Kill, Kill Again, Kill Them All

  

Jeffrey St. Clair

 Pete Hegseth is a producer of snuff films. The media-obsessed, if not media-savvy, Hegseth has produced 21 of these mass murder documentary shorts in the last three months, featuring the killings of 83 people–if you take his word for it. Hegseth introduces these kill shots like Alfred Hitchcock presenting an episode of his old TV show–without the irony, of course. There’s no irony to Pete Hegseth. No intentional irony, that is. It’s all bluster and protein-powder bravado to titillate the Prime-time Fox audience as they nibbled at their TV dinners.

Who were the people being killed? What did they have in their boats? Where were they going? No one seemed to care. Pete certainly didn’t care. It was the explosion that mattered, the now you see it, now you don’t quality of the videos. 

Pete’s snuff films have the mise en scène of a ’90s video game, the zombie slaughter games Pete grew up on, burning callouses onto his thumbs from obsessive use of this joystick. 

The irony, lost on Hegseth, is that these are the precise kinds of videos that ethical whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning used to scrape from the secret vaults of the Pentagon and ship to Wikileaks. Videos of crimes committed by US forces. In his dipsomaniacal mind, Hegseth seems to believe these snuff films are proof of the power and virility of the War Department under his leadership. In fact, each video is a confession. The question is: will he be held to account and who will have the guts to do it?

As the Washington Post reported, the very first of Hegseth’s snuff films had a gory epilogue that he chose not to share. Shortly after the smoke cleared from the missile strike, the drone video footage showed that two people had survived the attack and were clinging to the smoking wreckage of the boat. The commander of the operation, Navy Adm. Frank Bradley, ordered two more missile strikes: one to kill the survivors and another to destroy the remains of the boat and the bodies of its crew. According to the Post, Bradley was acting under the orders of Hegseth to “kill everybody.”

But the crime that left survivors shouldn’t be obscured by the crime that killed the survivors. Calling them “war crimes” doesn’t seem right, since there’s no declared war, congressional authorization or legal justification for the strikes. Serial mass murder is a far more accurate description.

The Trump brain trust had a hard time getting its story straight. First, they denied the Post’s story of a second strike. It didn’t happen. Fake news. Complete fabrication. Trump came out to say he wouldn’t have supported a second strike and didn’t believe it happened. On Monday, they sent Karoline Leavitt out to admit a second strike had taken place, but that Hegseth knew nothing about it. Next, they blamed the second strike on Adm. Bradley. This was followed by a statement saying the second strike was perfectly legit and that Bradley was fully authorized to order the killing of the two survivors. By Thursday, they were telling Congressional leaders that the second strike wasn’t aimed at killing the survivors but sinking the remains of the boat. The survivors were just collateral damage.