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Your own source says, "President Donald Trump, who is holding a meeting about Venezuela with his national security team later in the day, said on Sunday that he would not have wanted a second strike on the boat." So I'm not sure why your follow up questions are on Trump.
The Washington Post story is, "The Washington Post had reported that a second strike was ordered to take out two survivors from the initial strike and to comply with an order by Hegseth that everyone be killed."
Sean Parnell (Assistant to the SECWAR, Chief Pentagon Spokesman & Senior Advisor ) said, "We told the Washington Post that this entire narrative was false yesterday."
You seem to be implying that Leavitt's comment contradicts this:
"Secretary Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes. Admiral Bradley worked well within his authority and the law directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated," Leavitt said.
However, Leavitt's statement is not the Washington Post story. It actually contradicts it by placing the emphasis on the destruction of the boat, not the killing of the two survivors of the first attack.
He's the President and started this conflict without a declaration of war from Congress, so... (Or do you think the whole thing is being run by staffers pulling a "Weekend At Biden's?")
Was the wreckage of a boat a threat to the United States of America?
Your first comment seemed to be about the new scandal - the double strike. Trump might have had very little to do with the double strike while still not being a "Weekend at Biden."
No, Trump is clearly doing something with Venezuela. But if you want to argue about the whole situation in general, it would require putting forward more of an argument on your part.
Assuming that this occurred, until he fires the people involved, the buck stops with Trump. I'm fairly willing to believe that Trump might literally either not understand or not go into enough detail to care about the laws of war, but he employs several people whose job it is to keep him from tripping over his own dick. If all those people did not prevent him from doing this, or did this without his knowledge, he can fire them, or he can own their actions as his own.
Yeah, sure. But I haven't seen evidence of Trump being particularly bloodthirsty, which seems to be the implications being driven at.
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Yes. This is a case that really looks bad -- it looks not only like the US killed some shipwrecked survivors of an attack (which is generally considered perfidious, right?), but that Hegseth not only authorized it but lied about it, not just to the press but to his boss. If that's so, he should resign.
However, the press is so unreliable that it's quite possible this isn't the case, and e.g. even if they're telling the literal truth, the second strike was not to kill survivors but to destroy a drug boat after a first attack failed to do so.
I am very far from an expert in this topic, but perfidy is stuff like attacking while under a flag of surrender or parlay, or the use of protected symbols for that purpose. Double-tapping survivors of an attack might be a violation in other ways, such as violating the concept of hors de combat, but that gets a lot more complicated; even attempting to escape can leave a combatant as 'in', and being incapacitated does not mean that you act as a human shield for other nearby legitimate military targets.
That's separate from whether it's good: it's possible for something to be a war crime and tots not a big deal (eg, the famous Doom health pack examples), and it's possible for something to not be a war crime and still show a significant moral lapse.
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