Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly gave a verbal order to leave no survivors behind as the Donald Trump administration launched the first of more than a dozen attacks on alleged drug boats that have killed more than 80 people over the past three months.
On September 2, US military personnel fired a missile that hit a ship in the Caribbean carrying 11 people accused of drug trafficking in the United States.
When two survivors emerged from the wreckage, a Special Operations commander overseeing the attack ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions to “kill everyone,” according to The Washington Postciting officials with direct knowledge of the operation.
The two men were then “blown into the water,” according to the report.
News of Hegseth’s alleged command follows intense legal scrutiny from international investigators and members of Congress who allege the Trump administration’s deadly campaign amounts to illegal extrajudicial killings, which law-of-war experts speak to The Independent they labeled it outright killing and a war crime.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has reportedly instructed military personnel to leave no survivors behind as the Trump administration launched a series of attacks targeting boats suspected of carrying drugs to the United States (REUTERS)
The Defense Department “has no response to this post and declines to comment further,” a Pentagon spokesman said. The Independent Friday.
Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell said The Washington Post that the “entire narrative of the newspaper is completely false” and that “the ongoing operations to dismantle narco-terrorism and to protect the Motherland from deadly drugs have been a great success.”
In September, the Trump administration told Congress that the United States is formally engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels that the president has labeled “illegal combatants.”
Administration officials have labeled cartels as “non-state armed groups” whose actions “constitute an armed attack against the United States” and are now engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” — or war with a non-state actor.
In the weeks since, the Trump administration has directed more than a dozen strikes that have killed more than 80 people on ships in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean but has not publicly provided any evidence or legal justification for their deaths, according to lawmakers and civil rights groups.
A newly released legal memo from the Justice Department says military personnel involved in the strikes will not face criminal prosecution in the future, a defense that legal experts and national security scholars say has failed to prevent exposure to potential criminal liability.
The alleged traffickers do not represent any imminent threat to the United States and are not in what the administration has labeled an “armed conflict” with the country, according to officials and experts.
“The term for premeditated killing outside of armed conflict is murder,” said Brian Finucane, a senior adviser with the International Crisis Group, a conflict policy nonprofit.
“And the Trump administration has not established that these attacks are taking place in an armed conflict nor that the targets are legal under the law of war,” he said. The Independent this month.
Donald Trump shared video of a missile attack on September 2 that killed 11 people on a boat that officials say was carrying drugs to the United States (White House)
While it is unclear what instructions the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel provided the administration, the White House appears to be using that guidance as a “legal permission slip to carry out acts that might otherwise be criminal,” according to Finucane.
Asked why he would not seek permission from Congress for his military campaign targeting the South American regimes he claims are fueling a drug epidemic in the United States, Trump said his government is “just going to kill people” instead.
“I don’t think we’re going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war. I think we’re just going to kill people who are bringing drugs into our country, OK? We’re going to kill them,” Trump said during a White House roundtable with administration officials last month.
“They’ll be, like, dead, OK,” he said.
Trump shared a 29-second drone video of the first attack on September 2 in a post on his Truth Social account the next day, warning that the attack also served as “a warning to anyone even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. BEWARE!”
The president said that the 11 people on board were “terrorists” from the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which the administration has labeled as a foreign terrorist organization.
Admiral Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley, the commander who was overseeing the operation from Fort Bragg in North Carolina, told personnel involved in the strike that the survivors were legitimate targets because they could theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo, according to people with knowledge of the command who spoke to them. The Washington Post.
Bradley allegedly ordered the second strike to carry out Hegseth’s command to kill everyone on board.
At the time of the attack, he headed the Joint Special Operations Command, which operates under the command of the US Special Operations Command and is typically responsible for conducting classified military operations. He was later promoted to head the parents’ organization.
SEAL Team 6 — formally known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, which handles complex and classified operations that may include higher-profile targets — reportedly conducted intelligence gathering to determine who was on the boat.
News of the so-called “double tap” strike was first reported by The Interception within days after the attack.
Trump administration officials have released footage captured by drones on social media chronicling more than a dozen attacks on alleged drug-carrying vessels that law-of-war experts say amount to illegal extrajudicial killings (US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth)
Earlier this month, members of Congress last month received closed-door briefings on the attacks from administration officials, who “could not provide any credible explanation for his extrajudicial and unauthorized attacks,” according to Representative Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
The legal justifications are “dubious and intended to circumvent the constitutional power of Congress on matters of war and peace,” he said in a statement after the briefings.
Top Democrats on the House committees that oversee national intelligence, the armed forces and foreign affairs also called for a vote on a resolution to block the Trump administration from continuing with the strikes.
“The Trump administration has not provided a credible reason for its 21 unauthorized military strikes on vessels in the Western Hemisphere, which resulted in the extrajudicial killing of dozens of individuals,” they said in a joint statement last week.
“This administration has also not explained why it deployed an invasion-level force of approximately 15,000 troops, a carrier strike group, and military aircraft for a mission it claims is about the fight against narcotics,” they added. “This situation is very disproportionate to the stated objective and much more reminiscent of preparations for war.”