Rep Drunken Van Orden went on CNN to defend fellow booze bottle baby and Secretary of War Crimes, Whiskey Pete Hegseth. His efforts held up about as well as his liver. When the host asked DVO what he was hoping to learn about the second strike on a disabled boat, he replied by saying that it was OK to attack a boat as long as any part of it was floating:

Well, let me put this in a way that people who have not been to war can kind of visualize it better. If you're on the battlefield and there's an enemy tank and you launch a javelin missile, for instance, and it doesn't completely destroy the tank, you launch another one regardless if there are tank crewmen hanging out of the hatch. So, as long as there was a fraction of that boat floating, it was a viable military target.

DVO must have been hitting the bottle pretty hard to come up with that nonsense.

First off, it was supposedly a drug boat, according to Whiskey Pete, which would have made it a law enforcement action, not a military action. However, no one has provided a lick of evidence that his boat was carrying drugs or even why they suspected that it was.

Secondly, lethal military force is forbidden unless in self-defense. No one claimed that the people on the boat were sticking their tongues out at American forces, much less firing upon them, so that's out.

Thirdly and lastly, the law says that once a vessel is inoperative and not being combative, the mission becomes a rescue and recovery mission. There's nothing that says you should attack again and murder the survivors.

What DVO accomplished was to confirm that Hegseth did indeed commit war crimes with the second strike. With friends like DVO, who needs enemies?

H/T Aaron Rupar for the video