President Donald Trump’s defense secretary has overseen so many alleged atrocities that his department has earned a horrifying new nickname from the people who work there.
“I know active-duty Marines who now refer to Pete Hegseth’s department as the Department of War Crimes,” Rep. Seth Moulton, himself a Marine combat veteran, told MS NOW.
“That’s because they do things like this, destroy civilian infrastructure, which, just to be clear, is a war crime,” the Massachusetts Democrat went on, referring to Trump’s intention, announced Wednesday, to begin targeting Iranian civilian energy infrastructure as part of the his war on Iran.
“It’s meant to hurt civilians,” Moulton went on. “This is the same stuff we criticized Vladimir Putin for doing in Ukraine.”
The “Department of War Crimes” moniker combines Hegseth’s rebrand of the Department of Defense as the “Department of War” with the accusations he has faced of carrying out war crimes and other violations of international law in pursuit of the president’s foreign policy agenda.
That has included launching major U.S. airstrikes between March and April of last year against targets in Yemen that allegedly hit residential buildings and other civilian infrastructure, with reports of at least 224 non-combatants killed and hundreds more injured.
Legal experts have also questioned the constitutionality of Hegseth’s strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, which Trump ordered last June, as well as the legality under both domestic and international law of multiple strikes against alleged narco-trafficking vessels in the Caribbean, during which Hegseth is accused of issuing an illegal no-survivors attack order.
Hegseth has come under further fire after Trump launched a lightning invasion of Venezuela earlier in January as well as the president’s war against Iran, both without congressional authorization.
Well over a thousand civilians have been killed in the latter conflict, more than a hundred of them children who died after what’s believed to have been a U.S. missile hit a school in the south of the country.
Nor is it the only nickname Hegseth has earned for himself, with reports now suggesting Pentagon staffers have taken to calling him “Dumb McNamara” behind his back.
While Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara managed to maintain his reputation as a brilliant analytical mind even as he sent thousands of troops to the slaughter, the former Fox & Friends Weekend host is regarded as having the same appetite for escalation without quite the same intellectual credentials.
It remains unclear whether the brutal new nicknames are in any way related to Hegseth’s purge of DOD top brass Thursday.
Asked for comment by the Daily Beast, a spokesperson referred to remarks made by Hegseth at a press conference earlier in March: “They target civilians,” the defense secretary said of Iran. “We do not, and I can tell you this administration and this Pentagon focuses on that very, very closely.”
