The Secretary of War Crimes

When the civilian at the head of the Department of Defense is a public cheerleader for war crimes, that sends a message to everyone in the military that similar conduct won’t be punished.

Pete Hegseth loves war criminals past, present, and future:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has announced that he has decided that the 20 soldiers who received the Medal of Honor for their actions in 1890 at Wounded Knee will keep their awards in a video posted to social media Thursday evening.

Hegseth’s predecessor, Lloyd Austin, ordered the review of the awards in 2024 after a Congressional recommendation in the 2022 defense bill — itself a reflection of efforts by some lawmakers to rescind the awards for those who participated in the bloody massacre on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation near Wounded Knee Creek.

When Hegseth was nominated to be Secretary of Defense, I said that he was unfit for the office because of his successful efforts to get Trump to pardon convicted and accused war criminals. Advocacy for war criminals should be automatically disqualifying for any position in the government. Putting a prominent war crimes apologist in charge of the Pentagon was outrageous, and it should never have been allowed to happen.

Since then, Hegseth has removed top military lawyers to clear the way for more war crimes. He has presided over the murders of at least 19 civilians in the Caribbean on Trump’s orders. Like Trump, he has boasted about those murders and promises more to come.

He has wrongly said that the government has “absolute and complete authority” to commit these murders. Now he goes out of his way to defend the soldiers responsible for massacring civilians 135 years ago. Hegseth likes to call himsef Secretary of War, but he should really be called the Secretary of War Crimes.

When the civilian in charge of the Department of Defense is a public cheerleader for war crimes, that sends a message to everyone in the military that similar conduct won’t be punished and may even be rewarded. A military culture obsessed with “lethality” above all else will sooner or later become one that excuses and then celebrates crimes against civilians. Hegseth is a good example of what you get when someone is focused solely on lethality and despises the law.

The Wounded Knee massacre was a stain on the reputation of the United States. The U.S. government rightly apologized for the massacre. Giving the Medal of Honor to soldiers involved in the massacre was an insult to the victims. It diminishes the significance of the honor for all those that genuinely deserve it. Hegseth’s decision to let that insult stand is disgraceful.

When he defended the renaming of the department, Hegseth said that the department would be defined by “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” We are seeing where this reckless and lawless approach leads. Hegseth looks back on the slaughter on unarmed civilians and applauds the perpetrators for their service. He oversees the slaughter of civilians on boats and cheers.

Hegseth has proven that he has no problems following illegal orders to kill civilians. It is reasonable to assume that he won’t hesitate to carry out more of those orders in the future. As Secretary of Defense, Hegseth has been even worse than I feared. Every day that he is left in that post, the worse it will be for U.S. interests.