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Hegseth blames scapegoat for apparent war crimes he bragged about



Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday blamed a military commander for the
apparent war crime the U.S. military committed in September in the Caribbean
Sea, saying that it was Admiral Mitch Bradley, not Hegseth, who ordered the
strike to kill survivors of an initial missile attack.

"Let’s make one thing crystal clear: Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American
hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the
combat decisions he has made—on the Sept. 2 mission and all others since,"
Hegseth wrote in a post on X. "America is fortunate to have such men protecting
us. When this [Department of Defense] says we have the back of our warriors—we
mean it."

Of course, it's impossible to believe anything that Hegseth says. The Trump
administration lies often and with no remorse.




 



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On this incident alone, Hegseth, President Donald Trump, and other
administration officials have been changing their story about what happened in
that strike—as bipartisan groups of lawmakers are expressing fears that the
administration committed war crimes.

On Sept. 3, the day after the alleged war crime took place, Hegseth bragged
about the attack on Fox News.

"I watched it live. We knew exactly who was in that boat," Hegseth said,
saying that the people on the boat were Tren de Aragua members who were "trying
to poison our country with illicit drugs."

The Trump administration has wrongly accused multiple people of being members
of the Tren de Aragua gang. For instance, it sent a gay makeup artist based in
the U.S. to an infamously brutal prison in El Salvador, so it remains hard to
believe Hegseth’s claims that he has provided zero evidence for—either publicly
or to Congress.

When The Washington Post first broke the news that the military went back and
killed two people who were alive after a U.S. missile struck their boat in the
Caribbean Sea—an action that experts say is a war crime—both Hegseth, Hegseth's
spokesman, and White House Director of Communications Steven Cheung denied the
report.

"As usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and
derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect
the homeland," Hegseth wrote in a post on X, declaring that the missile strikes
on boats in the Caribbean Sea are legal.

"We told the Washington Post that this entire narrative was false yesterday,"
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell also wrote in a post on X. "These people just
fabricate anonymously sourced stories out of whole cloth. Fake News is the
enemy of the people."

"The Washington Compost provided NO FACTS and NO SUBSTANTIATION. They
literally just printed what some unnamed random person said and reported it as
fact," Cheung wrote in a post on X.





 



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However, in the days since, the White House and even Trump himself have
confirmed there was a second strike to kill the survivors of the initial
missile attack.

If Hegseth indeed ordered the second attack, as reports claim he did, it
wouldn't be the first time he has tried to blame underlings for his own
misconduct.

Earlier this year, when Hegseth was caught discussing classified intelligence
on an unsecured Signal chat, he refused to take responsibility for his actions
and blamed Pentagon staffers instead.

Also, Hegseth has previously voiced openness to committing war crimes. He has
said publicly he believes the laws of war unfairly constrain soldiers, and that
when he served in the military, he ordered his underlings to ignore legal
advice. Hegseth also convinced Trump in Trump’s first term to pardon men who
were convicted for or accused of committing war crimes.

Previously, Republican lawmakers defended Hegseth's misconduct around the
Signal chats. But this time around, even many of them are expressing concerns
that war crimes were committed in this boat attack.

“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,” Sen. Jim Justice,
Republican of West Virginia, told Semafor. “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.”

Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska echoed those sentiments.

“I think most would say that when you have two individuals that are literally
floating in the water, a second order to kill them all is not something that we
would consider within the rules of war,” Murkowski told MS NOW on Monday night.



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