[POST] Murder Incorporated
Everywhere you look now ... everywhere that you turn it's murder incorporated
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WAPO: Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all
GUARDIAN: Pete Hegseth denies he gave orders to ‘kill everybody’ on alleged ‘narco-boat’; Defense secretary called reports about his role in strike as ‘fake news’ intended to discredit US military
WAPO: Congressional committees to scrutinize U.S. killing of boat strike survivors; In a rare split with the Trump administration, GOP-led panels in the House and Senate say they want a full accounting in the September military attack.
GUARDIAN: Video shows Israeli forces shooting Palestinians dead moments after surrender
HAAREZT: Ben-Gvir Promotes Officer Whose Soldiers Shot Dead Surrendered Palestinians; A day after Border Police officers shot two Palestinians dead after they had raised their hands, National Security Minister Ben-Gvir visited their unit’s base to ‘strengthen and hug heroic fighters’ and announce the promotion of their commander
ABC NEWS: Russian drones targeting civilians are turning Ukrainian city into a ‘human safari’
GEORGETOWN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS: The Fallout of India’s Extrajudicial Killings
IOWA LAW REVIEW: Why Corporations Should Be Held Liable for China’s Crimes Against Humanities in Xinjiang: Seeking Civil and Criminal Solutions
Our Secretary of War (so-called) seeks to earn his spurs (or maybe just a celebratory tatt!) by ordering the extrajudicial killings of suspected drug runners. In one instance, after a first strike leaves all but two boat crew dead, a second strike is conducted.
As WAPO reports:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.
The rationale of the Special Ops commander who okayed the second strike?
In briefing materials provided to the White House, JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] reported that the “double-tap,” or follow-on strike, was intended to sink the boat and remove a navigation hazard to other vessels — not to kill survivors, according to another person who saw the report.
That should strike you as a laughable excuse. It certainly did one US Representative and Marine veteran:
“The idea that wreckage from one small boat in a vast ocean is a hazard to marine traffic is patently absurd, and killing survivors is blatantly illegal,” said Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Massachusetts), a Marine Corps veteran and vocal Trump critic who received a classified briefing from Pentagon officials on the strikes in late October with other members of the House Armed Services Committee. “Mark my words: It may take some time, but Americans will be prosecuted for this, either as a war crime or outright murder.”
Them’s the choices, folks: war crime—if this be genuine war—or mere murder by military forces.
Little wonder Hegseth vehemently denied WAPO’s reporting.
Lawyer up, everybody, because somebody’s going to prison.
Meanwhile, two Palestinian combatants, let’s call them that because they’re likely were, are shot dead upon surrendering to Israeli forces in the West Bank.
Giving no quarter.
Israel promises a formal review, but the truth remains …
Israeli soldiers and police are rarely held accountable for the killings of Palestinians despite hundreds of allegations.
So far, the only official action taken by the IDF was to promote the unit’s commander.
Like father, like son.
Good thing neither America nor Israel signs on to the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction. We unsigned the Rome Statute back in 2002 during the GWOT, pulling the plug on that globalist dream of supranational judges lording over our sovereignty.
Israel? Same story—voted no from the jump, never ratified, and keeps the ICC at arm’s length.
Both nations swear by their own military justice systems—Uniform Code of Military Justice for us, “rigorous” IDF probes for them. We frame it as pure self-preservation: no foreign court second-guessing split-second calls in the fog of war or sanctioning our troops for doing the nation’s hardest work.
Tensions flare up plenty—the ICC sniffing around Gaza ops or our drone campaigns triggers sanctions threats from the White House, but we push back hard, calling it out as sovereignty sabotage. It’s the classic great-power play: you fence off your own ruleset when the growing global one threatens your self-determined freedom of action.
Rules for thee but not for me.
Along those self-serving lines, SecWar Hegseth zealously carves out a new, brutal kind of reputational capital—one forged in the direct, cold-blooded killings without trial.
Remember the Russian proverb that states the fish starts to rot from the head:
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”
That dangerously self-entitling vibe seems to be spreading throughout our federal national security apparatus—right down to our police.
This isn’t just a matter of bad optics or political scroll-chasing. It’s a sharp pivot in what America calls “war”—as in, I decide and you’re dead.
This White House-declared “war” is stripped of any rules, any legal cover, and all claims to morality. We’re not talking about the chaos of asymmetric conflict or the fog of combat. This is a targeted, deliberate policy decision to enact violence with impunity—to kill because we can. The Secretary’s “kill everybody” order strips away the fantasy of surgical strikes and replaces it with the raw reality of sanctioned murder on the high seas.
The rhetorical cover for this kind of operation is familiar: drug cartels as terrorists. This framing is a strategic maneuver to create a war footing without a declared war—an aggressive, militarized posture that justifies unabated lethal force.
Imagine our official take on China starting to blow up other countries’ boats in the South China Sea, declaring them whatever they damn well please?
War, by international law, comes with boundaries. These US strikes cross every one of those lines—that’s the point. The Geneva Conventions make it clear: wounded, surrendering, or incapacitated persons must be protected. The double-tap strike’s function to finish off survivors weaves a thread of criminality straight back to the command level, which runs—by law—from JSOC to SECWAR to POTUS, meaning they’re all implicated in what every other self-respecting democracy in this world could legitimately describe as war crimes.
This is not just recklessness; it’s a deliberate choice to break the law and discard humanity. It’s the kind of behavior that gets Old Glory righteously burned in the streets—an erosion of American power not through external foes but the hemorrhaging of our moral authority.
Alongside these unfolding atrocities, note the echoes in other conflicts: not just Israel but Russia’s clear targeting of Ukrainian civilians, Xi’s “deradicalization” of Xinjiang, and India’s killing of ex-pat critics.
Kill ’em all and let God sort them out.
Hegseth isn’t an outlier yelling into the void; he represents a larger trend of weaponizing fear and mistrust, exploiting legal gray zones to conduct state violence with the bluster of absolute authority—a dangerous myth that makes kings out of war secretaries and puts entire populations at risk.
There are numerous reasons why this behavior merits a genuine war crimes charge:
A verbal command to kill everyone on the boat stripped away all protections afforded by international humanitarian law, reducing human beings to killable targets.
The deliberate second strike on survivors defies the principle of proportionality and necessity that govern lawful military actions.
Using “navigation hazard” as justification is a transparently fabricated pretext designed to mask unlawful killings.
There were no attempts at capture or due process, removing any legal pretense for lethal force and equating it with extrajudicial execution.
Designing legal fiction around drug traffickers as terrorists circumvents essential legal norms, facilitating impunity. You can’t just re-label crimes as you see fit.
Hegseth’s public dismissal of criticism and insistence on unfettered kill authority display a clear intent to avoid accountability.
Militarizing the drug war in this fashion transforms a judicial and law enforcement problem into a war zone, escalating violence to levels outside accepted norms.
The ICC was set up to stop exactly this sort of war crimes behavior by states incapable or unwilling to police themselves. That used to be just African dictators; now it’s America, Israel, Russia, China, and India—none of whom recognize the ICC’s purview over their actions.
Some company to keep.
The worst of it: this handful of great powers setting a precedent for future administrations and militaries worldwide, normalizing extrajudicial killings as policy. This tactic aligns with other state actors’ lethal impunity, reinforcing global instability and diminishing international law’s efficacy.
China doesn’t need to erect some alternative world order to prevail. All it needs do is watch Trump destroy the last vestiges of America’s world order.
The true failure here is not just the disregard for law but the collapse of strategic foresight. Grand strategy demands a vision that blends force with legitimacy, power with justice. The reckless pursuit of short-term tactical “wins” through lethal overreach weakens the overall architecture of US global influence. When orders come down to “kill them all,” the entire system—military, political, moral—cracks under the weight of illegality and cruelty.
This moment places America at a crossroads. One path dives deeper into lawlessness, cynicism, and declining global standing. The other demands accountability, adherence to lawful conduct, and the reinvigoration of American leadership as a power that defends values rather than smears them. The choice isn’t academic; it will shape the strategic environment for decades.
For now, the direction chosen echoes older, darker chapters of US history—ones where power without accountability ends in ruin.
Paging the Frank Church Committee.
That’s the strategic truth the current moment demands confronting. Per Moulton’s warning, the truth will eventually come out and the guilty brought to justice.
I was only following orders.
Famous last words.
One of your best, unfortunately worthy of the significance of the event. I wonder how much ADM Holsey testimony will ever be made public. Probably as much as Jack Smith's.
Erasmus' adagia, not Russian...