Updated ,first published
Washington: The White House has confirmed the US military launched a second lethal strike on a suspected drug trafficking boat, killing survivors from the first attack – an act that critics have likened to a war crime and which the Navy’s own manual appears to prohibit.
The furore arises from a September 2 operation – the first of more than 20 strikes against alleged drug boats conducted by the Trump administration – which killed 11 suspected “narco-terrorists” believed to be ferrying drugs on international waters to the US.
The Washington Post reported War Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a verbal directive ahead of the strike, citing two sources familiar with it. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of those people reportedly said.
When two people survived the initial hit, the commander in charge, Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, directed a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s order, according to the Post.
Hegseth did not explicitly deny the allegation but called the explosive story “fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting”. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said his department had told the Post “this entire narrative was false”.
But on Tuesday (AEDT), White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed Hegseth had authorised the operation and the multiple strikes, and said Admiral Bradley “worked well within his authority and the law”.
Asked about Hegseth’s alleged directive to kill everybody, Leavitt said: “I would reject that the Secretary of War ever said that. However, the president has made it quite clear that if narco-terrorists are trafficking illegal drugs towards the United States, he has the authority to kill them.”
The Department of Defence’s manual on the laws of war says people who have been incapacitated by shipwreck from any cause are deemed to be in a helpless state, and it would be “dishonourable and inhumane to make them the object of attack”.
Likewise, the Navy’s own handbook on the law of naval operations says combatants and belligerents who are hors de combat – out of the fight – by way of shipwreck may not be intentionally or indiscriminately attacked. This would be “a grave breach of the law of armed conflict”, the handbook says.
Presented with that argument, Leavitt told reporters: “The strike was conducted in international waters and in accordance with the law of armed conflict.”
She said Hegseth had spoken to members of Congress who had raised concerns about the matter in recent days.
But the war secretary now faces inquiries from multiple congressional committees, while President Donald Trump also said he would look into the matter.
In a joint statement, the top Republican and top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee said the group would be “conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances”.
Democratic senator and former naval officer Mark Kelly, a member of that committee, told CNN that if the claims were true, they appeared to constitute a war crime.
“We’re going to have hearings, we’ll put people under oath,” he said. “I’ve got serious concerns about anybody in that chain of command stepping over a line that they should never step over.”
Trump told reporters he would not have wanted a second strike to be fired on survivors, but believed Hegseth did not utter the words attributed to him.
“The first strike was very lethal, it was fine, and if there were two people around – but Pete said that didn’t happen … Pete said he did not order the death of those two men,” Trump said on Sunday night, local time.
More than 80 people have been killed by US strikes on boats alleged to be carrying drugs in the Caribbean or the Pacific Ocean since the September 2 operation. Hegseth and the Department of War routinely share vision of the strikes on social media.
The claims have added to simmering concerns in Congress about the legality and ethics of the strikes against alleged drug traffickers. Some lawmakers have complained for three months about a lack of information on the operations coming through official briefing channels.
The Trump administration has declared that it is in an armed conflict with cartels trafficking narcotics to the US to kill Americans, and that suspected traffickers are “unlawful combatants” associated with Venezuelan gangs such as Tren de Aragua.
The administration is also building up its military presence in the Caribbean, including at least one nuclear-powered submarine, reportedly the USS Newport News, and the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, which arrived in November.
Trump confirmed he had spoken with Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, but would not reveal the contents of the call. “I wouldn’t say it went well or badly, it was a phone call,” he said.
Trump is due to hold a meeting at the White House on Monday evening (Tuesday AEDT) about the next steps on Venezuela, amid speculation the US is planning to escalate military operations in a bid to force Maduro from power.
Meanwhile, Hegseth defended the boat strikes in several media posts, including one depicting a cartoon frog in a military helicopter shooting a missile at fishing boats stocked with packages.
Hegseth said all US operations in the Caribbean complied with US and international law, and the law of armed conflict, and were approved by military and civilian lawyers up and down the chain of command.
“Every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organisation,” he said. “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.”
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Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via Twitter or email.
