Brad Reed: ‘Furious Backlash’ Inside Pentagon as Hegseth Seeks to Avoid Blame for Deadly War Crimes

“This is murder,” said one legal expert.

Finger-pointing has reportedly begun inside the Pentagon as the Trump White House has tried to shield US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth from taking the blame for a double-tap strike on a purported narcotics smuggling vessel that many legal experts say was an obvious war crime.

According to the Washington Post, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt set off “a furious backlash within the Defense Department” on Monday after she declared that Adm. Frank Bradley, not Hegseth, made the decision to launch a second strike to kill two men who had survived an initial strike on a purported drug boat off the coast of Trinidad and Tobago on September 2.

One defense official told the Post that Leavitt’s statement was “’protect Pete’ bullshit,” while another said that the administration appeared to be “throwing us, the service members, under the bus.”

Hegseth on Monday praised Bradley in a post on X as “a true professional” who “has my 100% support.” However, Hegseth also appeared to make clear that Bradley was the person in the chain of command who made the final decision to authorize a second strike on the survivors.

“I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made—on the September 2 mission and all others since,” Hegseth wrote.

Even Fox News chief political analyst Brit Hume found Hegseth’s praise for Bradley to be disingenuous, and he described it as “how to point the finger at someone while pretending to support him.”

Bradley is set to give members of Congress a classified briefing on the strikes on Thursday amid bipartisan demands for more information.

The question of who authorized the second strike on the boat is crucial in determining who would face potential future war crimes charges. Earlier reporting from the Washington Post claimed that Hegseth gave a spoken order to “kill everybody” in the boat strikes, which was then interpreted as a justification for launching a second strike on the survivors.

Rachel VanLandingham, a military expert at Southwestern Law School, told Al-Jazeera that, regardless of who authorized the strike, it was clearly illegal.

“That second strike against individuals who are shipwrecked, clinging desperately to the side of their boat wreckage—that’s a war crime,” she said. “It’s a war crime because those individuals who are shipwrecked have protected status under the law unless they were, for example, shooting a gun at somebody.”

Todd Huntley, a former Staff Judge Advocate who served as a legal adviser on drone strikes carried out in Afghanistan and other nations by Joint Special Operations task forces, told The Intercept he had no doubt that the second strike on the survivors was a prosecutable offense under either federal law or the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

“This is about as clear of a case being patently illegal that subordinates would probably not be able to successfully use a following-orders defense,” he explained.

Rebecca Ingber, professor at Cardozo Law School, told Time that authorizing the second strike violated “one of the most basic and longstanding rules” of the laws of armed conflict.

“It is absolutely unlawful to order that there will be no survivors,” she explained. “There is no actual armed conflict here, so this is murder.”

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First published in Common Dreams. Licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely. 

Brad Reed is a staff writer for Common Dreams.