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By Saul Hudson
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"These are not high crimes," Pete Hegseth told the Pentagon press corps on Tuesday. "This is the job, and it's the job well done."
The defense secretary was responding to eight articles of impeachment introduced by Republican Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky. They accuse him of conducting unauthorized military operations, disregarding laws intended to protect civilians and carrying out extrajudicial killings in U.S. strikes on suspected drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Massie's resolution alleges that the maritime strikes killed at least 243 people.
Whatever comes of the impeachment process (the House on Tuesday voted 211-204 to refer the articles of impeachment to committee, effectively blocking the effort), Hegseth’s press conference was a textbook play to make potentially unlawful violence sound acceptable. It’s a script that is at least 20 years old.
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I spent decades as a Reuters journalist reporting on conflicts, including what governments do. I covered U.S. foreign policy in Washington when the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal erupted during the early stages of the Iraq war. I later traveled with then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Europe on a trip dominated by debates over secret CIA black sites and the treatment of detainees. Some U.S. diplomats dubbed it the “Secret Prisons Tour.”
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I have heard Tuesday's defense plays before. The legal questions differ, but these are the arguments the Bush administration used to defend torture and persuade Americans to accept it after 9/11. There were four moves then, and Hegseth made all four in 25 minutes.
First, rename the act. In the 2000s, waterboarding became "enhanced interrogation" and prisoners labeled "unlawful enemy combatants." On Tuesday, when defending U.S. strikes Hegseth referred to the dead as "narco-terrorists" whose boats carried "poison into our communities." No criminal trial preceded the killings. The administration asserts wartime authority for the strikes, a legal premise human-rights organizations dispute. But the label lets the administration claim a moral verdict before the evidence about those killed has been publicly tested.
Second, say it worked. Hegseth said he stood behind every operation and "would do it again tomorrow." In December 2014, days after the Senate Intelligence Committee published its report on CIA interrogations, then-Vice President Dick Cheney went on NBC's Meet the Press. "It worked," he said. "I'd do it again in a minute." In reality, the Senate Intelligence Committee found that the techniques had not produced the information originally claimed, and that 26 of the 119 CIA detainees had been wrongfully held. “It worked” survived even though the Senate investigation found the techniques ineffective. In Hegseth's version, success is measured by the act itself: boats sunk, capabilities destroyed. Whether it was lawful, and who was on board, isn’t even considered.
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Third, stand behind the troops. Hegseth said impeachment "puts a target on the backs of American warriors," and that politicians had accused sailors and pilots of war crimes for doing their job. However, the articles of impeachment charge one official: Hegseth. Not the sailors or pilots who carried out his orders. At a Pentagon briefing on June 1, 2005, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Amnesty International’s comparison of Guantánamo to a Soviet gulag did “a disservice to those who have sacrificed so much.” The move turns accountability for the person who gives the order into an attack on the people who follow it. It also conscripts those people into his defense without asking them.
Fourth, turn law into politics. Hegseth called the charges "policy disagreements." In 2009, when the Justice Department's torture memos were published, then-White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove warned of "show trials" over "policy differences." No senior U.S. official was prosecuted over the CIA interrogation program. The lesson for Washington was that reframing allegations of illegal violence as policy disputes could deflect demands for accountability. Tuesday's press conference is what that lesson looks like 17 years later.
The four moves share a purpose. They change the question from "was it legal?" to "whose side are you on?" Hegseth made the switch explicit when he called the impeachment effort sabotage.
This matters beyond one Cabinet secretary. A public does not come to tolerate what it once prohibited because someone wins a legal argument. It happens through stories repeated until they sound like common sense: they deserved it, it works, only the disloyal object. Those stories helped sustain defenses of torture, which is prohibited without exception under U.S. and international law. They also create the expectation that those responsible for misconduct will escape accountability.
It's easy to dismiss Hegseth's bombastic language as his style—a style he has actively projected since his Fox News commentator days. Some probably view this through the same lens as calling a critic "a loser"—crass, but not dangerous.
But it is also important to remember the weight of his office, and the outsized role it can play in normalizing behavior. The response is not louder outrage. It is plain language, used every time the script appears. People were killed without trial. A claim of success is not evidence of it. An impeachment article names an official, not a soldier. A law is not a policy preference.
I know the script will be used again, by this administration or the next one. It only works on an audience that does not recognize it.
Saul Hudson is CEO of Angle42, a strategic communications agency whose work includes anti-torture advocacy. He is a former Reuters senior journalist and general manager for the Americas who reported from conflict zones over two decades.
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