Washington — Military officials showed lawmakers video of a second strike on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat behind closed doors on Capitol Hill on Thursday, and testified that there was no order from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to leave no survivors of the attack, multiple lawmakers said.
Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley, head of Special Operations Command, briefed the leaders of the Armed Services and Intelligence Committees for both the House and the Senate. The classified briefings centered on the Trump administration’s campaign against alleged drug trafficking boats off the coast of South America, including the Sept. 2 follow-on strike that has become a flashpoint in Congress.
The Pentagon has been under fire since the Washington Post reported that a second missile killed two survivors of the initial strike. Hegseth has said the decision to strike the boat again was made by Bradley, who was leading the mission. The survivors were attempting to climb back onto the boat before it was hit a second time, a source familiar with the matter told CBS News on Wednesday.
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GOP Sen. Tom Cotton, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, spoke with reporters after the briefings. They both said Bradley told them that he had not been ordered to leave no survivors. The initial Post report quoted an anonymous source as saying that, before the first strike, Hegseth verbally ordered that everyone on the boat be taken out. “The order was to kill everybody,” the Post’s story quoted the source as saying. Hegseth has denied the Post’s account.
The lawmakers also said they were shown the video of the second attack, which has not been made public. Himes, a Connecticut Democrat, told reporters after the briefing that “what I saw in that room one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service.”
“You have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, who are killed by the United States,” Himes said.
“Any American who sees the video that I saw will see the United States military attacking shipwrecked sailors — bad guys, bad guys — but attacking shipwrecked sailors,” Himes added. “Now there’s a whole set of contextual items that the admiral explained — yes, they were carrying drugs. They were not in the position to continue their mission in any way. People will someday see this video, and they will see that that video shows, if you don’t have the broader context, an attack on shipwrecked sailors.”
President Trump said Wednesday that he would support releasing the footage.
Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, refuted Himes’ characterization of the video after his briefing, saying he “didn’t see anything disturbing about it.”
Cotton said the four strikes on Sept. 2 were “entirely lawful and needful, and they were exactly what we’d expect our military commanders to do.”
“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, and potentially, given all the context we’ve heard of other narco-terrorist boats in the area coming to their aid to recover the cargo and recover those narco-terrorists,” Cotton said.
The strike has sparked bipartisan concern from lawmakers and vows to investigate. Though the administration has argued the follow-on strike was legal and justified, members of Congress and experts have questioned its legality, with accusations from some Democrats that it would constitute a war crime if the second strike targeted survivors.
The strike was the first of the administration’s campaign against alleged drug traffickers in the Southern Hemisphere, which has now grown to more than 20 strikes and killed more than 80 people. The attacks attracted scrutiny from lawmakers even before the Post’s report, since the administration is conducting them without authorization from Congress. The administration has argued it has the legal authority to conduct the strikes because it has designated drug cartels as terrorist organizations and U.S. troops are not in harm’s way.
