Hegseth blames ‘fog of war’ for potential war crime

What happened

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Tuesday denied direct responsibility for a Sept. 2 follow-up boat strike on alleged drug traffickers, saying he “watched that first strike live” but “moved on” before Vice Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley ordered a second strike that killed two survivors.

It was Hegseth’s “most extensive public accounting yet of his involvement in the strike,” The Washington Post said, as legal experts and lawmakers seek details to determine “whether the episode constitutes a war crime and, if so, who bears responsibility.”

Who said what

“I did not personally see survivors,” Hegseth said at a Cabinet meeting, sitting behind a misspelled nameplate identifying him as the “SSecretary of War.” The boat “was on fire and was exploded, and fire, smoke, you can’t see anything. You got digital, there’s — this is called the fog of war.”

The U.S. is “not at ‘war’ with immigrants or drug dealers,” as Trump claims, and “any order to ’kill everybody,’ however conveyed, would be a black-and-white violation of the law,” Michael Waldman, the head of NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, said in a New York Times op-ed. Hegseth “seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement,” columnist George Will said in The Washington Post. “The killing of the survivors by this moral slum of an administration should nauseate Americans.”

President Donald Trump also distanced himself from the second strike at Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting. “I still haven’t gotten a lot of information, because I rely on Pete,” he told reporters. “I didn’t know about the second strike. I didn’t know anything about people, I wasn’t involved in it.” At a press briefing Tuesday, Pentagon spokesperson Kingsley Wilson said the boat strikes were “presidentially directed,” adding, “At the end of the day, the secretary and the president are the ones directing these strikes.”

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What next?

Bradley is expected to hold a classified briefing for lawmakers Thursday. But these allegations “demand extraordinary public investigation into any wrongdoing, not whispered consultations in the halls outside a congressional subcommittee room,” NYU’s Waldman said. “The House or Senate should start by creating a select committee to investigate any misuse of the president’s war powers.”