Pete Hegseth And Adm. Mitch Bradley Belong In Prison

Edited by Sam Thielman 

MORE THAN a decade ago, Adm. Eric Olson, then the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), warned that his elite forces were "fraying around the edges." It had already been nearly a decade of relentless deployment across the global battlefield of the War on Terror. While general-purpose forces were in the process of drawdown in Iraq and would soon begin one in Afghanistan, special operations forces remaining behind—and would soon be ordered onto other battlefields—aswere their functional replacement. Whatever Olson's concerns, his troops’ operational tempos were only going to keep pace or increase.

Olson didn't mention the moral degradation that spec ops had engaged in since the outset of the war, like the corpse mutilations known gruesomely as "canoeing." He spoke generically of relieving the "pressures on the force" that come from relentless deployment, and left unsaid what the wages of continued pressure would be. Over time, we've seen those wages cash out, in the form of Eddie Gallagher's executions, the SEAL murder of Green Beret Sgt. Logan Melgar, and everything Seth Harp reported in his excellent recent book The Fort Bragg Cartel. Less than two years after Olson's well-publicized remarks, Green Berets in Nerkh, Afghanistan, backstopped by the Afghans working for them, disappeared and murdered locals, as Matthieu Aikins recently investigated. Five years after that, in the southern Somali town of Bariire, reporter Christina Goldbaum revealed that U.S. special operations forces killed ten civilians, including at least one child, in one of the worst massacres of an invisible war. 

One of the other defining features of this generation of intense special-operations activity has been minimal accountability for battlefield atrocities. That lack of consequence creates a climate of permissibility for the next atrocity—and, should that atrocity prove too egregious to avoid criminal penalties, as in Melgar's murder, confusion over what is impermissible. This speaks to the essence of command responsibility; or, in this case, irresponsibility. 

The wages of that irresponsibility and lack of accountability have compounded to produce a new and appalling reality: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the then-leader of the Joint Special Operations Command—now Olson's successor at USSOCOM—directly ordering open murders at sea. 

The Washington Post reported on Friday that Hegseth ordered that there be no survivors on the first of what now stand at 22 strikes on boats off of Venezuelan waters that the Trump administration claims without evidence were smuggling drugs. I said at the time on TV that such a strike was murder. But the Post reveals that not only did Hegseth directly order the strike, but Adm. Mitch Bradley, then the commander of JSOC—the elite command throughout the War on Terror—ordered a "double-tap," a follow-on attack after a drone feed from above positively identified two survivors clinging to the remains of the boat. 

There are many layers to this crisis. The strikes are a blatant attempt at provoking a war with Venezuela or a coup against Nicolas Maduro, who rules over a country that just so happens to possess the world's largest oil reserves. And then the strikes operate under the invented pretext of combatting narcotrafficking while Trump plans on pardoning a convicted narcotrafficker and former right-wing president of Honduras in order to bolster the campaign of that country's conservative presidential candidate. I spoke about the many-layered Venezuela crisis with al-Jazeera's "Listening Post" magazine show about all this for a segment that aired this weekend:

I was interviewed for that segment on Wednesday, before the Post revealed the layer of this crisis that has to do with military degeneracy and the long legacy of impunity during the War on Terror. If you caught this morning's episode of Democracy Now!, I addressed this point there, but only briefly. Unless Hegseth and Bradley face criminal penalties for their illegal order, the bottom will drop out of military ethics. There will be no order too blatantly criminal for officers and enlisted personnel in the world's largest and most forward-deployed military to refuse. Those are the stakes of an investigation that the congressional armed-services committees have ordered, though political responses will not suffice. Only criminal reprisal can.

A working group of former Judge Advocates General—convened after Hegseth's ominous action earlier this year to fire senior Army and Air Force JAGs—put it like this in a statement on the strike: If the U.S. is at "war" in the waters near Venezuela, as Hegseth insists, then the double-tap ordered by the commander of JSOC is an unambiguous violation of the Law of Armed Conflict's prohibition on killing survivors of a military operation. But if the U.S. is not in such a state of war, as the Justice Department insists for the purpose of denying congressional authority over war, then Hegseth, Bradley and "everyone from SECDEF down to the individual who pulled the trigger" are simply murderers. In Hegseth's case, by this point, we're talking 83 people killed, which should qualify as mass murder. And more may be on the way as President Trump declares Venezuelan airspace closed, suggesting further strikes at larger scale may be imminent. 

Leaving Trump aside for a moment, Hegseth never should have been permitted to hold one of the most powerful offices in the world. Ever since he inserted himself in the Iraq debate to lobby for the 2007 troop surge that began his public career, Hegseth has shown himself to be a grifter, a narcissist, a man of petty resentments, and an abuser of his power. His adulation of violence translated into his successful televised lobbying for clemency for those accused and even convicted of war crimes. If ever there was a disqualification for being secretary of defense, it is that, and yet 50 Republicans and Vice President Vance voted him into the Pentagon.

Their ranks included Mississippi's Roger Wicker, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee who now vows to investigate the Sept. 2 boat strike. Wicker should as well examine his own complicity in enabling a patently unqualified, unfit and immature man to lead the Pentagon. He should examine why he did nothing as Hegseth fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. C.Q. Brown, simply for being black. He should examine why he did nothing when Hegseth fired the JAGs, and why he did nothing when Hegseth pledged his commitment to "maximum lethality, not tepid legality." If there was any doubt what that pledge meant, it's this: going from war-crimes fanboy to war-crimes practitioner, all while Republicans like Wicker looked the other way. 

On Saturday, the Pentagon emailed a pugilistic statement from Hegseth to reporters that included the standard non-denial denials. The operative part of it was this assertion: "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." That is an unambiguous indication that Hegseth intends to fight for his right to commit murder, approved by the rubber-stamp JAGs that remain after his purge. Who will stop him?  

Bradley as well cannot remain in command in Tampa. He has to be escorted to the brig, or everyone within the USSOCOM chain of command, which indisputably has a claim to the "maximum lethality" part of Hegseth's coinage, will receive the message that there is no impermissible action. Why not kill civilians here in the United States as well, should a superior in the chain of command order it?

For so many years, in military fora I have been a part of, I have heard the virtues of professional military education extolled, and not unreasonably, as a crucial check on lawlessness in the legally and ethically ambiguous realm of the War on Terror. (This was an alternative to abolition of the War on Terror, which would have performed that work far more thoroughly and efficiently, but usually that perspective has not been welcome in such fora.) If ever there is a bright-line example for the insufficiency of that approach, it is here. There is no way to teach officers and enlisted personnel not to attack civilian boats with lethal force, to say nothing of vaporizing survivors, when the secretary of defense and the since-promoted commander of JSOC do it without consequence. 

There are clearly those within the military who know that Trump, Hegseth and Bradley have plunged them into an abyss. They are the ones who brought their commanders' involvement to the Post. They likely include the outgoing U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) commander Adm. Alvin Holsey, who announced his retirement weeks into the boat attacks. (JSOC is a separate command, so, while we await Holsey's account, Bradley would not have answered to the SOUTHCOM commander, even though the SOUTHCOM commander is nominally in command of the military assets in theater.) Holsey's last day at SOUTHCOM is Dec. 12, and he is a crucial witness for investigations both congressional and criminal. 

It should not diminish the seriousness of previous episodes of military lawlessness to say that the Venezuela boat strikes are a five-alarm crisis. Permissibility for prior lawlessness created the conditions for the current crisis. But it does mean that neither Hegseth nor Bradley can remain at their posts—at the absolute minimum!—without deepening that crisis, and perhaps creating a point of no constitutional return. 

From the moment Hegseth arrived at the Pentagon, the specter of a new Jan. 6, this time aided by the military instead of ignored by it, arrived with him. If a man personally implicated in war crimes can remain atop the Pentagon, why would he stand by and risk his freedom should Vance (or, perhaps, Trump again) lose the 2028 election? 

I WROTE about the shooting of the West Virginia National Guardsmen by a former CIA death squad member for Zeteo on Friday. Normally, I'd be presenting that column here, for paying subscribers, but the Hegseth/Bradley story has to take precedence. Buy a FOREVER WARS subscription and tomorrow, you'll join the many—but not enough!—who'll receive the paywalled column free of charge. You should also subscribe to Zeteo, while you're at it. 

THROUGHOUT IT ALL, the U.S. still had time for a drone strike in Yemen.