, three more attacks obliterated the two survivors and their wreckage, for “self-defense,” the White House said.
When two courageous persons privy to all this revealed it two weeks ago to reporters for The Washington Post who corroborated the revelations with five others, the Post published the story. Then, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth denied he ordered the survivors killed; it was, he said, “the fog of war.” Then, the White House countermanded that denial. Then, the admiral in charge acknowledged that he ordered the kills pursuant to the secretary’s initial orders.
The military has a duty to rescue the injured and the shipwrecked. And the military has a duty to disregard unlawful orders — a position that Attorney General Pamela Bondi herself argued to the Supreme Court when she was in private practice, and Hegseth himself argued when he was a private citizen.
Not rescuing these survivors was criminal. But the entire killing process is criminal.
Here is the backstory.
The core legal issue here in Hegseth’s fog of fear is whether the president may lawfully order the military to kill noncombatants for law enforcement purposes. The short answer is: NO. The longer answer requires us to delve into the history and nature of the federal government and the purposes of the Constitution.
The federal government is one of limited powers. The powers are delineated in Article I of the Constitution wherein we find 16 grants of power to Congress, plus a catch-all which permits Congress to legislate in areas not specifically found in the 16 but arguably supportive of them.
Nowhere can public safety be found. In fact, the courts have ruled innumerable times that governance over health, safety, welfare and morality — called the “police power” — was and remains reserved to the states. Indeed, the 10th Amendment recites that the powers not granted to the feds are reserved to the people or to the states.
After the Civil War ended and during the period of Reconstruction, federal troops exercised the police power and attempted to govern and even provide safety in the formerly seceding states. Reconstruction ended after 11 years with a number of compromises, one of which is a federal statute that prohibits the use of the military for law enforcement purposes.
This is not a historic anomaly or mere footnote. It is a profound legal commitment to keep troops off American streets and out of the business of domestic law enforcement; and keep the police power local.
When the president takes an oath to uphold the Constitution, he promises to execute his office “faithfully.” James Madison, the scrivener of the Constitution, insisted that the presidential oath be in the Constitution and that the word “faithfully” be in the oath. He knew presidents would be tempted to ignore laws with which they disagreed.
He was right. Such persons are unfit to be president. “Faithfully” in the presidential oath means evenhandedly, irrespective of the president’s personal opinion of the laws. If a president could enforce the laws he liked and disregard those he didn’t like, he’d be violating his oath and veering away from the system of checks and balances Madison so carefully crafted, and toward authoritarianism.
Now back to killing people in speed boats.
Trump claims that the folks in the boats are drug dealers and the drugs are destined for the United States. That is unlikely to be accurate in the case of all the boats destroyed and all the riders killed.
Even if it were true, however, it does not legally justify killing anyone. Neither the military nor domestic law enforcement may lawfully kill nonviolent, noncombatant persons. As horrific as was the experience of those for whom the waves turned the minutes into hours, that is only a small part of the unconstitutional authoritarianism we are witnessing.
The whole program — “kill them all” — is a profound violation of the Fifth Amendment, which the president has sworn to uphold faithfully and which requires a jury trial when the government wants anyone’s life, liberty or property. If the president were really interested in drug interdiction, seizures in U.S. waters and arrests and prosecutions would yield a far better path to the source of the drugs than murdering couriers and destroying any evidence.
The admiral who gave the “kill them all” order was in Florida when he gave the order. The projectiles that struck these boats were dispatched from aircraft that took off from Florida, and the dispatchers — the folks who pulled the triggers (today, pressed the buttons) — were in Florida. No one can seriously argue that they were not subject to the Constitution.
Killing is the most horrific business. It is dangerously becoming normalized due to the demonization of the victims. But killing destroys innocent lives and the values that underlie the Constitution. If the president can demonize those whom he hates and fears, and then kill them in defiance of law and get away with it, of what value are our laws?
Antiwar.com.
Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the US Constitution. The most recent is Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty. To find out more about Judge Napolitano and to read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2025 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO – DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
No comments:
Post a Comment