MAGA commentator Megyn Kelly held back no punches and clarified that she wants a harsh and gruesome fate for alleged drug traffickers entering the US. Kelly said she has no empathy for the peddlers and would like to see them “suffer” at the hands of US President Donald Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth In a segment on The Megyn Kelly Show, the conservative pundit said she would prefer that alleged drug traffickers killed in the September Caribbean boat strikes suffer a slow and painful death rather than a swift one.This comes after the White House confirmed that a top US Navy admiral ordered a second round of strikes on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat in September, reports BBC. Kelly was defending maritime strikes by the US military in which boats carrying suspected “narco-terrorists” were reportedly attacked, including a controversial second strike called a “double tap,” carried out even after the initial assault had already disabled the vessels and forced survivors into the water, where those still floating were killed in the second strike.Opposition lawmakers and legal experts condemned the follow-up attack on survivors as a violation of international law, possibly constituting a war crime.Speaking to journalist Mark Halperin, Kelly described in detail what she would wish upon such “narco-terrorists”: “So I really do kind of not only want to see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water, but I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so that they lose a limb and bleed out a little. Kelly also claimed the second strike was necessary to protect American people: “Like I’m really having a difficult time ginning up sympathy for these guys who ten seconds earlier almost got taken out by the initial bomb, but because they managed to get ejected, you know, a little too soon, had to be taken out in the water. I realize legally it may make a difference, but truly, Mark, this is a tough case to really gin up the sympathies of the American people.”

War crime or not?

CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig said that the second strike in September was no doubt a war crime: In a word, they were illegal. It is a core principle of the rule of law and of the law of war that you cannot target and kill people who have been rendered incapacitated or defenseless. That conflicts with the Geneva Convention.On Monday, White House sress secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Hegseth authorised the strikes but did not give an order to “kill everybody”, as the report said.More than 80 people have been killed in similar strikes in the Caribbean Sea since early September. US officials typically release a short, grainy video after each operation, and POTUS also posts the clips on his Truth Social platform, but they provide no evidence of drug trafficking and give few details about who or what was on the boats.The Trump administration says the strikes are carried out in self-defence and target boats transporting illicit drugs to the United States.