Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth arrives for a briefing at the U.S. Capitol with congressional leaders and Secretary of State Marco Rubio regarding military strikes against suspected drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean, November 5, 2025. Tom Williams via Getty Images
WASHINGTON — The White House on Monday shifted the blame for the killing of survivors of a U.S. military strike on an alleged drug-smuggling ship from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to Cmdr.
Killing the survivors of a destroyed ship is literally an example of a war crime in the US Department of Defense Law of War Manual. “For example, orders to fire on castaways would be clearly illegal,” the manual states.
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However, press secretary Karoline Leavitt repeatedly said it was legal — even as she claimed, as did President Donald Trump on Sunday, that Hegseth didn’t know it happened.
“On September 2, Secretary Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes. Admiral Bradley worked well within his authority and the law, directing the engagement to ensure that the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated,” she said.
At the time of the attack off the coast of Trinidad, Frank Bradley was the head of the Joint Special Operations Command. According to a Washington Post report of the incident, he relayed the order to Hegseth to “kill everybody,” sending Navy SEALs back to the disabled boat to kill the two men clinging to the wreckage.
In October, Bradley was promoted to head the US Special Operations Command.
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Leavitt referred additional questions to the “War Department,” Trump’s nickname for the Pentagon.
An official there, however, said he could not provide any other information beyond Hegseth’s statements on social media in recent days in which he called the Post story “fake news” and more recently posted a cartoon to justify the killing of the alleged smugglers.
Officials from the US Special Operations Command did not respond to HuffPost’s inquiries.
Later on Monday night, Hegseth posted a statement on social media confirming that Bradley, and not him, ordered the second hit.
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“I stand with him and the combat decisions he made — on the 9/2 mission and everything since,” Hegseth wrote.
Three months ago, Trump posted portions of a video of the Sept. 2 attack on his social media platform, boasting that the attack had killed 11 “narco-terrorists.”
The fact that 11 people were on board the vessel suggests that it was not, in fact, drug smuggling, as each unnecessary passenger would reduce the vessel’s useful cargo capacity for drugs by an average of 180 pounds. Most of the other strikes against suspected drug boats had three or four people on board.
Trump and his administration’s explanations for the series of strikes against small craft in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific have been misleading or potentially outright false since they began.
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Trump has repeatedly claimed that the goal of the attacks was to stop the flow of fentanyl into the United States and has at times said that fentanyl was on board the destroyed ships. In fact, the administration offered no evidence that any fentanyl was on any of the boats, which largely fit the profile of vessels used by low-level cocaine smugglers.
Trump also claimed that the boats and their crews were en route to the United States at the time of the attacks. And that is false. The boats were all too small to reach the US without repeated refueling stops and are not suitable for long ocean crossings.
During the Thanksgiving holiday, Trump added a layer of hypocrisy to his policy of killing smugglers by pardoning a former Honduran president who had been convicted by a US federal court for his role in leading the smuggling of about 500 tons of cocaine into the United States.
Leavitt defended the pardon Monday by repeating Trump’s baseless claim that Juan Orlando Hernández was wrongfully prosecuted by Trump’s predecessor, Democrat Joe Biden.
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“His court-appointed attorney was given only three weeks to prepare for trial. He shared that his conviction was a right by the left-wing party that, he quoted, made a deal with the Biden-Harris administration,” she said. “So the president heard the concerns from a lot of people, as he does, and of course it’s within his constitutional authority to sign clemency for anyone he thinks deserves it.”
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