POLITICS: Pete Hegseth’s response to WaPo report is not sitting well with some – USSA News

As a U.S. senator challenged corporate media’s harping over a report built on an anonymous source, a former prosecutor raised the specter of a war crime involving Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

“The administration’s defense can’t be that ‘we killed them because our plan is to use lethal force.’”

Heading into the weekend, while President Donald Trump set a focus on closing the border to those in Third World countries and expelling those who might “undermine domestic tranquility,” the Washington Post dropped a report claiming Hegseth had allegedly been responsible for a second strike against a suspected drug boat after a first one had left survivors.

While Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R) pushed back on coverage of the story that has yet to be confirmed, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andy McCarthy penned a column for National Review challenging Hegseth’s statement in response to the report.

“If this happened as described in the Post report, it was, at best, a war crime under federal law,” asserted the former prosecutor. “I say ‘at best’ because, as regular readers know, I believe the attacks on these suspected drug boats — without congressional authorization, under circumstances in which the boat operators pose no military threat to the United States, and given that narcotics trafficking is defined in federal law as a crime rather than as terrorist activity, much less an act of war — are lawless and therefore that the killings are not legitimate under the law or armed conflict.”

McCarthy went on, “Even if you buy the untenable claim that they are combatants, it is a war crime to intentionally kill combatants who have been rendered unable to fight. It is not permitted, under the laws and customs of honorable warfare, to order that no quarter be given — to apply lethal force to those who surrender or who are injured, shipwrecked, or otherwise unable to fight.”

In addition to knocking the Post as “fake news … delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland,” Hegseth stated, “As we’ve said from the beginning, and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be ‘lethal, kinetic strikes. The declared intent is to stop lethal drugs, destroy narco-boats, and kill the narco-terrorists who are poisoning the American people.”

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‘Biden coddled terrorists, we kill them’: SecWar blasts ‘fake news,’ makes case for Caribbean ops https://t.co/bpFOx35qzO via @BIZPACReview

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Challenging that as a position, the column asserted, “This is a very serious matter. The administration’s defense can’t be that ‘we killed them because our plan is to use lethal force,’” wrote McCarthy who argued neither Hegseth’s nor Admiral Frank M. Bradley, the operation commander, had provided an adequate explanation the “makes legal sense.”

Meanwhile, Mulling appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” with Dana Bash, where he challenged the attention corporate media is giving this story, pushing the narrative as Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly (D) has of a potential “war crime.”

(Video Credit: CNN)

When asked about the comments of the Arizona lawmaker, who is facing his own allegations of impropriety as one of the so-called “Seditious Six” sowing discontent within the U.S. military, and whether or not the secretary should “face consequences,” the guest replied, “Listen, you’re once again making assumptions. That’s not even kind of accurate, I don’t believe. All we’re doing is talking about an assumption. This [hasn’t] been proven. It hasn’t been said it was actually true.”

“In this particular situation, you’re talking about, once again, it’s alleged over an anonymous source, which the media is really good about, always trying to name some anonymous source. And then they make a big deal about it as though it’s true,” Mullin went on, prompting questions from Bash as to whether he knows it’s not true.”

“Why would it be true? And then we know that … the Navy or the Coast Guard has picked up survivors already and sent them back to the country. So, now we’re saying that they did it once and they didn’t do it again. I don’t believe this at all,” the senator argued.

After Bash posed a hypothetical where a Pentagon lawyer may have told them an alleged secondary strike was illegal, thus prompting rescue missions, the senator decried the suggestion, “No, absolutely not. And I don’t know why we’re spending so much time on this.”

“What are we questioning here? These individuals don’t care about the lives of our friends and families. Why do we care if we take them out in international water? It is a war because they have declared war on our streets. And the president and Secretary Hegseth is doing exactly what we should be doing, being proactive against our enemies. And that’s what they’re doing here,” argued Mullin. “And I applaud them for doing something because the past administration did absolutely nothing while thousands of Americans died on our streets.”