Civil Discourse – The Moment to Pick a Side Has Come – Joyce Vance
Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance
The Moment to Pick a Side Has Come
By Joyce Vance, Nov 29, 2025
“You must refuse illegal orders.” That’s what was said in the video made by six Democratic members of Congress. Trump accused them of seditious behavior. The FBI launched an investigation.
Then, on Black Friday, the Washington Post ran with an exclusive story about the September 2, 2025, attack on a boat allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean, the first of a series of attacks that have involved strikes on at least 23 boats to date. The Post reported that in advance of the strike, “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive,according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. ‘The order was to kill everybody.’”
That’s what the special operations commander overseeing the attack did. After the initial hit, live drone feed showed two survivors clinging to the wreckage. The commander “ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions … The two men were blown apart in the water.” The video Trump released later that day did not include the second strike.
The Post quoted Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who had advised special operations on the illegality of the order: “Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight ‘would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime.’”
My colleague Ryan Goodman, Professor of Law at NYU School of Law and the founding co-editor-in-chief of Just Security, an online forum focused on U.S. national security law and policy, will join us Sunday morning at 10:00 a.m. EST for an in-depth Substack live discussion of the issues raised here. Mark your calendars now and make sure you have the Substack App downloaded so you can join us for cutting edge legal analysis on this most important of issues. Ryan has been tracking these strikes and their legal implications since they first began. After the story broke in the Washington Post, he tweeted, “Textbook war crime/extrajudicial killing.”
Earlier this month, The Guardian reported that Britain had stopped sharing intelligence on Caribbean drug running with the United States “amid concerns information supplied may be used to engage in lethal military strikes by American forces.” They specified that the cooperation was “paused shortly after the US began a campaign of lethal strikes in September,” but there was no explicit mention of the order Hegseth issued as the cause.
Friday evening at 5:42 p.m., Hegseth tweeted:
“As usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland.
As we’ve said from the beginning, and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be ‘lethal, kinetic strikes.’ The declared intent is to stop lethal drugs, destroy narco-boats, and kill the narco-terrorists who are poisoning the American people. Every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization.
The Biden administration preferred the kid gloves approach, allowing millions of people — including dangerous cartels and unvetted Afghans — to flood our communities with drugs and violence. The Trump administration has sealed the border and gone on offense against narco-terrorists. Biden coddled terrorists, we kill them.
Our current operations in the Caribbean are lawful under both U.S. and international law, with all actions in compliance with the law of armed conflict—and approved by the best military and civilian lawyers, up and down the chain of command.
Our warriors in SOUTHCOM put their lives on the line every day to protect the Homeland from narco-terrorists — and I will ALWAYS have their back.”
Hegseth did not deny that two defenseless people were killed. We still do not know what, if anything, they were guilty of. Certainly, as they clung to the wreckage of a boat in the ocean, they did not pose an immediate threat to the United States. The lawful thing to do would have been to rescue and prosecute the men. Instead, per Hegseth’s instruction, they were executed.
Hegseth doubled down a few moments later, tweeting, “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.”
The Pentagon Spokesman, Seth Parnell, tweeted, “We told the Washington Post that this entire narrative was false yesterday. These people just fabricate anonymously sourced stories out of whole cloth. Fake News is the enemy of the people.”
But shortly after the story ran in The Post, Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican, issued a joint statement with the Committee’s top Democrat, Jack Reed of Rhode Island, vowing “vigorous oversight” of Hegseth’s “kill them all” order. They wrote, “The Committee has directed inquires to the Department, and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to the circumstances.”
By Saturday night, there was a growing call for, if not accountability, investigation, including by both House and Senate Republicans. The Washington Post wrote, “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.” Saturday night, Democratic Senator Ed Markey tweeted, “Pete Hegseth is a war criminal and should be fired immediately.”
Continue/Read Original Article Here: The Moment to Pick a Side Has Come
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