The hosts of MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” unpacked Monday why Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has come under intense scrutiny from both elected Republicans and Democrats over concerns about potential war crimes being carried out by the Trump administration in the Caribbean.
The “Morning Joe” segment followed up on recent reports of a Hegseth-sanctioned strike on a boat in the Caribbean that was suspected of smuggling drugs. It has been reported that a subsequent second strike was ordered on the boat to kill at least two survivors that were seen clinging to the vessel’s wreckage. “When that strike was ordered, the person ordering that strike knew that was a war crime,” host Joe Scarborough explained.
“It’s part of international law. It’s been part of the laws of war since World War II,” the “Morning Joe” anchor added. “They knew that was an illegal action, that that could constitute a war crime.” The MS NOW host and his fellow “Morning Joe” panelists went on to quote from the Department of Defense’s own manual, which prohibits the killing of helpless, shipwrecked enemies and forbids any declaration that “no quarter will be given.”
“This is the DoD manual. This is not some left-wing, woke person or fake news [like] Pete Hegseth would suggest it is,” Scarborough said. “This is the Department of Defense manual that says to shoot people on a shipwreck in a helpless state is a war crime. It would be ‘dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack.’”
You can watch the full “Morning Joe” segment yourself in the video below.
“Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski noted that the targets of the attack in question were “suspected drug-runners on a boat,” which prompted Scarborough to reference a statistic cited by Kentucky Senator Rand Paul in October.
“If you look at Coast Guard interdictions of boats they think are drug-running boats, they get that wrong at least 25% of the time,” Scarborough said. “Here, it’s hard not to think that they blew up the boat and then had orders to kill anybody else there because they didn’t know who was on the boat and they didn’t want to be exposed as killing fishermen, or they didn’t want to be exposed killing somebody else.”
Scarborough went on to speculate that the boat’s passengers may not have been willingly onboard the vessel when it was struck. “Let’s say [they were] killed — as I heard from somebody in the military today — because their families had been kidnapped by drug cartels and told, ‘You have to get on that boat,’” the “Morning Joe” host added. “That was from somebody in the military in the region saying, ‘If you want to understand — if those are drug boats — who would go on those boats, it’s people who have families that have been kidnapped.’”
