WASHINGTON, D.C. – On CNN’s AC360 with Anderson Cooper, U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) sharply criticized Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s unlawful, unauthorized military strikes in the Southern Hemisphere. Duckworth also slammed the Department of Defense for misleading the public and putting our servicemembers in legal jeopardy and at greater risk of retaliation from our enemies. Video of the full interview can be found on the Senator’s YouTube.
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Key Quotes:
- “You can't just go in and kill people just because you think that they might conduct future operations against you. It just violates all sorts of international laws of warfare. It's illegal on so many levels. This revelation tells us that the DOD has been lying to the American people since September, when they claimed that these people had access to radios.”
- “Remember that if you conduct war crimes, you can actually be caught up in front of the international tribunal… So this puts our servicemen and women in real danger, and this type of attack does not help America's fight against narco-terrorists. If Donald Trump really cared about fighting drug traffickers, he wouldn't be pardoning the former president of Honduras who helped traffic hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States.”
- “I have requested all the video footage of every mission that's been conducted in this operation—not just this particular boat strike—but all of the strikes. I've also requested the after-action reports that pilots file and drone operators file after they conduct a mission, as well as the intelligence debrief that they also do post-mission. And so I'd like to see all of that now. Whether or not my Republican colleagues are going to stand up and force that to happen is a whole different question.”
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