WEDNESDAY: What did he say and when did he say it?

WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 3, 2025

Here we go again: Did Pete Hegseth commit a war crime? We suppose it's certainly possible that he actually did.

That said, the knives are out for the highly erratic, widely scorned Secretary of Defense. In some quarters, that has produced a familiar type of chase, with creative paraphrase being widely applied to the several things Hegseth has now said about the events of September 2.

Full disclosure:

The analytical skills of mainstream journalists are frequently rather poor. When they settle on a group target, the embellishments and the slippery paraphrase are rarely far behind.

In the case of Hegseth, the current uproar about the second strike on the disabled boat (and on its two survivors) began with a rather fuzzy report in the Washington Post. Headline included, this is the way the current chase after this new target started:

Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all

The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.

A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack—the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere—ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

[...]

The commander overseeing the operation from Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley, told people on the secure conference call that the survivors were still legitimate targets because they could theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo, according to two people. He ordered the second strike to fulfill Hegseth’s directive that everyone must be killed.

The chronology there is less than precise. We know of nothing Hegseth has said which is inconsistent with that first fuzzy account.

According to that account, Hegseth gave a spoken order at some unspecified time. "The order was to kill everybody," one person is said to have said.

(Would some such order be a war crime in itself? We have no idea.)

It sounds like the first strike on the boat came soon after that. (It sounds that way, but the Post's report doesn't explicitly say so.) According to Hegseth's latest statement, he then left the scene.

He says he did so before "the smoke cleared." When the smoke cleared (how long did that take?), that would have made it possible for Admiral Bradley and / or others to see there were two survivors.

Is that possible? Of course it is! But is that what actually happened? 

We have no idea.

That said, the Post account explicitly says that it was Admiral Bradley who decided to order the second strike. If Hegseth had still been present on the scene, wouldn't he have been the one to make that second decision?

(Maybe yes, maybe no. We don't know how these things work.)

The mob is now attempting to hang Hegseth high based on a comment he made about "the fog of war." All he seemed to saying was this:

The smoke from the initial strike obscured everyone's vision for a while. By the time the smoke had cleared, he had left the scene.

Has Hegseth described events as they actually happened? We have no way of knowing.

We do know that some of the semi-usual suspects are on the hunt again. (Joe Scarborough was horrendous on Morning Joe this morning.) 

Instead of waiting for audio / video recordings to establish what was said and done, the chase is on for the highly erratic man who prefers to call himself the Secretary of War. As this chase has moved through the streets, the attempts at paraphrase have been highly creative.

That said:

We know of nothing Hegseth has said which contradicts the initial Washington Post report. We know of nothing he has said which contradicts his own handful of statements.

We're simply going to have to wait if we want to establish what actually happened. In the meantime, a few of the jackals are back in the streets, advancing the versions of this story which they themselves prefer.

We've been on this beat for 27 years. Al Gore said he invented the Internet!

We've seen them do this before!