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Judge Andrew Napolitano has a dire warning for Pete Hegseth after the Secretary of Defense reportedly authorized an attack on alleged drug smugglers back in September.
Napolitano appeared on the Newsmax’s “National Report” show where he decried Hegseth’s decision.
“It gives me no pleasure to say what I’m about to say, because I worked with Pete Hegseth for seven or eight years at Fox News,” Napolitano said on Tuesday. “This is an act of a war crime, ordering survivors who the law requires be rescued instead to be murdered, there’s absolutely no legal basis for it.”
The Washington Post said in a damning report released on Friday that Hegseth issued a verbal order to “kill everybody” on board the boat in the Caribbean.
John Lamparski via Getty Images
After the initial attack, a second strike was ordered to kill survivors left clinging on the burning boat, which Hegseth has blamed on a Navy admiral.
“Everybody along the line who did it, from the Secretary of Defense to the admiral to the people who actually pulled the trigger should be prosecuted for a war crime, for killing these two people,” Napolitano said, singling out the “two people in the ocean clinging to a burning boat to stay alive.”
According to the U.S. Department of Defense’s own Law of War Manual, it states that “orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.”
Napolitano added that the issue is now “getting beyond politics” and that “the killing is out of hand.”
Fellow critics have referred to the second strike as “outright murder,” though Hegseth sees the attacks differently.
In a statement shared on X last week, Hegseth said the “declared intent is to stop lethal drugs, destroy narco-boats, and kill the narco-terrorists.” He also referred to the Post’s account of events as “fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory.”
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