Survivors on ‘narco boat’ targeted by Trump order were blown apart after Hegseth verbal command to ‘kill everybody’: Report

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly gave verbal orders not to leave survivors behind as Donald Trump’s administration launched the first of more than a dozen attacks on alleged drug-smuggling boats that have killed more than 80 people in the past three months.

On September 2, U.S. military personnel fired a missile at a ship in the Caribbean carrying 11 people accused of smuggling drugs to the United States.

When two survivors emerged from the rubble, the Special Operations commander overseeing the attack ordered a second attack to comply with Hegseth’s “kill everyone” instructions. accordingly Washington PostOfficials with direct knowledge of the operation were cited.

The two men then “disintegrated in the water,” according to the report.

News of Hegseth’s alleged command came after intense legal scrutiny from international investigators and members of Congress who claimed the Trump administration’s deadly campaign amounted to illegal extrajudicial killings; As war law experts also say Independent They directly described it as murder and war crime.

A Pentagon spokesman said the Department of Defense “had no response to this post and declined further comment.” Independent Friday.

Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said: Washington Post He said that the newspaper’s “entire narrative was completely false” and that “ongoing operations to eliminate narco terrorism and protect the Homeland from deadly drugs are a great success.”

In September, the Trump administration told Congress that the United States had officially entered an “armed conflict” with the drug cartels, which the president described as “illegal combatants.”

Administration officials have labeled cartels “non-state armed groups” whose actions “constitute an armed attack against the United States” and are currently engaged in “non-international armed conflict” or war with a non-state actor.

In the weeks that followed, the Trump administration launched more than a dozen attacks on ships in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean that killed more than 80 people, but no evidence or legal justification for their deaths was publicly provided, according to lawmakers and civil rights groups.

A newly released legal brief from the Department of Justice claims that military personnel involved in the attacks will not face criminal prosecution in the future; That defense failed to prevent exposure to potential criminal liability, according to legal experts and national security experts.

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 has described as an “armed conflict” with the country.

“The definition of intentional killing outside of armed conflict is murder,” said Brian Finucane, senior counsel at the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit conflict policy organization.

“And the Trump administration has not determined that these attacks occurred during an armed conflict or that the targets would be lawful under the laws of war,” he said. Independent this month.

While it’s unclear what guidance the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel provided to the administration, the White House appears to have used the guidance as “legal authorization to carry out actions that would otherwise be criminal,” according to Finucane.

When asked why he would not seek approval from Congress for his military campaign targeting South American regimes that he claimed were fueling the drug epidemic in the United States, Trump said his government would instead “just kill people.”

“I don’t think we’re necessarily going to call for a declaration of war. I think we’re just going to kill people who bring drugs into our country, okay? We’re going to kill them,” Trump said at a White House roundtable with administration officials last month.

“They’ll die, okay,” he said.

Embers Shared 29-second drone footage of the first attack on September 2 A post on the Truth Social account the next day warned that the attack also served as “a warning to anyone considering bringing drugs into the United States.”

The president said the 11 people on the ship were “terrorists” belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which the administration has designated a foreign terrorist organization.

Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley, the commander who oversaw the operation from Fort Bragg in North Carolina, told personnel involved in the attack that the survivors were legitimate targets because they could theoretically seek out other smugglers to retrieve them and their cargo. Washington Post.

Bradley allegedly ordered the second attack to fulfill Hegseth’s orders to kill everyone on board.

At the time of the attack, he was leading the Joint Special Operations Command, which operates under the command of U.S. Special Operations Command and is generally responsible for conducting covert military operations. He was later promoted to leadership of the parent organization.

SEAL Team 6, formally known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, which conducts complex and covert operations that may involve high-profile targets, reportedly conducted intelligence gathering to determine who was on the boat.

News about the so-called “double tap” strike first reported by Intersection a few days after the attack.

Earlier this month, members of Congress received closed-door briefings on the attacks from administration officials who “failed to provide a credible explanation for the extrajudicial and unauthorized attacks” last month, according to Rep. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

In a statement after the briefings, he said the legal justifications were “dubious and intended to circumvent Congress’ constitutional authority on matters of war and peace.”

Top Democrats on the House committees that oversee national intelligence, the armed forces and foreign affairs also made a request. vote on a decision To prevent the Trump administration from continuing the strikes.

“The Trump administration has failed to provide a credible justification for 21 unauthorized military strikes against ships in the Western Hemisphere that resulted in the extrajudicial killings of dozens of people,” they said in a joint statement last week.

“Nor has this administration explained why it deployed an occupation-level force of approximately 15,000 troops, a carrier strike group and military aircraft for a mission it claimed was related to counternarcotics,” they added. “This stance is extremely disproportionate to the stated goal and is more reminiscent of preparations for war.”