Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s latest bid to punish Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) for his role in a video instructing active-duty troops to refuse unlawful orders was raked over the coals by analyst David A. Graham in a scathing write-up for The Atlantic published Monday.
Hegseth has previously threatened to recall Kelly into active duty to court-martial him. He has evidently backed down from this idea — but is now instead starting a process to demote Kelly’s retirement rank and reduce his military pension, which, Graham wrote, is an “extremely pernicious” exhibition of political “bullying.”
“What Hegseth did not cite was what Kelly and his colleagues actually said in the video, and for good reason,” wrote Graham. “Doing so would expose the absurdity of the charge and the abuse of power involved in the attempt to demote him. ‘Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders,’ Kelly said. No one in the Trump administration has disputed that this is true. A more agile or even-keeled administration would have smoothly dismissed the video as irrelevant: This is true, but of course we would never issue an illegal order.”
However, Graham noted, Trump’s administration has engaged in a number of operations challenged as illegal, from summary airstrikes on boats in the Caribbean leading up to the Venezuelan incursion that captured that country’s autocratic president, to efforts to deploy the National Guard to cities that were protesting him.
“The Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual for service members states that ‘orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal,’” wrote Graham. “This revelation made the video from Kelly and company not just hypothetical but directly relevant. It also put Hegseth on the defensive, even among Republican members of Congress, and he quickly shifted blame to Admiral Mitch Bradley, who commanded the operation.”
“Punishing Kelly is extremely pernicious political retaliation. It also ought to be embarrassing to Hegseth, though he seems as impervious to shame as his boss,” wrote Graham, concluding that “The core belief underlying all of this is as plain as it is dangerous: Criticizing Donald Trump and defending the rule of law is sedition.”
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