Hegseth blames scapegoat for apparent war crimes he bragged about

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday blamed a military commander for the apparent war crime the U.S. military committed in September in the Caribbean Sea, saying that it was Admiral Mitch Bradley, not Hegseth, who ordered the strike to kill survivors of an initial missile attack.

"Let’s make one thing crystal clear: Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made—on the Sept. 2 mission and all others since," Hegseth wrote in a post on X. "America is fortunate to have such men protecting us. When this [Department of Defense] says we have the back of our warriors—we mean it."

Of course, it's impossible to believe anything that Hegseth says. The Trump administration lies often and with no remorse.

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On this incident alone, Hegseth, President Donald Trump, and other administration officials have been changing their story about what happened in that strike—as bipartisan groups of lawmakers are expressing fears that the administration committed war crimes.

On Sept. 3, the day after the alleged war crime took place, Hegseth bragged about the attack on Fox News.

"I watched it live. We knew exactly who was in that boat," Hegseth said, saying that the people on the boat were Tren de Aragua members who were "trying to poison our country with illicit drugs."

The Trump administration has wrongly accused multiple people of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang. For instance, it sent a gay makeup artist based in the U.S. to an infamously brutal prison in El Salvador, so it remains hard to believe Hegseth’s claims that he has provided zero evidence for—either publicly or to Congress.

When The Washington Post first broke the news that the military went back and killed two people who were alive after a U.S. missile struck their boat in the Caribbean Sea—an action that experts say is a war crime—both Hegseth, Hegseth's spokesman, and White House Director of Communications Steven Cheung denied the report.

"As usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland," Hegseth wrote in a post on X, declaring that the missile strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea are legal.

"We told the Washington Post that this entire narrative was false yesterday," Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell also wrote in a post on X. "These people just fabricate anonymously sourced stories out of whole cloth. Fake News is the enemy of the people."

"The Washington Compost provided NO FACTS and NO SUBSTANTIATION. They literally just printed what some unnamed random person said and reported it as fact," Cheung wrote in a post on X.

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However, in the days since, the White House and even Trump himself have confirmed there was a second strike to kill the survivors of the initial missile attack.

If Hegseth indeed ordered the second attack, as reports claim he did, it wouldn't be the first time he has tried to blame underlings for his own misconduct.

Earlier this year, when Hegseth was caught discussing classified intelligence on an unsecured Signal chat, he refused to take responsibility for his actions and blamed Pentagon staffers instead.

Also, Hegseth has previously voiced openness to committing war crimes. He has said publicly he believes the laws of war unfairly constrain soldiers, and that when he served in the military, he ordered his underlings to ignore legal advice. Hegseth also convinced Trump in Trump’s first term to pardon men who were convicted for or accused of committing war crimes.

Previously, Republican lawmakers defended Hegseth's misconduct around the Signal chats. But this time around, even many of them are expressing concerns that war crimes were committed in this boat attack.

“We have always been trained to believe that folks who surrender, we don’t just mow them down for the sake of mowing them down,” Sen. Jim Justice, Republican of West Virginia, told Semafor. “You have a situation like this where you’ve got survivors evidently in the water and we pulled a second strike off? It’s just not acceptable.”

Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska echoed those sentiments.

“I think most would say that when you have two individuals that are literally floating in the water, a second order to kill them all is not something that we would consider within the rules of war,” Murkowski told MS NOW on Monday night.

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