It’s in the venerable tradition of pushing accountability down.View this email in your browser [link removed]

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**‘War Department’ mission: Saving Secretary Hegseth**

**It’s in the venerable tradition of pushing accountability down.**

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s scramble to avoid responsibility for his order to kill everyone on a boat allegedly transporting drugs, including two survivors treading water and clinging to flotsam after their boat had been blown up in mid-Caribbean, is a violation of law and a moral disgrace—but not without precedent. When things go visibly awry in our nation’s military actions (the key word in that clause is, of course, “visibly”), we have a long tradition of laying the blame on the underling.

According to

**The Washington Post** [link removed], Hegseth specifically ordered the operation’s commander, Adm. Frank Bradley, to have his sailors gun down those two survivors. According to

**The New York Times** [link removed], Hegseth gave no such order, but he did issue the initial order to kill the people on that boat, which followed from President Trump’s order to the military to view such boats as enemy warships. (Of course, in all such attacks that the Navy has carried out, not a one of those “enemy warships” has fired so much as a single shot at our Navy.)

Hegseth has denied giving the order to kill those two very short-lived survivors, and Trump has backed him up. In her Monday press conference, presidential press secretary Karoline Leavitt read a statement fixing the blame for killing those two floating boatmates on Bradley—who, she said, “worked well within his authority and the law directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated.” Under military law, it’s permitted to fire on an enemy warship that is partially disabled but still returning fire, with survivors in the water, but illegal to keep firing if that warship has surrendered. Then again, none of the boats we’ve attacked have returned fire.

The

**Post**has reported that a number of senior military officials view Hegseth’s denial and Leavitt’s statement as “‘protect Pete’ bullshit,” as one officer put it. “It’s throwing us, the service members, under the bus,” said another.

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It’s been clear for some time that the officer corps in charge of these actions has been dubious about this non-war war they’ve been ordered to carry out, and perhaps being set up to take the blame when its details come out. In mid-October, Adm. Alvin Holsey, just one year into his term atop the U.S. Southern Command, which includes the Caribbean, **retired** [link removed] after reported conflicts with Hegseth about the attacks. In the wake of Leavitt’s statement, others have been reported to be considering resigning, too.

But “the buck stops there, not here” tradition of exonerating higher-ups at the expense of those further down the chain of command is well established when it comes to war crimes. In response to the Army’s massacre of roughly 500 unarmed women, children, and old men in the Vietnamese village of My Lai in 1968, the U.S. Army captain who ordered the troops to make an indiscriminate attack and the colonel who suppressed a subsequent investigation were acquitted by military courts. Only Lt. William Calley, who presided on-site while the troops carried out their orders, was convicted.

No one accused Robert McNamara, who’d resigned as secretary of defense two weeks before the massacre, or Clark Clifford, his successor, for anything that happened at My Lai. By then, the U.S. had more than half a million troops in Vietnam, and defense secretaries didn’t and couldn’t follow the doings of a single infantry company. Whatever crimes we attribute to officials that high up are wholesale, not retail, and wholesale crimes seldom go punished. In fact, they’re seldom called crimes.

At minimum, though, an estimated two million Vietnamese, most of them civilians, died in the Vietnam War, and the fact that U.S. military policy classified much of that country as a “free-fire zone” subject to largely indiscriminate aerial bombardment was a leading reason why two (or perhaps three) million died in that war. Worse yet, according to his onetime aide Daniel Ellsberg, McNamara knew as early as 1965 that the war was unwinnable, yet persisted in telling the public that it could and would be won, even as he continued to ship hundreds of thousands of troops into those killing fields.

Half a century later, George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dispatched an army to Iraq on the even more spurious claim that this was a “preventive” war. There was no accountability for that epic falsehood, either.

Hegseth is the most preposterous secretary of defense this nation has ever had, but in his scrambling to escape accountability for wanton killings, he’s in elite establishment company. If you read down to the fine print, “passing the buck” is in the defense secretary’s job description.

**–HAROLD MEYERSON**

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