President Trump told reporters on Sunday night that he “wouldn’t have wanted” the US military to launch a second missile strike on an alleged drug boat that reportedly occurred in September.
The president was answering questions regarding The Washington Post report that said the first US bombing of a vessel in the Caribbean on September 2 involved a second missile strike to kill the survivors to comply with US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s order to “kill everybody” on the boat.
“I wouldn’t have wanted that – a second strike. The first strike was very lethal. It was fine,” Trump said. “But Pete said that didn’t happen. I have great confidence in him.”
While Hegseth called the Post report “fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory,” he didn’t explicitly deny giving the order to kill everyone on the boat, at least in his public comments. “As we’ve said from the beginning, and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be ‘lethal, kinetic strikes,'” he wrote on X.
“The declared intent is to stop lethal drugs, destroy narco-boats, and kill the narco-terrorists who are poisoning the American people. Every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization,” Hegseth added. He later posted an AI-generated image depicting a cover for the Franklin the Turtle children’s book titled “Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists,” with the character firing rockets at small boats.
The fact that the US military used more than one missile to blow up the first boat it bombed on September 2 was first reported by The Intercept on September 10, but the report didn’t receive nearly as much attention.
“People on board the boat off the coast of Venezuela that the US military destroyed last Tuesday were said to have survived an initial strike, according to two American officials familiar with the matter. They were then killed shortly after in a follow-up attack,” wrote Intercept reporter Nick Turse.
