No fog, no war. Hegseth’s war crimes put Australian soldiers at risk

Australian service personnel are working with a rogue military force committing war crimes. The failure to recall these individuals is evidence of the Australian Government’s lack of integrity. Michael Pascoe reports.

It’s a fair bet that Pete Hegseth has never heard of Heinz-Wilhelm Eck, Walter Weispfennig, and August Hoffmann. If the United States ever regains its justice system, it will probably learn a lot about them.

As an American Admiral, Frank “Mitch” Bradley is likely to have known at least the incident that made Eck and his associates infamous – the murder of the survivors of a Greek cargo ship sunk by his submarines. Their victims were in lifeboats, trapped among the debris in the South Atlantic night as they were machine-gunned and attacked with grenades and small arms fire. Two of them were taken aboard the submarine for questioning before being returned to the water and dying.

Eck, Weispfennig and Hoffmann were convicted at Nuremberg and executed by firing squad in October 1946.

Following Hegseth’s orders, Bradley used nothing as primitive as small arms to kill the two survivors of a Venezuelan speedboat hit by an American missile in international waters. He sent another missile to tear them apart from the comfort and safety of Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

Since then Washington Post Reporting the crime Friday night, the Trump administration vacillated between outright denial, outrage and cautious statements, as even some Republican politicians sensed a bridge too far.

Any denials by Trump, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, and Hegseth, of course, have all the credibility of Trump, Leavitt, and Hegseth. The MAGA mafia may be guaranteed to continue the next scandal, increasingly abusing the most powerful military machine the world has ever seen as an extra-legal hit squad and releasing snuff films to prove it.

Fog of war?

Trump and Hegseth overnight, as denials and concealments cannot be sustained confirmed and defended killing those who survived the initial attack.

Hegseth speaks with tremendous arrogance about the “fog of war” and criticizes journalists who sit in air-conditioned offices and write “fake stories.” Bradley and the cowards who followed his orders were in air-conditioned comfort, nowhere near any front lines or danger.

Hegseth continues with the usual pattern of a worm caught in scandal: first denying, then moving away as the denial weakens, making the penultimate defense and trusting that the Trumpists are above the law. As always, pay attention to step four, distraction.

It took some time for Australia’s leading media outlets to start talking about the immorality of killing helpless survivors. As Todd Huntley, director of the National Security Law program at Georgetown University Law Center and formerly a judge advocate for the U.S. Navy for more than two decades, said New Yorker:

“Basically, this is the only attack that we know of that would still be illegal under the laws of armed conflict, even if you accepted the Administration’s position that the United States was in an armed conflict with these drug cartels, because the individuals were out of combat and shipwrecked and therefore owed protection.”

The “even if” in this sentence is a statement that no one accepts except MAGA fanatics and their defenders. The predominant legal opinion is that blowing up civilian boats – extrajudicial killings – constitute a crime. Much has been written about what theater on the Venezuelan coast is really about; The only thing for sure is

has nothing to do with preventing fentanyl from reaching the United States.

Australians buried

The important thing for us is that we have Australian service personnel embedded in this rogue American military, which is now an arm of a criminal organisation.

It has now become trite to quote Lieutenant General David Morrison as Australian Army chief that “the standard you live by is the standard you accept”.

Moreover, the Australian Government, consisting of Albanese, Marles and Wong, does not pass by Trump’s mud, it embraces him, welcomes him, pledges allegiance to him, pays him protection money,

He sells our nation for it and sends Australian men and women to serve it.

The latter is ethically unsustainable. We’ve moved far beyond the embarrassing embarrassment of Marles and Hegseth’s smiling photo ops into questions of complicity in facilitating the criminal acts of America’s armed forces.

Distinguished former US officers publicly warned soldiers not to follow the Trump gang’s illegal orders and Trump threatens for doing this. What did Australian Defense Force Commander Admiral David Johnston say before handing his people over to the likes of Admiral Bradley?

It’s time to show some courage by bringing our troops home. Our inability to prosecute our own war criminals is no excuse for potentially creating more.

Marles keeps silent to entrenched troops

How many people are we endangering? I don’t know. An email request to Marles’ defense media office has gone unanswered for more than 24 hours as I write. I wanted to know how many Australians were based or on exchange with the US military and in which areas.

In response to a question from Senator Jacqui Lambie in July, Defense said there were 193 ADF and APS personnel in the US for the first phase of AUKUS alone.

Instead of pursuing ridiculous bashing about where Chinese ships might go in the Philippine Sea for Christmas, perhaps a clued-up press gallery could ask Marles at his next media performance whether any Australian personnel were involved in the US Navy SEAL teams that carried out Hegseth and Bradley’s unlawful killing orders.

A storm in a Southern China teacup. Is Marles’ testosterone putting Australia at risk?

Questions to the Government

In this context, any Australian Government politician should be asked whether we share America’s values ​​on war crimes, the extent to which our so-called Australian Pine Gap and Exmouth facilities are being used for illegal military action against civilians off the coast of Venezuela, whether we would support US military action against Venezuela, whether they think Hegseth is fit to return to his post as a Fox News weekend clown, let alone be US “Minister of War”.

Lots of good questions to ask, but hey, watch the gallery stick to the safe Sinophobia trap and the usual horse racing policies.

I can already hear the argument that the US has always been like this, that it enjoys extrajudicial killings. True, there have been over a century of invasions and covert or overt actions that have overthrown governments, good or bad, often replacing them with something worse.

But there are legal subtleties in the rules of war. These rules have been bent and twisted to suit, most recently in the “War on Terror,” but this is a different thing, a different level of state evil.

Context was provided by The New Yorker’s interview with Todd Huntley:

“I think it was intentional. In most of the other cases where U.S. strikes have killed civilians, the deaths were either due to faulty intelligence, a faulty assessment of the facts, or an accident. This seems very clearly intentional. I think that’s something that makes it very different and even worse on some level, because when you look at the use of force in an armed conflict and you have violations, not everything rises to the level of a war crime.”

This is a war crime.

And by remaining silent, we are making Australia complicit by continuing our policy of ensnaring our military with the US military.

Labor has a new mandate to act. He still turns a blind eye to war crimes. From where?