'Dictatorship confirmed,' one social media user said of the exchange.
faced backlash after declaring the Pentagon had “absolute and complete authority” to bomb a suspected Venezuelan drug vessel, but then offering no legal basis to back up that claim about the A reporter pressed Hegseth on Thursday: “What legal authority did the Pentagon invoke to strike that boat full of drug smugglers?”“First of all, just the defense of the American people alone.
A hundred thousand Americans were killed each year under the previous administration because of an open border and open drug traffic flow. That is an assault on the American people. I’d say we smoked a drug boat and there’s 11 narco-terrorists at the bottom of the ocean and when other people try to do that, they’re gonna meet the same fate.” "I'd say we smoked a drug boat and there's 11 narco-terrorists at the bottom of the ocean — and when other people try to do that, they're gonna meet the same fate."Sen. Rand Paul , the chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, warned Wednesday that the move may set a chilling precedent. “It’s hard to have any sympathy for drug dealers trying to import product into our country,” Paul said on Newsmax. “But at the same time, I guess, you might ask the question, ‘Where does it end? Are we the world’s policemen?’” He added: “We all assume these people were bad people and drug dealers, but if they were caught off the coast of Miami, we would stop the boat. If they don’t shoot at us, we don’t shoot at them. They’re confiscated; they’re put in jail.” On social media, critics accused Hegseth of swerving the question entirely — and questioned what actual authority the Pentagon was relying on.This is the equivalent of a parent tells their kids,"Because I said so." He doesn't have an answer, so he tries to shut down the question. Hegseth doesn't answer the question here. He attempts to do the standard tough guy routine, but it is not a legal defense or justification. Perhaps if he hadn't fired all of the top Judge Advocates General for all of the branches of the military or the inspectors general or the…The central point is not the guilt of the men on board — everything suggests that they were drug traffickers — but the choice of method: instead of capturing and trying these people, it was decided to eliminate them on the spot. An act that conveys a precise message: we don't… The argument presented by Hegseth could be used by police officers to justify a shoot to kill policy for people on the street they suspect to be drug dealers.
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