EXTRAJUDICIAL KILLINGS
Extra judicial killing is rooted in international law, codified in every major human rights treaty among nations. The Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA) imposes civil liability in the United States for such killings, often referred to as “state killings.” These killings are conducted by government officials or anyone acting under their direction. They are carried out for political purposes without the targeted individual having been given any due process protections, much less a trial before their peers or an independent judge.
Examples of an extrajudicial killings are the October 2, 2018 assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi by Saudi government agents in a Saudi consulate in Istanbul at the direction of Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman; and the more than 6,000 people killed per instruction of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte during anti-drug operations in that country between 2016 and 2022 without any legal process.
There are currently 38 cases pending before the International Criminal Court for various crimes against humanity, including Duterte’s. Extrajudicial killings are considered by the international court to be “war crimes” or “crimes against humanity.”
The court may one day have U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Navy Admiral Frank M. Bradley before the tribunal for “war crimes” dealing with the extrajudicial killing of two survivors after a Venezuelan “drug boat” attack. The attack was part of President Trump’s undeclared war on alleged “narco-terrorists” smuggling drugs from Venezuela into the U.S. via high-speed drug boats.
This first attack occurred this past September. Admiral Bradley was in charge of the attack operation. Secretary Hegseth reportedly ordered Bradley to either “eliminate everyone” or “kill them all” on the boat. The first strike by Bradley killed nine of the 11 people on board. Two individuals survived the attack. They were clinging to boat wreckage when drone surveillance picked them up. When notified about the two survivors, Bradley ordered a second strike that killed the two helpless, defenseless individuals.
That, my friends, is a war crime. Bradley executed the two extrajudicial killings in response to Hegseth’s “kill them all” order.
And beyond these two senior military officials are the lower level military personnel who carried out the fatal attack—those directly involved in the launch of the second missile that killed the two survivors of the first missile strike. These lower level military personnel are the kind that Senator Mark Kelly and some of his Democratic colleagues warned not to “obey” illegal orders from their superiors.
The Nuremberg Trials after World War II clearly rejected the “just following orders” defense—also known as the “superior orders defense.” This defense was also soundly rejected in the My Lai massacre trial of Lt. William Calley. In that Vietnam War case Lt. Calley’s defense was that he was following orders from Captain Earnest Medina to kill (or waste) everyone in the village—some of whom had supposedly been assisting the Viet Cong enemy—when he and his platoon killed at least 347 of the more than 500 unarmed civilians in that village.
Assuming that Hegseth had legal authority (which most international legal experts said he did not) to “order” the initial strike, he did not have legal authority to order that “everyone be eliminated.” Bradley most certainly had to know that Hegseth’s “kill them all” order was illegal, yet he ordered the second strike that killed the two defenseless survivors who posed no threat to anyone. And the military personnel who actually executed the firing of the second missile are just as guilty of carrying out the two extrajudicial killings.
Under American criminal law, it is known as the “law of parties”—all individuals involved in a killing are equally responsible even though they do not actually participate in the act of killing.
Outside of the American legal system, extrajudicial killings are tantamount to “lynching”—and that is something Americans know a lot about.
And we just learned that President Trump gave a “full and complete” pardon to the former drug smuggling president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, whose cartel smuggled more than 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S. during his tenure in office. The Hernandez cartel carried out tens of thousands of killings of rival traffickers and innocent civilians during his reign of narco-terror—crimes that ultimately put him in an American federal prison.
The former Honduran president is now free to go spend the hundreds of millions of dollars he made “stuffing cocaine” up American noses.
Isn’t it wonderful to see America being made “great again.”
And it’s only just beginning.