No Quarter: The White House’s New ‘War’ Lets the President Kill First — and Pardon Drug Lords Later

December 2, 2025, By: Joshua Scheer, https://scheerpost.com/2025/12/02/no-quarter-the-white-houses-new-war-lets-the-president-kill-first-and-pardon-drug-lords-later/

With the president claiming that we are in an armed conflict with the cartels — and with the AP reporting from a memo it obtained from the administration — the bar is being set incredibly low so that any president can create an “enemy” out of anyone.

Here is some of what the memo said from the AP: “The President determined that the United States is in a non-international armed conflict with these designated terrorist organizations… The United States has now reached a critical point where we must use force in self-defense and defense of others against the ongoing attacks by these designated terrorist organizations.”

The AP also reported the backlash from a number of people, including Michael Schmitt, a former Air Force lawyer and professor emeritus at the U.S. Naval War College, with him saying, “I can’t imagine anyone, no matter what the circumstance, believing it is appropriate to kill people who are clinging to a boat in the water,” and Schmitt added, “That is clearly unlawful.” He also noted that “it has been clear for well over a century that you may not declare what’s called ‘no quarter’ — take no survivors, kill everyone.”

Because of this, right now in Washington the call is for a war-crimes investigation. With the hypocrisy on full display, no matter your political leanings, it is a joke that our President props up a narco-trafficking, unapologetic strongman and yet is willing to go to war with a country he disagrees with politically. The drug war is not needed — its cost, both human and financial, is obscene — and it is much cheaper and more humane to treat drugs as addiction and disease.

But drugs, in this case, are just a pretext for bombing your rivals and enemies. In 2015, we spent 25 billion on the war on drugs, and that was ten years ago; to keep our healthcare subsidies it would have cost 32 billion. This doesn’t seem like a real choice; we just love a good war.

One of those calling for investigation is Virginia Senator Tim Kaine saying on CBS Face the Nation Sunday, “If that reporting is true, it’s a clear violation of the DoD’s own laws of war, as well as international laws about the way you treat people who are in that circumstance,”

He also spoke about his time in Central America and asked the same important question: What’s this really about — the oil? He went on to discuss the hypocritical pardoning actual drug kingpins:

And, needless to say, the offensive duplicitous double standard on full display pardoning of drug kingpin Juan Orlando Hernández proves that this administration only cares about “armed conflicts” with its chosen enemies. It certainly doesn’t care about the threat posed by massive drug traffickers such as this man — whom they have now effectively allowed back into the business. As Hernández himself once said: “[Let’s] stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos.”

I will add here, but not diverge: Kaine brought up the fact that oil is a motivating factor. Here is a member of Congress explaining that point, as reported by Common Dreams:

US Rep. María Salazar (R-Fla.) said there were three reasons why “we need to go in” to the South American country. The first, she said, is that “Venezuela, for the American oil companies, will be a field day.”

Progressives on the Hill point out that we have heard this before regarding our invasion of Iraq, which at the time we were told would cost $50 billion and be paid for by oil profits — yet, as of a report from Harvard, it has become a $3 trillion war.

To swing back to today and the current war crimes the White House is standing by the strike. “Admiral Bradley worked well within his authority and the law to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday.

“This administration has designated these narco-terrorists as foreign terrorist organizations,” she continued. “The president has the right to take them out if they are threatening the United States of America, if they are bringing illegal narcotics that are killing our citizens at a record rate, which is what they are doing.”

You can watch her whole press conference here:

Leavitt also said that Hegseth had discussions with members of Congress who were concerned about both the strike and the potential war-crime implications. However, he quickly pivoted to posting memes about the situation — one of which I’ve included below. Needless to say, this behavior is typical of this administration: do whatever they want, defend the action, try to calm people down, and then do whatever they want again.

This “leader” needs to be at a tribunal to answer for killing survivors of this attack — there’s not much more to say. It’s clear that $1 trillion for the military is far too much. We have to ask these questions because if we keep flooding the military with money, we have to justify it — and that justification can lead to actions like this, killing whomever is deemed an enemy. Honestly, we are living in 1984. We’ve been heading down this road for a while, but it has never been so clear.

I remember this quote from the show the west wing discussing war crimes and tribunals and such, “All wars are crimes“