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Top Democratic and Republican lawmakers in Congress on Thursday said that the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, had not ordered the military to “kill them all” in a deadly attack on a boat alleged to be carrying drugs in the Caribbean, but differed over whether the strike was appropriate.
The allegation that Hegseth ordered the killing of survivors sparked bipartisan concern in Washington that he or others involved may have committed a war crime. On Thursday, US navy admiral Frank Bradley, who commanded the attack, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, appeared before the House and Senate’s armed services and intelligence committees for a closed briefing in which they showed video and discussed the attack with lawmakers.
“What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service,” Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House armed services committee, said after exiting the meeting.
However, he said Bradley “confirmed that there had not been a ‘kill them all’ order, and there was not an order to grant no quarter”.
The Republican chair of the Senate intelligence committee, Tom Cotton, defended what he called “righteous strikes” and said Hegseth had not explicitly ordered that all on board be killed.
“Adm Bradley was very clear that he was given no such order to give no quarter or to kill them all. He was given an order that, of course, was written down in great detail, as our military always does,” Cotton told reporters.
The comments came days after the Washington Post reported that Hegseth had verbally given such an order before the attack, which resulted in the death of two people who had survived an initial air strike targeting the vessel off the coast of Trinidad.
The 2 September bombing killed a total of 11 people and was the first in a wave of attacks on boats that Donald Trump says are ferrying drugs from Venezuela to the United States, though experts have disputed that claim and questioned whether the air campaign is legal.
Trump posted video of the initial strike on his Truth Social platform shortly after the operation, but no footage of the follow-up attack, which killed the two remaining crew members, has been released. On Wednesday, he pledged to make the entire video public, but the Pentagon has not yet done so. Spokespeople at the department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Lawmakers differed over what the full video shows, which could prove crucial to determining whether the second air strike killed survivors who were defenseless, or capable of posing a threat. Himes said he saw “two individuals in clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, who are killed by the United States”.
Describing those on board as “bad guys” who “were not in the position to continue their mission in any way”, he added: “Any American who sees the video that I saw will see the United States military attacking shipwrecked sailors.”
Cotton said he “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”. Other “narco terrorists” in the area may have been coming to rescue them, he added.
Cotton also pointed to another strike “where survivors actually were shipwrecked and distressed and not trying to continue on their mission, and they were treated as they should be, as non-combatants. They were picked up by US forces.” He did not provide details of that incident.
While Himes called for the full video to be released, Cotton deferred to the defense department, but said: “I didn’t see anything in there that concerned me.”
Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate armed services committee, vowed to continue investigating the attack. “I am deeply disturbed by what I saw this morning,” he said in a statement that called on the full video to be released.
“This briefing confirmed my worst fears about the nature of the Trump administration’s military activities, and demonstrates exactly why the Senate armed services committee has repeatedly requested – and been denied – fundamental information, documents, and facts about this operation.”
Trump has defended the decision to destroy the boats, saying that those piloting them were guilty of trying to kill Americans. Hegseth said he didn’t see any survivors, explaining that it “exploded, there’s fire, there’s smoke” adding “this is called the fog of war”. A White House spokesman earlier this week denied that the defense seceretary personally ordered that the vessel’s occupants be killed, and defended Bradley’s handling of the attack.
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A total of 83 people have been killed across the 21 US military strikes carried out between early September and mid-November that targeted boats alleged to be carrying drugs. The campaign, which Trump has said is necessary to stop the flow of fentanyl and other illegal substances into the United States, marks a sharp departure from the previous US strategy of interdicting such vessels, and faces mounting criticism from legal and human rights experts.
Marcus Stanley, director of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said the strikes themselves constitute potential war crimes even before the killing of survivors. “You’re already talking about entities that don’t have any means of defending themselves,” he said. “This is a totally extrajudicial process. They’re simply destroying them and killing everyone on them without any judicial process whatsoever.”
Sarah Yager, Washington director of Human Rights Watch, rejected the administration’s characterization of the boat strikes as military operations in an armed conflict. “The president, even though he says it’s a conflict, he can’t just make up a conflict. There isn’t one,” she said, explaining that war has to be declared by a congressional vote. “Nobody on those boats can be killed legally by the United States military.”
The report that survivors were deliberately killed prompted criticism from some congressional Republicans. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina senator who is not running for re-election after a dispute with Trump earlier this year, said if reports are substantiated that the strike targeted survivors clinging to burning wreckage, it would violate ethical and legal requirements.“Whoever made that order needs to get the hell out of Washington,” he said.
Senate Democrats have meanwhile announced plans for a war powers resolution that could undermine the air campaign if approved by Congress, but a previous similar effort did not attract the Republican support to pass.
Human Rights Watch has called on Congress to investigate the entire campaign of strikes, which Yager said fall into “the same bucket of illegal”. She added that regardless of whether the US considers itself at war or in peacetime, any government action to kill, detain or arrest individuals requires due process that should typically be transparent.
Emily Tripp, executive director of Airwars, a civilian-harm watchdog that monitors armed conflicts, called on the administration to be more transparent about the strike, saying her organization would like to know “what considerations are made around shipwrecked survivors, and why the use of force was chosen over search and rescue when as far as we understand the targets here are the drugs, not the people onboard”.
Asked what should happen if Congress fails to act, Yager said: “Congress’s job is to have oversight over military operations and they should be stepping up.”
Stanley warned that the precedent extends beyond drug interdiction.
“What’s the next step? There’s somebody committing a street crime, or you claim they’re committing a street crime in a United States city, and then you can unleash the military on them without judicial evidence,” he said. “The American people should get as much transparency and information here to judge what’s being done in their name as possible.”
