There is absolutely no doubt about it: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Admiral Mitch Bradley are war criminals. So is President Donald Trump. The premeditated killings of unarmed, noncombatant civilians in boats off the coast of Venezuela are war crimes under international law and murder under the U.S. Law of War, the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the U.S. Constitution. All three of these men should be tried as war criminals and sent to prison.American journalist par excellence Max Blumenthal, editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, recently hosted Judge Andrew Napolitano on his broadcast. Judge Nap served as a New Jersey Superior Court judge from 1987 to 1995. He also served as a visiting professor at Widener University Delaware Law School, Seton Hall University School of Law and Brooklyn Law School. The transcript of this interview between Blumenthal and Napolitano below is must-reading.
Conservatives and evangelical Christians profess to be pro-law and order. But the Trump administration has proven that these two groups are NOT pro-law and order. They are as selective and biased regarding the rule of law as any of those on the political or ideological Left. They only care about law and order when it pertains to the opposite political party. Office holders within their own party (Republican) are free to commit the most heinous crimes known to man with not just impunity but also with their unequivocal support.
Here are excerpts from this interview. Please read them carefully.
Blumenthal: So, Judge, you have been making waves recently in a recent Newsmax appearance. You called Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, basically the Secretary of war crimes and questioned the entire legal rationale for what he’s called Operation Southern Spear. This all relates to a September 2 strike, ordered by Admiral Mitch Bradley on a boat containing 11 men in the Caribbean. I don’t know why you’d stack your boat with 11 men if you wanted to bring a lot of drugs into the U.S., or why you’d have such a small boat that can’t even reach the U.S., but two men survived the initial strike, were clinging to the boat, and a second double-tap strike was ordered, apparently by Hegseth. What is your critique? Why did you call Pete Hegseth a war criminal?
Napolitano: The killing of the two people that survived really should not divert focus from the entire project, which is a series of war crimes. The idea that the President of the United States can use the military to kill people who he believes are about to commit a crime, even though at the time of their deaths, they’re 1,500 miles away from the United States, is antithetical to the concept of due process.
It’s pretty basic that under the Constitution, there’s only two ways the government can kill anyone. That is pursuant to a declaration of war by the Congress, where the U.S. military is legally fighting the military and agents of the country against which we’ve declared war, or after due process, which is basically a fair jury trial with all the attendant rights and defenses that the Constitution requires the feds and the states to make available to you when they want your life, liberty or property.
So, it’s pretty basic that the entire concept is a war crime. A war crime because it is the use of the U.S. military to kill noncombatant civilians. But I’m concerned that we lose sight of the bigger picture.
The other issue that brought this to everybody’s attention was the rather courageous but incomplete video prepared by six members of Congress who themselves are veterans of the military or the intelligence community, in which they basically made a truthful statement, which is that you don’t have to obey an illegal order. The president, of course, typically overreacted and said they committed sedition, they committed treason, they should be killed, executed. It’s unclear if by killed he meant that they should be tried for a capital crime or that he would dispatch the military to kill them as he has these boat people.
Sedition is defined in the statutes as encouraging people to use violence to overthrow the government of the United States. Treason is defined in the constitution. It’s the only crime defined in the Constitution, intentionally so, so that Congress or a president couldn’t alter the definition. And it is well known as waging war in the United States or providing material assistance to those who are doing so.
So, neither of these statutes is relevant. They all know and we all know the illegal order is to kill civilians, to kill unarmed noncombatants. That’s the illegal order.
The event on September 2, in which Pete Hegseth said he didn’t have time to stick around to see who survived it, is defied by the Washington Post (which claims seven—seven—sources, they must be military or intelligence) who said that Admiral Bradley asked Hegseth, “What do you want me to do?” And Hegseth verbally said, “Kill everybody.”
The White House eventually admitted that Hegseth did that under some laughable theory of self-defense, that these two poor souls were injured, terrified, in the middle of the water, middle of the ocean, clinging to the debris of their boat, somehow posed a threat and needed to be eliminated, posed a threat to Admiral Bradley and his people. Admiral Bradley is a killer who should have left the Capitol building in shackles and handcuffs and been delivered to a military prison for a court-martial. The same can be said for Secretary Hegseth and anybody that obeyed these orders.
What I forgot to say earlier: About a month and a half after this horrible event on September 2, there was another killing where there were two survivors. This time the Navy went in and rescued them, and the DOJ said, “Well, we can’t prosecute them. Send them back home.” So, those guys went back home. It shows that the DOJ profoundly changed its policy after this September 2 event.
It also shows that Trump and Hegseth have absolutely no knowledge of exactly whom they are murdering. The fact that there was no evidence that elicited criminal charges against these men whom Hegseth had just attempted to kill proves that Hegseth (with Trump’s blessing) is killing innocent civilians, as Max points out below.
Read Full Article: https://thewashingtonstandard.com/pete-hegseth-war-criminal/
