CNN’s Elie Honig Points Out Alleged US Strike on ‘Defenseless’ Survivors Is Literally a Textbook Example of a War Crime

CNN’s Elie Honig pointed out Monday that a “double tap” strike on a ship, the likes of which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is alleged to have ordered, was a textbook example of an “illegal” act cited in the “Department of Defense’s own manual on the law of war.”

The Washington Post reported Saturday that the September 2 mission targeting a suspected narco-trafficking boat, part of a Trump administration push against Venezuelan drug routes, escalated after a drone spotted two survivors clinging to the wreckage, prompting Hegseth to allegedly order “kill everybody” with a second strike.

Speaking to CNN host Wolf Blitzer on Monday, Honig argued that the second strike “conflicts with the Geneva Convention” since the target was “rendered incapacitated” by the initial attack:

In a word, they were illegal. It is a core principle of the rule of law and of the law of war that you cannot target and kill people who have been rendered incapacitated or defenseless. That conflicts with the Geneva Convention.

There was a group of Judge Advocate General, former military attorneys, who came out with this statement over the weekend saying that these acts would be patently illegal. Colonel Cedric Leighton just told you 15 minutes ago on air that it would be illegal. And Wolf, if you look at the Department of Defense’s own manual on the law of war, it uses as an example of something that would be illegal this exact scenario. It says if you have survivors of a shipwreck, they cannot be targeted because they are incapacitated. So if somebody took this order or gave this order knowingly and with the intent to take out two survivors who had been rendered helpless in the water, then yes, it would absolutely be illegal.

Blitzer then asked whether officers down the chain of command could be implicated in a “war crime” even if they were just following orders.

Honig replied:

Yeah. So it all will depend there on their level of knowledge. What did they know at that moment? If they were aware that there were people in the water who had been rendered defenseless, who were incapable of defending themselves and fighting back, and they took that order, then yes, they would be acting on an illegal order. And that has been rejected as a defense in court cases.

The host then offered a counter in the form of a Department of Justice memo, issued by the Office of Legal Counsel in September, which argued that President Donald Trump had the official ability to “authorize deadly force against a broad range of cartels because they pose an imminent threat to Americans.”

“Would this apply to what are being described as so-called double tap strikes? A second strike going in and killing wounded individuals?” Blitzer then asked.

Honig said he does not believe the memo does “provide legal cover” in this case: “First of all, while that memo relates to the overall effort to target these Venezuelan drug boats, it apparently does not relate to this double tap, to this effort to go back and attack people who had been rendered helpless in the water.”

He added: “The second thing is that Office of Legal Counsel memo actually was issued on September 5th, which was three days after this attack. And so you can’t provide retroactive cover for something that happened three days ago.”

On Sunday Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One Sunday night that Hegseth denied giving the order, and said that he believed him.

Watch above via CNN.