Secretary of War Pete Hegseth told reporters on Tuesday that he wasn’t in the room when the order was given to launch a second strike that killed survivors on an alleged drug boat on September 2, as the Trump administration has shifted the responsibility for the order to Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the commander of US Special Operations Command.
“I watched that first strike live,” Hegseth told reporters at a cabinet meeting. “As you can imagine, at the Department of War, we’ve got a lot of things to do, so I didn’t stick around for the hour, two hours, whatever, when all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs, so I moved on to my next meeting.”
The US war chief said that a “couple of hours later,” he learned that Bradley, who was the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at the time, made the “correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat.” He added that it was the “right call” and “we have his back.”
According to The Washington Post report, US military commanders saw two survivors clinging to the burning wreck and launched a second strike to kill them. Intercept reporter Nick Turse, who first broke the story that the bombing of the alleged drug boat involved multiple strikes to kill survivors, pointed out in a story published Tuesday that bombing survivors of a wrecked boat is against the Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual.
“Persons who have been rendered unconscious or otherwise incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck, such that they are no longer capable of fighting, are hors de combat (out of action),” the guide reads. “Persons who have been incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack.”
Lawmakers in Congress on both sides of the aisle have announced their intention to open a probe into the strike to see if a war crime was committed, though the entire bombing campaign is clearly illegal under both US and international law. Legal experts told Turse that the entire chain of command could end up being investigated for war crimes and that each strike puts them at risk.
“While the September 2 strike seems uniquely depraved, every single strike taken against these boats by DoD is a summary execution of criminal suspects, people who even if tried in court would never get the death penalty,” Sarah Harrison, who previously served as associate general counsel at the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel, International Affairs, told Turse. “Every single strike exposes those in the chain of command to the risk of criminal liability under murder statutes and international law prohibiting extrajudicial killings.”
Further distancing himself from the September 2 double-tap strike, Hegseth told reporters that he didn’t personally see any survivors.
“I did not personally see survivors because the thing was on fire. It was exploded, and fire, you got smoke, you can’t see anything, you got digital — this is called the fog of war. This is what you in the press don’t understand. You sit in your air-conditioned offices, you’re up on Capitol Hill, and you nitpick, and you plant fake stories in The Washington Post about ‘kill everybody’ phrases based on anonymous sources,” he said.
While calling the Post story fake, it appears the only thing Hegseth disputes about the story is the idea that he gave an order to “kill everybody” on the boat. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who has been very critical of the US bombing campaign against boats in Latin America, ripped into Hegseth over his initial denial of the report.
“Secretary Hegseth said he had no knowledge of this, and it did not happen. It was fake news. It didn’t happen. And then the next day, from the podium at the White House are saying it did happen. So, either he was lying to us … or he’s incompetent and didn’t know it had happened,” Paul said.
“Do we think there’s any chance that … the secretary of the defense did not know there had been a second strike? So as a country, we’re just going to let people lie to us, to our face?” he added.
