Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, told soldiers under his command in Iraq to ignore legal advice about when they were permitted to kill enemy combatants under their rules of engagement.
The anecdote is contained in a book Hegseth wrote last year in which he also repeatedly railed against the constraints placed on “American warfighters” by the laws of war and the Geneva conventions.
Hegseth is currently under scrutiny for a 2 September attack on a boat purportedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean, where survivors of a first strike on the vessel were reportedly killed in a second strike following a verbal order from Hegseth to “kill everybody”.
Hegseth has denied giving the order and retained the support of Donald Trump. The US president said Hegseth told him “he did not say that, and I believe him, 100%”. But some US senators have raised the possibility that the US war secretary committed a war crime.
In the book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth relates a story about a legal briefing at the beginning of his service in Iraq, in which he told the men under his command to ignore guidance from a military judge advocate general’s (JAG) attorney’s guidance about the rules of engagement in the conflict.
Are the democrats going to do anything about this because if you just sit on your hands you are just condoning this behaviour.
But democrats have been condoning trump and his lackeys from day 1 so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised
A strongly worded lett…no, a very strongly worded xhitter post is incoming. And when that mass murderer sees it he’ll be shaking in his boots, I can tell you.
Of course they condone the behaviour. This is shit they do too.
We all know the answer the answer to this is a definitive no.
A few Dem office-holders will say things. Maybe a random Dem will file a bill criticizing Hegseth. Other than that, nope, Dems won’t do anything, because doing anything would piss off their bosses, the Republicans.