The former bulwark of American conservatism National Review has accused President Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth of committing a “war crime” in their attacks against Venezuelan narco traffickers.
In a piece entitled ‘We Intended the Strike to be Lethal is Not a Defense,’ RINO columnist Andrew McCarthy responded to a recent Washington Post piece that claimed Hegseth had ordered a second airstrike after two of the narcotraffickers survived the initial impact.
He wrote:
An explosive Washington Post report, the subject of so much discussion the past two days, says that, in the first missile strike the Trump Defense Department carried out against operatives of a boat suspected of transporting narcotics on the high seas off Venezuela, two survivors were rendered shipwrecked. As they clung to the wreckage, the U.S. commander ordered a second strike, which killed them.
If this happened as described in the Post report, it was, at best, a war crime under federal law. I say “at best” because, as regular readers know, I believe the attacks on these suspected drug boats — without congressional authorization, under circumstances in which the boat operators pose no military threat to the United States, and given that narcotics trafficking is defined in federal law as a crime rather than as terrorist activity, much less an act or war — are lawless and therefore that the killings are not legitimate under the law or armed conflict.
To reiterate, I don’t accept that the ship operators are enemy combatants — even if one overlooks that the administration has not proven that they are drug traffickers or members of designated FTOs. There is no armed conflict. They may be criminals (if it is proven that they are importing illegal narcotics), but they are not combatants.
My point, nevertheless, is that even if you buy the untenable claim that they are combatants, it is a war crime to intentionally kill combatants who have been rendered unable to fight. It is not permitted, under the laws and customs of honorable warfare, to order that no quarter be given — to apply lethal force to those who surrender or who are injured, shipwrecked, or otherwise unable to fight.
Needless to say, such hyperbolic commentary is typical for National Review, the magazine that infamously wrote an editorial in 2016 entitled “Against Trump,” in which they collected a sorry group of liberals, RINOs and has beens to try and persuade the Republican grassroots not to support his candidacy.
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Funded in 1955 by William F. Buckley Jr., National Review was once considered the benchmark for the American right.
Nowadays, it is a declining, largely irrelevant magazine, clinging to relevance after betting the house against Donald Trump.
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