Those who point to the illegality of the lethal campaign what Donald Trump has been launched in the Caribbean and the Pacific against boats and people supposedly dedicated to drug trafficking They have added new arguments this Friday. ‘The Washington Post’ has revealed that the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegsethdio orders not to leave survivors behindbefore launching the first of the attacks on September 2, part of an operation that has already left at least 83 fatalities in extrajudicial executions.
“The order was: kill them all”, one of the two sources with direct knowledge of the verbal directive given by Hegseth told the newspaper.
In that attack, the first of more than 20, an elite SEAL Team 6 launched a missile which left the boat suspected of carrying drugs on fire and caused the death of most of its occupants. When the smoke cleared, the images that came live through drones showed that two people were left holding to remains of the boat.
Then Admiral Frank Bradley, commander of special operations, to comply with Hegseth’s order ordered from the command center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to launch a second missile. It is he blew the two survivors into the water and in the end all the occupants of the boat, 11 personasthey died. Two more missiles were then launched to completely sink the ship.
“”War crime”
The revelations underscore the dubious legality of the Trump campaign, which has made a declaration of war against cartels, which is already legally questionable. Part of the Republican’s argument is that drug trafficking represents a imminent threat to the US and its national security and the alleged drug traffickers are, therefore, as enemy combatants.
These are justifications that have been questioned since the HIM to experts like Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years. Now director of the national security program at Georgetown University, Huntley told the Post that Killing the boat’s occupants “is tantamount to murder”.
Even if the argument that we are at war were considered valid, killing someone who is no longer in a position to fight, such as two survivors clinging to the remains of a burning boat in the middle of the sea, “would be essentially a take no prisoners orderwhich would be a war crime” according to Huntley.
Sean Parnell, the Pentagon spokesman, has refused to answer questions from the capital’s newspaper and has said that “the entire narrative is completely false.”
Disinformation to Congress
The problematic revelations do not end there. In briefing materials about the attack on the White House and members of the Congress In closed-door sessions it was said that the second missile against the boat was launched to, supposedly, sink the remains of the ship and so that it did not represent a danger to navigation.
They were arguments that provoked discredit and frustration among some congressmen who believe that the Pentagon is deceiving them.
In fact, according to the newspaper’s sources, on the day of the Bradley attack, the supervisor of the operation, who has been promoted and now heads the organization that supervises elite units of all the armed forces, defended that the two survivors of the first missile were legitimate objectives. According to him, they could theoretically have called other drug traffickers to come rescue them and the alleged shipment.
Since that first attack, however, and always according to the Post’s sources, the protocols have changed to emphasize the rescue of possible survivors. In an attack in October, for example, there were two fatalities but two other people were rescued and repatriated to Colombia and Ecuador.
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