Monday on the RealClearPolitics podcast, Tom Bevan, Andrew Walworth, and Carl Cannon discussed reports from The Intercept and The Washington Post that an order from War Secretary Pete Hegseth to “kill everybody” led to a “double tap” attack on the survivors of a strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean in September. Did this cross a line, or has designating the cartels as “terrorists” changed the rules? “We should acknowledge it’s not really a matter of debate whether you can shoot someone clinging to wreckage. That’s just against the Geneva Convention,” Andrew Walworth explained. “What happened in this case depends on the sequence,” Cannon said. “These stories are not precise. Did Hegseth say ‘kill them all’ after the first drone strike had disabled this boat?” Tom Bevan suggested these reports are conveniently timed following the recent video from Congressional Democrats urging service members to disobey illegal orders. “Mark Kelly, Elissa Slotkin, and some others were asked if there had been any illegal orders, and they said they don’t know of any. Then, the next week, two anonymous sources leaked this story. Is that a coincidence? I’ll leave it to our listeners.” “This could all be a hoax, particularly when anonymous sources are attacking Trump’s administration,” Bevan added. “The media and Democrats are reacting as if it’s the absolute truth – and we don’t know that.” “We don’t know that there were two orders given. We think we know – based on the press – that there were two drone strikes. If the original order is: If the boat isn’t destroyed, we send another drone, and that second strike comes seconds or minutes later, that’s not the same as shooting wounded men on a battlefield,” Cannon said. Bevan offered some historical context: “You only have to go back to 2021, when Joe Biden’s Defense Department launched a drone attack in Afghanistan. They thought they were killing an ISIS terrorist. It turned out they killed a guy who worked for a California-based NGO and seven of his children.” “Ten people died in that attack. Seven were little children. For the better part of a year, the military insisted they’d done nothing wrong. Then, a year later, they announced: Oops, we actually did kill civilians and we’re sorry,” Bevan continued. “Nobody got fired. There were no war-crimes tribunals. There was nothing done. There was no outcry in the media, either, as far as I can tell,” he said. “So let’s keep all of this in proper context. Two wrongs do not make a right, but the double standards are real and need to be taken into account.”
RealClearPolitics Videos