Is This A War Crime? (Hint: Yes.)

Written By Leeja Miller

Sources:

Transcript:

Hi it’s Wednesday, December 3rd, 2025, you’re tuned into Why, America? I’m Leeja Miller. Since September 2nd, the United States military has made 21 separate strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean near Venezuela, killing 82 people so far that we know of. That’s the official tally from the Pentagon so let’s take their word with a grain of salt, shall we. It has recently come to light, in a Washington Post article last week, that a strike on September 2nd, which was initiated by Pete Hegseth who ordered the leaders of the mission to “kill everyone,” left multiple survivors clinging to burning boat shrapnel. Those survivors were then killed in a second strike, in accordance with Hegseth’s orders. This has many experts concerned that the US military is committing war crimes or breaking US laws in its boat strikes against alleged drug cartel members at sea. In a cabinet meeting earlier this week during which Trump fully dozed off at one point so let’s not pretend he’s really at the helm of anything anymore our country is being run by unelected right wing extremists, during that cabinet meeting Hegseth claimed that he had left the room before the second strike and wasn’t aware there were any survivors or a second strike had occurred. This despite the fact that he had fully denounced the reporting as fake news when it first came out that a second strike had occurred. But facts and figures don’t matter, we know this!! Today we’re talking about these ongoing boat strikes, Venezuela, why the fuck Pete Hegseth keeps getting his ass saved despite demonstrating complete incompetence since day one, and whether all of this is one giant war crime.

AD

You’ve probably never heard of most data broker sites, but they’ve definitely heard of you. Their entire business model is collecting your personal info and selling it to anyone willing to pay.

This stuff isn’t just floating around by accident. It’s being packaged, indexed, and sold legally. Right now. [show document] You can pretty much Google anyone or anything and find all sorts of private information like this out.

These sites are run by data brokers, who collect your personal information, package it up and sell it to anyone who wants it - and usually scammers and spammers want it. What really gets me is that these guys are printing money off our information and it's completely legal in America. There should be laws requiring them to at least get our consent before each sale - but nope, they're making billions without even trying to keep scammers away from our data.

And look, I get it - we all make compromises. I was on Instagram and TikTok for years, knowing they were harvesting my data in exchange for entertainment. I recently deleted both apps to break the habit, but it's tough when so much of society revolves around social media.

That’s a big reason why I use Aura, the sponsor of this video. Aura identifies data brokers exposing your info and submits opt-out requests on your behalf. Give Aura a few weeks, and you'll stop seeing your information on these sketchy sites when you search yourself.

Now, I've been lucky - I haven't had my identity stolen yet. But that's exactly why I use Aura. They continuously monitor the dark web and alert me if they find my personal information exposed. They’re going to let me know fast if anyone tries to use this information to access my credit or bank accounts. Plus, they give me up to $5 million in identity theft insurance should the worst case scenario happen.

You can go to my link aura.com/leeja to try 14 days for free. That will be enough time for Aura to find which data brokers are selling your information and start submitting opt out requests on your behalf. Thanks to Aura for partnering with me on today’s video!

At that cabinet meeting earlier this week, Pete Hegseth claimed both that he was not in the room, and that the people were clinging to burning shrapnel, there was smoke, there was fire, this was the FOG OF WAR!!!!! A term he clearly read about in a book once. And then he threw Admiral Frank Bradley under the bus as the commander of the operation who ultimately made the call to strike a second time. According to Hegseth, Bradley made the correct call and had to sink the boat and do the second strike to “eliminate the threat.” You know, the threat of two guys clinging to burning shrapnel whom the administration have not proven to be drug cartel members or criminals of any sort. The Pentagon also blamed Admiral Frank Bradley, as did Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, in a clearly coordinated effort to protect Hegseth and make an inferior officer take the fall for shit he should have known about and had control over.

Okay so first question here, the one everyone is talking about, is this a war crime? Yes. Yes this is a war crime. When two countries are at war, it has been well established in international law, in the rules of engagement, for over a century, that you do not order an operation to “kill everyone” to “take no prisoners” or “leave no survivors.” At that weird rally that Trump and Hegseth held a couple months ago where they called all the highest military commanders in the country into one room to lecture them about being fat and gay and having beards, at that meeting Hegseth bemoaned these types of finicky rules of engagement, saying quote ““We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters.”” Hegseth had promised to bring a “warrior mentality” to the department of defense, and I guess this is what he meant by that: absolutely despicable, cowardly acts like killing people helplessly clinging to boat shrapnel. In fact, the Pentagon’s own law of war manual explicitly says this exact scenario would be clearly illegal. The manual gives the example as almost a throwaway so obvious it barely needs saying: “For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.” I mean this is literally why the administration fired all of the top military lawyers earlier this year. It was for this specific purpose. Laws get in the way of what they’re trying to do. The international criminal court provides the legal definition of war crimes. They include things like the willful killing of people protected by the Geneva Conventions. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, “protecting the sick and wounded in armed conflict was the founding principle of the 1864 Geneva Convention.” This also includes “the shipwrecked” which is “military personnel or civilians in a perilous situation at sea or on any other waters following a misfortune and who refrain from any act of hostility.” Meaning they are not still actively attacking while shipwrecked. These victims of the US boat bombings were clinging on to burning shrapnel, they weren’t a threat before they got hit and they certainly weren’t committing acts of hostility while helplessly clinging to shrapnel in the middle of the ocean.

It is also a war crime to attack civilians. It is also a war crime to attack civilian objects that are not military objectives. It is also a war crime to kill a person out of combat meaning they are unable to fight due to injury, capture, or intent to surrender. The larger problem with all of this though is that war crimes only happen during times of declared armed conflict. And the Trump regime is claiming they are in open armed conflict with “drug cartels” generally and therefore this is all legitimate because we are at war. Even if that were true, this would STILL be a war crime. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, an international armed conflict is defined as “only those armed conflicts in which two or more states or other entities with international legal personality (including international organizations such as the UN or interstate military alliances) are opposed.” It goes on to say quote “Of course, only acts attributable to a state can trigger an IAC; acts by private persons not acting on behalf of a state do not trigger an IAC.” So Trump and Hegseth can claim til they’re blue in the face that drug cartels pose an immediate threat to Americans because their drugs are killing us all and therefore we are in armed conflict with them, but under international law you cannot simply pick a group of civilians and start attacking them and claim there’s an armed conflict. They are of course doing all sorts of things to try to get around these pesky definitions–claiming that they are attacking cocaine on the boats, not the people on board, so those people are just incidental casualties. Claiming that the drug cartels are closely linked with the state, that Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela is a member of tren de aragua, for example, and therefore they are acting on behalf of the state. It’s all way too far fetched to actually hold up in a court of law but there’s the rub. WHAT court of law??

The United States is not a member country of the International Criminal Court. Venezuela IS, though. HOWEVER, there is an ongoing investigation into Venezuela by the ICC because of human rights abuses going on in that country. So I think it poses a serious issue for Venezuela to ever turn to the ICC for protection from the United States for war crimes the US is committing against its people. And even if it DID turn to the ICC, we’ve talked about this. International law has no teeth. The ICC doesn’t have a police arm that can go into other sovereign countries and arrest people and bring them to justice. It is mostly entirely a game of name and shame. Call out the perpetrators, try to convince other countries to impose sanctions, that’s about it. And listen all of this may definitely alienate some of our allies who are going to be incredibly wary of sharing any intelligence with us if they think we’re going to use it to commit war crimes. But Trump and the whole regime has proven to be INCREDIBLY unconcerned with alienating our allies, relying instead on Trump’s strongman tactics to strongarm them into doing what we want whenever we need it in the future. I don’t see JD Vance being quite as good at this, and by all accounts Trump is in the decline and won’t be here for all of his second term, so I’m not sure if they have a game plan once they have a man who looks like he wears eyeliner and likes to fuck couches taking the reins on the whole strongman negotiating schtick. So I don’t think the threat of alienating ourselves from our allies is going to do ANYTHING to deter what the regime is already doing with regards to Venezuela. And yes it is a war crime. It is also a crime against humanity if we’re not in a legitimate armed conflict like I argue we are not, because you cannot just unilaterally decide to murder civilians with no hearing or trial because you think they might be doing something bad. That’s still murder. And it is also a crime within the US because the Uniform Code of Military Justice says hey guess what murder is a crime, even at high seas, even when committed by a commander or I don’t know the secretary of defense.

But this all begs the question WHY are we doing this. The administration knows and we ALL know well enough that bombing a few boats off the coast of Venezuela is not going to make the international drug trade grind to a halt. It may intimidate a few other boats from ever leaving shore, but the VAST majority of drugs like cocaine and fentanyl enter the United States by land through the southern border. So why do this?

My theory is that this is all about the optics, as is everything with the Trump regime. Trump is standing beside Hegseth despite his many fuck ups and clear incompetence because it would look bad if Trump admitted he was wrong, and he knows that ultimately Hegseth will do whatever Trump tells him to do, he is a spineless sycophant and that is exactly how Trump likes it. Trump made the mistake during his first term of surrounding himself at least partially with people willing to tell him no, and he hated it. So he’s going to cling onto his yes men in government no matter how many times they fuck up so long as they stay on his good side.

And the optics here are that the US is increasing its military presence in the Caribbean and along the coast of Venezuela, a country with a fuck ton of oil and a government often accused of being a failed communist state. For the record, I do have a degree in Latin American Studies that I don’t get to use very often but Venezuela has its own version of what is called Bolivarianismo, named after South American independence leader Simon Bolivar, which combines socialist, nationalist, patriotic, anti-imperialist, populist, panhispanic ideals. Hugo Chavez took that and ran with it in Venezuela, doing away with democratic norms and closing the country off from foreign influence in the process, which led to alleged human rights abuses, a lack of democratic representation, corruption and run away inflation, that’s easy to point to and say hey look communism doesn’t work even though that’s not exactly what’s been happening in Venezuela. That’s obviously an oversimplification of the last half century of Venezuela but all that to say the US hates all of this because it means it doesn’t have access to Venezuelan oil, it doesn’t have a sympathetic person in leadership, and of course the constant cold war boogeyman of Russian and now Chinese influence in the Western Hemisphere that is so deeply feared in the United States. Even though Trump and Putin are best buds. But Nicolas Maduro has got to go. And Maria Corina Machado, the winner of this year’s nobel peace prize, dedicated that prize to Trump for a reason. She is a leading opposition figure in Venezuela and could prove to be a very useful ally in the government if Nicolas Maduro is overthrown. And the US LOVES participating in Latin American coups wherever it suits their fancy. And it would suit them greatly if the Venezuela problem, a thorn in the side of the US for DECADES, would go away. We’re bombing them because they need our democracy!!!

And when I posted asking for questions from the audience, which I do every week here on YouTube under the “posts” tab, one person asked WHY these videos of these boat strikes are being declassified and shared publicly when other war crimes have been carefully covered up in the past. And I think it’s because of the optics. The US wants to show force, it wants to show it’s willing to do whatever it takes to intimidate Nicolas Maduro, probably in the hopes that he’ll resign or flee but I don’t think that’s his style. They are hoping perhaps Maduro will retaliate which will give them the pretext to initiate a full blown war to overthrow Maduro. They are squeezing him to see what he does and to eventually get him out of there. On top of that, this regime is far more openly brazen about breaking the law than past regimes have been. They are not pretending with the niceties, they are fulfilling their strongman promises as a show of intimidation for the entire region and the entire world. It is all about the optics.

So then the question remains: what happens next? What can be done to stop this? I’ve already said international law doesn’t REALLY do much. It is really up to the other two branches of government: Congress and the Courts, to curtail the overreaching of the Trump regime. And listen it doesn’t feel like they have the power to do much but there HAVE been legal victories over the last 11 months, there HAS been pushback from courts that has successfully stopped certain Trump regime tactics or forced them to change course or at the VERY least slowed them down, that is important and we can’t be completely fatalistic about all of this. And Congress has completely rolled over and abdicated its duty to check the powers of the president for the last 11 months because Congress is run by Republicans and anyone willing to stand up to Trump has been weeded out over the last decade. However even many Republicans are very uncomfortable with these boat strikes.

Both houses of Congress have recently opened investigations into these boat strikes. Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, a republican and chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, tasked with overseeing the military, said “These are serious charges, and that’s the reason we’re going to have special oversight.” Many Republicans are skeptical of the Washington Post’s reporting but are nevertheless concerned enough that they’re speaking out and participating in investigations. Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina, said “Somebody made a horrible decision. Somebody needs to be held accountable.” And Republican House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers of Alabama has opened an investigation in the House as well. Many are calling for Hegseth to testify before Congress as to these bombings, what he knew, and what he ordered. And Admiral Frank Bradley, the one who has been blamed up and down by the regime for ultimately calling for the second strike, will be giving private closed door testimony to the chairs of the armed services committees along with the top Democrats on those committees later this week. That’s all well and good but these boat strikes have been going on for MONTHS, and just one month ago the Senate REJECTED an attempt to try to control the Executive branch and its military actions surrounding venezuela. Senator Tim Kaine was the lead sponsor of a bill that would have required Congressional approval prior to any move by Trump to take military action against Venezuela. Just 2 Republicans voted to try to oppose Trump and the bill failed. Congress has been on alert for MONTHS as to potential escalation with Venezuela, they’ve been concerned about it for MONTHS but when push comes to shove and something lands on their desk that would allow them to DO anything about it, to take the power the constitution has given them to control the President and actually use it, they folded. And that has been the central theme of the last 11 months. Trump, through the creeps calling the shots behind the scenes like Steven Miller or Russel Vought, is claiming sweeping, unchecked presidential authority to do whatever he wants, and despite the fact that the constitution literally put in place checks on the President’s ability to claim such sweeping power, in the form of Congressional oversight, Congress has mostly played dead for the last 11 months. Committee hearings are all well and good, and I hope we do get some public testimony from Bradley and Hegseth because that is the public record and the public deserves to know what atrocities are being committed in our name and with our tax dollars. But ultimately a hearing makes for some good sound bites, makes it look like our Congressmembers are doing anything, but when actually faced with a vote on a bill that would curb presidential powers, Congress has shown time and again it is unwilling to do the things that actually have to happen to exercise its full authority.

So the remaining branch is the judicial branch. What lawsuits could result from this? It would be Trump’s own prosecutors who would have to decide to prosecute Bradley or Hegseth for murder. But murder of whom? Venezuelan nationals on the high sea? There is no political will in our US attorneys offices to undergo any prosecution and the gray area that’s created when you bring in foreign nationals at high sea and crimes committed by officials who may have immunity, thats a complex case that I would venture a guess most prosecutors won’t touch. There’s of course the JAGs and the military tribunals, again it’s a murky legal area, I’m not sure there’s the political will to go after one of their own. And as far as I know the secretary of defense is not subject to the UCMJ or to being court martialed, so Hegseth would certainly be out. The only potential pathway, and the one that is actually currently unfolding, would be for the families of those killed by the US strikes to file lawsuits or complaints in the United States or with foreign legal entities. That is a huge feat considering the fact that with a strike in the middle of the ocean like that it is very hard to know if your family member disappeared because of a military strike or because of something else. On top of that, many of these boats are launching from incredibly remote and impoverished fishing villages. To have the resources and the knowledge to bring a case or file a complaint is quite a feat. But it’s happening. A Colombian family filed a complaint with the Washington DC based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights with the help of a Pittsburgh-based human rights lawyer. The complaint names Pete Hegseth specifically and calls the murder Colombian Alejandro Carranza Medina an extra-judicial killing. The complaint was filed on behalf of Carranza’s wife and the four children his murder left fatherless. However, the complaint was filed with the IACHR, which is not a legal body in the US, it is an international body based in the US. The IACHR can make recommendations but does not have power to enforce what it recommends. So it is a first step, and an important one to bring international condemnation to the strikes, to bring to light details of the strikes and the victims–Carranza was a Colombian fisherman. When the US bombed his fishing boat it claimed the boat was filled with violent Venezuelan narcotraffickers. That is important to bring to light. But of course it’s unlikely to stop future aggression if that’s what the Trump regime decides to do. And filing civil litigation to seek compensation or other redress for the killings of their family members in US courts would likely be unsuccessful. A similar bid filed by the families of victims of the Obama drone strikes was dismissed in federal court. And the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. And that was for US citizens killed in Yemen by US drone strikes. The court dismissed the case claiming it did not have jurisdiction to hear it in the first place, especially because of sovereign immunity–the courts aren’t willing to wade into issues of national security, military decisions, ongoing armed conflicts, etc., and second guess the will of the executive in those matters by stepping in and enjoining the military or the intelligence community from engaging in actions against foreign enemies, especially where those activities were approved by the president and the secretary of defense. It is VERY hard for foreign nationals to get any justice in United States courts for activities of the United States abroad. It is even more difficult when those activities abroad are ongoing, as is the case with the escalating situation in Venezuela. And this isn’t a new development with this Supreme Court or other Trump-appointed judges–sovereign immunity especially when it comes to military actions has always had a really strong sway against any sort of judicial involvement. It is truly Congress that is the final bastion of authority that could try to hold back any moves by the President or Pete Hegseth or the military against Venezuela at this point. And I’m not holding my breath on that one.

So all we can do at this point is wait and watch and remain ever vigilant. We’ve done things like this before, under far less brazen and violent presidential leadership, so there’s nothing to indicate we have the power to stop it now, unfortunately. This is one of those times when it’s important to stay vigilant but also remind yourself that you cannot save the world, and sitting and staring at the horrors all day doesn’t do anything to help anyone. Help where you can, but also be sure you are turning to help your community in the immediate area where you live. That is where you have the most agency and can do the most good, and the antidote to anxiety is often action. So taking action where you actually can help is necessary right now to keep us all from sliding into complete despair and hopelessness. I know here in the Twin Cities, Indivisible is organizing a number of trainings and demonstrations and has put together a rapid response group that is mobilizing to be prepared to handle the onslaught of ICE that is likely going to start targeting our Somali community and likely the many other immigrant communities that call this area home. They have chapters all over the US. Indivisible dot org for more information.

And if you’d like to support my work this holiday season, consider joining here on YouTube by clicking the big join button below, or supporting me over on Patreon, patreon dot com slash Leeja miller, where you get access to all these episodes completely ad free. Thank you to my multi-platinum patrons Christopher Cowan, Amber Arwood, Evan Friedley, Marc, Sarah Shelby, Art, David, L’etranger (Lukus), Thomas Johnson, Anthony Jiles, and Tay. Your generosity makes this channel what it is, so thank you!

And if you liked this episode, you’ll like the one from Monday about the anti-immigrant crackdown in the fallout from the National Guard shooting.

Leeja Miller
Next

The Immigration Crackdown Has Entered A New Phase