Ryan Goodman
‪@rgoodlaw.bsky.social‬

Former US military lawyers speak out:

"The Former JAGs Working Group unanimously considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both."

Statement on Media Reports of Pentagon “No Quarter” Orders in Caribbean Boat Strikes

1/2


• If the U.S. military operation to interdict and destroy suspected narcotraFicking vessels is a “non-international armed conflict,” as the Trump Administration suggests, orders to “kill everybody,” which can reasonably be regarded as an order to give “no quarter,” and
to “double-tap” a target in order to kill survivors, are clearly illegal under international law. In short, they are war crimes.
• If the U.S. military operation is not an armed conflict of any kind, these orders to kill helpless civilians clinging to the wreckage of a vessel our military destroyed would subject everyone from SECDEF down to the individual who pulled the trigger to prosecution under U.S. law for murder.
ALT



Highlighted sentence at the end of the document reads:

Again, the bottom line is that, since orders to kill survivors of an attack at sea are “patently illegal,” anyone who issues or follows such orders can and should be prosecuted for war crimes, murder, or both.
ALT
Nov 29, 2025, 3:10 PM

Sanho Tree
‪@sanho.bsky.social‬

It’s also the 80th anniversary of this event:

‪Sanho Tree‬
‪@sanho.bsky.social‬
· 1d
Exactly 80 years ago tomorrow (Nov. 30, 1945), German submarine commander Heinz-Wilhelm Eck and two of his former subordinates on the U-852 were shot by Allies in Hamburg for killing the survivors of a ship they had sunk. Pete Hagueseth should be very worried.
https://www.executedtoday.com/2009/11/30/1945-heinz-eck-u-boat-commander/

1945: Heinz Eck, U-Boat commander | Executed Today
www.executedtoday.com
Nov 29, 2025, 5:16 PM

1945: Heinz Eck, U-Boat commander

Posted on 30 November, 2009 by Headsman

On this date in 1945, Heinz-Wilhelm Eck and two of his former subordinates on the Unterseeboot U-852 were shot in Hamburg for killing the survivors of a sunk target.


The defendants in the U-852 trial. From left to right: Eck, August Hoffmann, Walter Weisspfennig, Hans Lenz, Wolfgang Schwender. The leftmost three were executed.

On March 13, 1944, in the South Atlantic en route to the Indian Ocean, U-852 torpedoed the Greek-flagged Peleus.

The submarine commander Eck feared the steamer’s debris would be observed by a passing airplane, and give enough information to Allied reconnaissance to enable it to find his ship. He therefore surfaced and attempted to have the debris field eliminated by machine-gunning and grenading it into the watery deep.

This seems a rather curious expedient, but evidently it was a common one.

U-Boat ace Adalbert Schnee was called (German link) to testify that blasting away at ship wreckage actually was an effective practice. But on prosecution’s cross-examination, Schnee was deftly trapped — lest he incriminate himself in a potential war crime — into disavowing (pdf) the killing of survivors who happened to be clinging to that debris.

{snip}