Senior Democratic legislators briefed on a US strike on a suspected drug boat in the Caribbean said yesterday they were troubled by a video showing survivors in distress being killed, though Republicans there defended the strike as legal.
The incident under scrutiny is a September 2 attack by the US military that struck a vessel in the Caribbean, killing 11 suspected drug traffickers.
The initial strike left survivors, who were killed in a subsequent strike, prompting critics to ask whether the operation violated laws and whether US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth was responsible for it.
Hegseth has already come under fire this year after a Pentagon investigation faulted him for using Signal on his personal device to send sensitive information about planned strikes in Yemen.
Admiral Frank Bradley, who was the head of the Joint Special Operations Command at the time, and Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, yesterday briefed legislators on the operation and showed an unedited video of the second strike.
“You have two individuals in clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, who were killed by the United States,” Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters after the briefing.
He added that it was ‘one of the most troubling things’ he had seen but said Bradley confirmed he did not receive a ‘kill them all’ order.
Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he was ‘deeply disturbed’ by the video and said it should be released to the public.
“This briefing confirmed my worst fears about the nature of the Trump Administration’s military activities,” Reed added in a statement.
But Tom Cotton of Arkansas, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Bradley and Hegseth did exactly what was expected of them.
“I saw two survivors trying to flip a boat, loaded with drugs bound for the United States, back over so they could stay in the fight,” Cotton said, adding it was possible that other suspected drug boats could have come to their aid and recovered the drugs onboard.
The lethal strikes on drug vessels, including the early September one, are part of a broader campaign that the Trump administration says is aimed at cutting off the supply of illegal drugs into the US.
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