Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly gave a verbal order to leave no survivors behind as Donald Trump’s administration launched the first of more than a dozen raids on suspected drug-trafficking boats that have killed more than 80 people in the past three months.
On September 2, US military personnel fired a missile at a Caribbean ship carrying 11 people accused of drug trafficking to 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 everybody,” according to The Washington Postciting officials with direct knowledge of the operation.
The two men were then “crushed into the water,” according to the report.
News of Hegseth’s alleged order follows intense legal scrutiny from international investigators and members of Congress who say the Trump administration’s deadly campaign amounts to illegal extrajudicial killings, which experts on the law of war are talking about. The Independent they labeled total murder and war crime.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly instructed military personnel to leave no survivors behind as the Trump administration launched a series of strikes against boats suspected of carrying drugs to the United States (REUTERS)
The Department of Defense “has no response to this post and declines to comment further,” a Pentagon spokesman said. The Independent Friday.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said The Washington Post that “the entire narrative of the newspaper is completely false” and that “the ongoing operations to eradicate narco-terrorism and protect the Motherland from deadly drugs have been a resounding success.”
In September, the Trump administration told Congress that the United States was formally engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels that the president labeled “illegal combatants.”
Administration officials have labeled the cartels “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 that followed, the Trump administration conducted more than a dozen strikes that 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 claims that military personnel involved in the strikes will not be prosecuted in the future, a defense that legal experts and national security scholars say has failed to prevent exposure to potential criminal liability.
According to officials and experts, the alleged traffickers do not pose an imminent threat to the United States and are not in what the administration called an “armed conflict” with the country.
“The term for premeditated killing outside of armed conflict is murder,” said Brian Finucane, senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, a conflict policy nonprofit.
“And the Trump administration has not determined that these strikes 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 September 2 missile strike that killed 11 people on a boat that officials say was carrying drugs bound for the United States (White House)
While it’s unclear what guidance the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel gave the administration, the White House appears to be using the guidance as “legal authorization slips to commit acts that might otherwise be criminal,” according to Finucane.
Asked why he won’t ask Congress for permission for his military campaign targeting South American regimes he says are fueling a drug epidemic in the United States, Trump said his government is “just going to kill people.”
“I don’t think we’re necessarily going to ask for a declaration of war. I think we’re just going to kill people who bring 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 as dead, all right,” he said.
Trump shared 29 seconds of drone footage of the Sept. 2 first strike in a post on his Truth Social account the next day, warning that the attack also served as “a notice to anyone even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. BEWARE!”
The president said the 11 people on board were “terrorists” from the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, which the administration has labeled a foreign terrorist organization.
Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley, the commander overseeing the operation at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, told personnel involved in the strike that the survivors were legitimate targets because, in theory, they could call in other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo, according to people with knowledge of the command who spoke to The Washington Post.
Bradley allegedly ordered the second strike to carry out Hegseth’s order to kill everyone on board.
At the time of the attack, he headed the Joint Special Operations Command, which operates under the US Special Operations Command and is usually responsible for conducting classified military operations. He was later promoted to head the parent 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 ship.
News of the so-called “double tap” strike was first reported by interceptions within days of the attack.
Trump administration officials have posted drone footage on social media depicting more than a dozen attacks on suspected drug-carrying vessels that law-of-war experts say constitute illegal extrajudicial killings (US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth)
Earlier this month, members of Congress received closed-door briefings on the attacks from administration officials last month, who “could not provide any credible explanation for his extrajudicial and unauthorized attacks,” according to Rep. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
The legal justifications are “dubious and designed to circumvent the constitutional power of Congress in 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 the strikes.
“The Trump administration has not provided a credible justification for its 21 unauthorized military strikes on ships in the Western Hemisphere, which resulted in the extrajudicial killing of dozens of people,” they said in a joint statement last week.
“Nor has this administration 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 counternarcotics,” they added. “This posture is grossly disproportionate to the stated objective and is far more reminiscent of preparations for war.”