Secretary of War, U.S. Southern Command, X post of Nov. 30, 2025
The latest South Park episode nailed it: When “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth gets wind of a small Colorado town’s annual holiday race, he declares it an “Antifa uprising” and calls out the troops to crush it. While armed forces assemble their AK-47s, Hegseth struts around filming himself for muscular social media content, unaware that his trademark obsession with ‘lethality’ looks unhinged.
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South Park’s point, previewed during Hegseth’s shameful speech at Quantico, and his sophomoric tome championing war without rules, is that Trump has reduced the US military to an absurdist prop so grotesque it raises fair questions of insanity.
After a series of unilateral US strikes in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean killed 83 people suspected of trafficking drugs, strikes widely assessed as murder, Congress and the media are finally alarmed, with bipartisan members of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees beginning investigations.
The Trump administration cannot justify the strikes under existing law
Last week, two days after the Washington Post first reported that Hegseth issued a command to “Kill them all” in a September attack on the high seas, which led to a second strike that killed survivors, Hegseth posted a juvenile cartoonmaking light of his own crime. Hegseth’s post, shown above, depicts a chubby American turtle standing on helicopter skids, either grinning or laughing as he fires a bazooka close-range at boats bearing visible drugs, each boat guarded by armed men who are not chubby, friendly, or smiling.
Aside from depicting the slaughter of humans as a cartoon or children’s war game, Hegseth’s post also perpetuates a lie: Neither drugs, nor rifles, nor weapons of any kind have appeared in any of the snuff videos Hegseth and Trump keep posting to brag about the killings. To date, the administration has offered no intelligence or evidence whatsoever, other than Trump’s personal opinion, to supports the claim that the destroyed boats were carrying drugs, arms, or illicit cargo of any kind. Even if they were, military law requires interdiction, seizure and process, not unilateral, on-the-spot executions.
Bolstering his comic strip defense, Hegseth has also claimed that the strikes are in compliance with the laws of armed conflict, and “approved by the best military and civilian lawyers, up and down the chain of command.”
Except there weren’t any top lawyers left ‘up and down the chain of command,’ after Hegseth fired them. In February, Hegseth fired the top Judge Advocates General (JAGs) for the Army, Navy, and Air Force as his first order of business.
Hegseth’s JAGS come back to haunt him
The JAGS didn’t slink away quietly. After Hegseth fired them, they formed a watchdog Working Group now warning that Hegseth’s orders on the high seas “constitute war crimes, murder, or both.” Their letter to Congress requesting an investigation echoes the warnings from 6 Democratic lawmakers that servicemembers have a duty to disobey patently illegal orders. “Since orders to kill survivors of an attack at sea are patently illegal,” their letter states, “anyone who issues or follows such orders can and should be prosecuted for war crimes, murder, or both.”
After Hegseth and Trump appeared to throw commanding officer Frank Bradley under the bus, blaming Bradley, not Hegseth, for the second strike that killed the survivors, press secretary Karoline Leavitt read a statement that Bradley’s conduct was “well within his authority and the law directing the engagement.”
Except, of course, it wasn’t. None of Hegseth’s orders to execute people based on suspicion alone comports with federal or military law, and no one from Trump’s administration has been able to articulate a plausible legal justification for any of the strikes—first strike, second, or otherwise. The administration seems to be arguing that the strikes are lawful, despite Hegseth not knowing the identities of anyone onboard, because Trump has “determined” that the US is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels, but Congress has not declared any such war, and one-sided orders to execute suspects do not constitute an ‘armed conflict’ under any military code.The State Department’s designation of Tren de Aragua—or any cartel— as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” does not provide legal authority to use lethal force against non-combatants, even if they are engaged in drug running.
Even if there were evidence of drugs on the destroyed ships, executing non-combatants violates the “imminent threat” rule where the military can only use lethal force against an imminent, ie, immediate, threat to life. Trump/Hegseth’s assumption that these small boats: 1. are carrying drugs; 2. are destined for the US; 3. will make it that far; 4. without sufficient fuel; 5. will eventually cause deaths; 6. of some Americans; 7. who choose to use the drugs, does not support an “imminent threat” analysis under any law, for reasons that should be obvious from the string-along assumptions listed.
Guilt (and execution) by association
After the first boat strike on September 2, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the military could have interdicted the vessel, which is how the Coast Guard normally responds to drug vessels, but chose instead to destroy the vessel and to kill everyone on board because Trump wanted to “send a message.” Hegseth continues to parrot Trump’s “message,” posting recently that, “Every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization,” adding two minutes later that, “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.”
Whether victims die in the first, second, or third strike matters little. Trump’s legally suspect campaign of executing people based on a suspicion that they are smuggling drugs didn’t start with Hegseth’s order to “Kill them all,” it started with Trump’s assumption that he alone gets to be judge, jury and executioner.
Legal authorities rejecting Trump’s assumption include the Dept. of Defense’s own Law of War Manual; the Hague Regulations; the US 1863 Lieber Code; the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act; the Uniform Code of Military Justiceprohibiting extrajudicial killings; the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and state and federal statutes prohibiting murder.
People disinclined to read legal treatises but inclined to think the government can execute people suspected of committing a crime should ask themselves: If a police officer thinks I am going to beat my wife when I get home, should he be allowed to shoot me in the face before I get there?
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
