Ordering our troops to commit murder is a crime. Period.

 https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=1504219&post_id=180252772&utm_source=post-email-title&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=rovhk&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo0NjUxMDE4NCwicG9zdF9pZCI6MTgwMjUyNzcyLCJpYXQiOjE3NjQ0MzYzNTcsImV4cCI6MTc2NzAyODM1NywiaXNzIjoicHViLTE1MDQyMTkiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.tk3SJIx9MXLgXae9MOxUYmLq1mMC0v3s_p3AYgioQuA

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This article is dedicated to Ozarkmichael who had complained about the ad adminitioning the military to disobey illegal orders.  Here is a time when they should have disobeyed Hegseth,who acts like GI Joe playing a video game.

Meanwhile Trump has said he will pardon the former Honduran president who was convicted of drug smuggling.  I guess bringing drugs into the country is not that big a deal afterall for Trump.  

The Washington Post story on the 'take no prisoners' order from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is clear evidence that the Trump Administration is giving illegal orders to our troops

Fred Wellman Nov 29

Pete Hegseth is very likely a war criminal

That is not a bold statement. It’s fact based and growing clearer by the day. The recent reporting by the Washington Post on orders to kill everyone in boats of the Venezuelan coast confirms what many have suspected all along. This is an illegal mission committing crimes.

I have the unusual fortune to actually know the lead author of the explosive Washington Post story that came out yesterday, Alex Horton. His story lays out how a verbal order from SecDef Hegseth to kill everyone on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean.

That journalist is a former Army enlisted soldier who served in Iraq and who has built a journalism career covering the military based on deep knowledge of the service and even deeper sources.

If he says this happened then he has the goods.

So, based on the reporting, its clear that what Hegseth and subordinate military members did when killing survivors of a strike on an alleged cartel speed boat is indeed a war crime if not a domestic one. That’s before we talk about the fact we aren’t legitimately at war at all.

From the story:

“The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.

A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.”

The clarity of this moment can’t be understated. I am a former scout helicopter pilot for Apache and Cobra attack helicopters. I led them into combat in Desert Storm. We knew the laws of war. We drilled them even as we went to combat.

Flying over the Rumaila Oilfield battlefield the day after the fight on March 3, 1991

If an enemy is incapacitated you must spare their lives. This isn’t complicated. There was no military reason to strike the boat a second time and kill the men in the water. None.

It was murder.

Congress must act now

To date the Republican Congress has refused to hold hearings or even investigate these extra judicial killings. So far they have only gotten closed door briefings to the top leaders of the Armed Services and Intelligence Committees. That’s it. This is an unacceptable shirking of their Constitutional duty and must end now.

I was encouraged this morning to see that Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (MS-R) and Ranking Member Jack Reed (RI-D) released a joint statement promising investigations into these shocking reports.

We have not heard a single squeak from the utterly gutless and cowardly Republican leaders of the House Armed Services and Intelligence Committees. My Republican opponent for Congress, Ann Wagner, sits on the Intelligence Committee and chairs the Open Source Intelligence Subcommittee. She has never once even mentioned these strikes as our armed forces have killed over 80 people in our names.

This is a dereliction of duty that is hard to fathom. Our service members are being ordered to kill people and our members of Congress can’t even be bothered to question the legality of the entire situation.

I call it the Republican Doormat Congress for a reason. They have simply laid down to be walked on by Trump and his corrupt Administration.

Murder in our name is unacceptable. A speedboat in waters over 2,000 miles from our shores is not “delivering drugs to the United States.” No matter how much the Administration wants to come up with convoluted terms like “narco-terrorist” it is not legal cover for extrajudicial killings.

This is about those young men and women being ordered to pull the trigger. They will live with that decision their entire lives. While Hegseth gets to dress up and play tough guy it is our children who will carry the burden of killing innocents and may even face criminal charges themselves.

Put politics aside and put our service members and the good of our nation first. This is a battle for the souls of our kids and our entire country.

Cowards must not be allowed to destroy them all. Demand change. Fight for truth. Throw them all out.