Source: Washington Post
by George F Will
“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement. In 1967, novelist Gwyn Griffin published a World War II novel, ‘An Operational Necessity,’ that 58 years later is again pertinent. According to the laws of war, survivors of a sunk ship cannot be attacked. But a German submarine captain, after sinking a French ship, orders the machine-gunning of the ship’s crew, lest their survival endanger his men by revealing where his boat is operating. In the book’s dramatic climax, a postwar tribunal examines the German commander’s moral calculus. No operational necessity justified Hegseth’s de facto order to kill two survivors clinging to the wreckage of one of the supposed drug boats obliterated by U.S. forces near Venezuela. … The killing of the survivors by this moral slum of an administration should nauseate Americans. A nation incapable of shame is dangerous, not least to itself.” (12/02/25)