On a day in early September, Pete Hegseth – the US Secretary of State for War (no longer for “Defence”) – ordered the firing of a precision-guided missile at a wooden boat offshore from Venezuela. This strike killed nine of its crew and left two injured and struggling to cling to the wreckage. Whether or not (as The Washington Post alleges) Hegseth said, “Kill them all,” the operational commander, Admiral Frank Bradley, admits to ordering a second strike intended to exterminate the two survivors. This, as all the legal textbooks make clear, is a war crime – the murder of a combatant who is hors de combat – unable to fight back.
War Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed to be acting in the “fog of war”. Credit: AP
Second strikes on shipwrecked mariners are among the most contemptible of war crimes and are universally recognised as such. The most influential precedent came in 1918 with the sinking of a Canadian hospital ship, the HMHS Llandovery Castle, by a German submarine, which then surfaced and machine-gunned the nurses and sailors as they scrambled for the lifeboats. A Leipzig court – although notorious for pro-German bias – nonetheless convicted and condemned the gunners, who must have known the order to fire was unlawful. There were several cases during World War II when Nazi submarine commanders and crew were hanged for killing those who survived their torpedoes.
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Although Hegseth has shrugged his shoulders and claimed to be acting “in the fog of war”, that is no longer a good defence – especially when the smoke from the initial bombing had cleared and the two men could clearly be seen struggling to hold on to the helm of the boat. The second strike was intended to kill them, and the law of war was ignored because Hegseth and Bradley believed that, as American commanders, they were entitled to ignore it.
But Australians are not, and must now be wary of co-operation under ANZUS or AUKUS with American commanders who could draw them into complicity in the commission of war crimes. “First strikes” on fishing boats in the Caribbean have cost 87 lives so far and are not themselves lawful – whether guilty of cocaine-couriering (as the Pentagon claims) or merely innocent fishermen, as their bereaved relatives protest, it does not actually matter. In neither case is America fighting, other than in rhetoric, a “war”, no matter what form it takes in Trump’s imagination. He is, in fact, conducting an extraterritorial police action in which he is killing suspected drug traffickers – just as Rodrigo Duterte did when he was mayor of Davao City and had such suspects shot. Duterte is now in prison in The Hague awaiting trial for his crimes against humanity, while Trump is in the White House doing exactly the same thing: executing suspects without trial or even investigation.
This amorality in government conduct is most prominent in the peace deals that Trump thinks he is doing together with his realtor mate, Steve Witkoff. These two appeasers are behaving as if Nuremberg never happened. They turn a blind eye to war crimes, and their peace plan for Ukraine proposes a general amnesty for Russian fighters. This will protect them from prosecution for the barbaric executions of civilians in Bucha and the mass murder – by bombing – of hundreds of women and children in the theatre at Mariupol. Crimes against humanity are to be forgiven and forgotten. As for their peace plan for Gaza, all war crimes are to be overlooked and treated as if they had never taken place: the 70,000 (so far) victims of IDF bombing will fade away as mere “collateral damage”, or incidents justified by that all-purpose excuse, namely “self-defence”.
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As for Trump’s and Hegseth’s attitude towards war criminals, one need look no further than Trump’s 2019 pardon of Lieutenant Clint Lorance, who had been convicted in 2010 and sentenced to 20 years for ordering the killing of two Afghans on a passing motorbike – men who posed no threat whatsoever to his platoon. His own soldiers reported him, ashamed to serve under a commander they regarded as a murderer. Yet a few years later, Hegseth – then a Fox News commentator – took it upon himself to recast Lorance not as a war criminal but as a “great warrior”.
Trump swiftly followed suit, hailing him as a “war hero” when overturning the conviction. It was an eerie reprise of Lieutenant William Calley, who was convicted and court-martialled of the murder of 22 unarmed South Vietnamese villagers – mostly elderly men, women, and children – at a village in My Lai half a century earlier, another officer who had done little more, in the eyes of his apologists, than kill people unlikely to fight on America’s side.
