Transcription
First, they lie. That's what has happened in the American military after every war crime committed by the American military. First, they lie. Somewhere in the chain of command, they lie. That is what Donald Trump's incompetent defense secretary, Pete Hegsth, did when first confronted with the Washington Post breaking news report of a second missile strike on a small boat that had already been destroyed and burst into flames after the first missile strike.
The Washington Post reported that the second missile strike killed two people clinging to the wreckage, which would be a war crime in a war and is murder outside of war. There is no war in the Caribbean. There is no fog of war there. So, Pete Hegsth lied and said that everything in the Washington Post article was, quote, "the fake news delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting." That was Pete Hegsth's first lie about this story as soon as it came out.
Pete Hegsth himself has already turned himself in for lying about that, for telling that lie, since he has changed his story multiple times since he told that lie on Sunday.
In Vietnam, the worst American military war crime of the 20th century was called a resounding success. Those are the words. "Resounding success" in the first after-action report of what came to be known as the My Lai massacre, in which American soldiers, commanded by Lieutenant William Calley, summarily executed 347 people. And first, they lied. But 18 months later, Lieutenant Calley was finally charged with personally murdering 109 civilians: babies, grandmothers, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers. When one of the soldiers, Lieutenant Calley, ordered to murder people, refused to do it, Lieutenant Calley took that soldier's rifle and shot them himself. But first, they lied.
The American military never wanted us to know that story. And when suspicions built about a possible war crime, the lying didn't stop immediately. The lying does not stop immediately in these cases. But based on the American military's history of lying about war crimes, the American military has earned exactly zero credibility to any defense offered about a possible war crime if that defense does not include evidence. And that's for war crimes. What about crimes committed outside of war?
Brian Goodman is now a professor of law at NYU who served as a legal counsel in the Pentagon in 2015 and 2016. He told the New York Times today, "Focusing on the shipwreck is a distraction in so far as it suggests everything else preceding and after that strike was all legitimate. Even under a law of armed conflict, they were all civilians. And we are not actually in armed conflict either way. It was all murder. All murder." That is the considered opinion of a legal expert on this matter.
Today, the admiral in command of the mission met privately with the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate committees with some jurisdiction over this matter: House and Senate Armed Services Committee, the House and Senate Intelligence Committee, the House and Senate Appropriations Committee, including the Appropriations Subcommittees on Defense. Of the six Republicans who were offered that briefing today, only one of them stepped up to a microphone afterwards to offer what he saw in the video of the second strike that targeted for murder two people clinging to the wreckage of what used to be a small boat and was just debris at that point.
Republican Senator Tom Cotton, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, believes that the two people clinging to the wreckage, in his view, needed to be killed. "I saw two survivors trying to flip a boat loaded with drugs bound for the United States back over so they could stay in the fight and potentially, given all the contacts we heard of other naroterist boats in the area coming to their aid to recover their cargo and recover those naroterists. And just like you would blow up a boat off of the Somali coast or the Yemeni coast and you'd come back and strike it again if it still had terrorists and it still had explosives or missiles. Admiral Bradley and Secretary Hegsth did exactly what we would expect them to do." No terrorists were killed in that attack.
No other Republican who was briefed today offered a specific defense of what they saw when they were shown the video of the second attack killing those two people clinging to the wreckage. Every Democrat who saw that video of the second missile attack today said they found it deeply disturbing.
Tonight, Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, made it very clear that Pete Hegsth was lying when he claimed that the second strike occurred during what Hegsth called the fog of war. "It turns out, there was no war and there was no fog. First of all, we need to be clear. There was no fog of war. They had a clear vision of these two people on top of what was left of their capsized boat for quite a while. I think it was somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour after the initial strike. So, they could see clearly what what was going on. First, second, I I saw Senator Cotton say that the two gentlemen were trying to turn their boat back up. I guess that is patently ridiculous. Um, that boat wasn't going anywhere. And by the way, that's not the justification that Admiral Bradley even offered. So, it's two people sitting on a tiny little portion of a boat sticking out of the water that that's capsized."
In the first report of this incident by the Washington Post, Admiral Bradley was as fully implicated in the order to kill those two people as Pete Hegsth was. The Washington Post reported the commander overseeing the operation from Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Admiral Frank M. "Mitch" Bradley, told people on the secure conference call that the survivors were still legitimate targets because they could theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo, according to two people. He ordered the second strike to fulfill Hegsth's directive that everyone must be killed.
If Admiral Bradley told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth today in his discussions with congressional leaders, which was not under oath, he will be the first military commander suspected of involvement in illegal killing, who immediately told the full truth in his very first secret discussions about the incident. The only video we can show you of Admiral Bradley speaking to Congress is from his Senate confirmation hearing. "I pledge and I and I believe that uh throughout time we have always worked as an integrated interagency to be able to bring the multiple levers of influence and power that the US needs to achieve its policy objectives and and if confirmed I would pledge to continue that."
If the Republican-controlled committees in the House and Senate conduct real investigations of this incident, Admiral Bradley will face more difficult questions next time he testifies to Congress under oath on television. No matter what evidence comes out in this case, there will be defenders of every missile Donald Trump and Pete Hegsth and Admiral Bradley have fired at every person they have killed on every one of those very small boats.
When Seymour Hersh began his investigative reporting on the My Lai massacre in 1969, he found defenders of Lieutenant Calley everywhere. One officer told Seymour Hersh, "He's a good soldier. He followed orders." There was no amount of evidence that could change the minds of Lieutenant Calley's defenders in the American military and outside of the American military. And that's what will happen this time. No matter what we see on that video, there will be people like Tom Cotton telling us that they saw something else.
The criminal charge against Lieutenant Calley was that he committed premeditated murder of 109 "oriental human beings whose names and sex are unknown" by shooting them with a rifle. Like the people the United States of America has been killing on those small boats far from the United States. Pete Hegsth doesn't know their names. Pete Hegsth doesn't know their sexes. Pete Hegsth doesn't know how old they are. He doesn't know if there was a 12-year-old boy or other children on any of those boats. Pete Hegsth doesn't know if there were women on those boats.
And so now Donald Trump is facing a demand to release other information that he apparently wants to hide. And that includes the now-secret video that was shown today only to congressional leaders and to no one else. And as an added insult to the American public, Donald Trump released another video tonight of another missile killing everyone on another boat somewhere in the Pacific Ocean this time, thousands of miles from the United States of America. A small boat that can't carry enough fuel to reach the United States.
If these small boats are carrying as much cargo as Pete Hegsth says they are, they cannot possibly carry enough fuel to make it farther than the next island. They just couldn't possibly carry enough fuel for that if they're also carrying all that cargo. These are not oceangoing vessels. These are very, very, very small boats. Donald Trump and Pete Hegsth want you to enjoy watching videos of them killing people in those boats. That's why they release those videos. They want you to be like them. They want you to love watching those people get killed. But for some reason, there's two people they don't want you to see get killed. For some reason, they don't want you to see the video of them killing two people clinging to the wreckage and what law professor Ryan Goodman, an expert on military law and civil law, says is just murder.