Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is facing bipartisan scrutiny after he reportedly ordered U.S. forces to “kill everybody” in a strike on an alleged Venezuelan drug-trafficking boat. If those reports are accurate, critics say, Hegseth and the servicemembers who carried out the attack may be guilty of war crimes.

The initial Sept. 2 attack on a Venezuelan boat left two survivors “clinging to the smoldering wreck,” said The Washington Post . A Special Forces commander ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s order, and those survivors were “blown apart in the water.” Hegseth’s alleged instruction to kill all the occupants of the boat, even if they could no longer fight, would be an “order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Todd Huntley, a former military law

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