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Legal Experts Accuse Hegseth of ‘War Crimes, Murder, or Both’ After New Reporting on Boat Strike Order

Two Republican-controlled committees also said they were opening investigations into the defense secretary’s alleged order to “kill everybody” aboard a boat in the Caribbean in September—the first of nearly two dozen strikes.

Julia Conley, Nov 30, 2025

Former top military lawyers on Saturday said that new reporting on orders personally given by US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in early September, when the military struck the first of nearly two dozen boats in the Caribbean, suggests Hegseth has committed “war crimes, murder, or both.”

The Former Judge Advocates General (JAGs) Working Group, which includes former officials who served as legal advisers for the military, issued a statement in response to the Washington Post‘s reporting on the September 2 attack on a boat in the Caribbean—the first strike on a vessel in an ongoing operation that the Trump administration has claimed is aimed at stopping drug trafficking.

The Post reported for the first time on the directive Hegseth gave to Special Operations commanders as intelligence analysts reported that their surveillance had confirmed the 11 people aboard the boat were carrying drugs to the US—an alleged crime that, in the past and in accordance with international law, would have prompted US agencies to intercept the vessel, confiscate any illegal substances that were found, and arrest those on board.

But as the Trump administration began its boat bombing campaign, the order Hegseth gave “was to kill everybody,” one of the intelligence analysts told the Post.

After the first missile strike, the officials realized that two of the passengers had survived the blast—prompting a Special Operations commander to initiate a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s order.

The Former JAGs Working Group, which was established in February in response to Hegseth’s firing of Army and Air Force JAGs, said that the dismissal of the military’s top legal advisers set the stage for the defense secretary’s order and the continued bombing of boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, which have now killed more than 80 people.

Hegseth’s “systematic dismantling of the military’s legal guardrails” led to the formation of the working group, pointed out the former JAGs. “Had those guardrails been in place, we are confident they would have prevented these crimes.”

The working group said Hegseth’s order to “kill everybody” could be understood in one of two ways—a demand for the US military to carry out a clear war crime, or for those involved in the operation to commit murder:

If the US military operation to interdict and destroy suspected narcotrafficking vessels is a “non-international armed conflict,” as the Trump administration suggests, orders to “kill everybody,” which can reasonably be regarded as an order to give “no quarter,” and to “double-tap” a target in order to kill survivors, are clearly illegal under international law. In short, they are war crimes.

If the US military operation is not an armed conflict of any kind, these orders to kill helpless civilians clinging to the wreckage of a vessel our military destroyed would subject everyone from [the defense secretary] down to the individual who pulled the trigger to prosecution under US law for murder.

The Post‘s reporting comes less than two weeks after NBC News revealed that Senior Judge Advocate General (JAG) Paul Meagher, a Marine colonel at US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) in Miami, had spoken out against the plans to begin bombing boats in the Caribbean, specifically warning in August that the operations would make service members liable for extrajudicial killing.

Following the Post‘s report, Republican-controlled House and Senate committees said they were investigating the allegations regarding Hegseth’s order, which the defense secretary dismissed on Friday as “fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://www.commondreams.org/news/pete-hegseth-boat

December 3, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Legal, USA