WASHINGTON – The White House on Monday shifted the blame for killing the survivors of a U.S. military strike on an alleged drug smuggling boat from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and onto the commanding admiral.
Killing survivors of a destroyed vessel is literally an example of a war crime in the U.S. Department of Defense Law of War Manual. “For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal,” the manual reads.
Press secretary Karoline Leavitt, nevertheless, repeatedly stated that it was legal – even as she further claimed, as President Donald Trump did Sunday, that Hegseth was unaware that it had happened.
“On Sept. 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 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 Trinidad coast, Frank Bradley was head of the Joint Special Operations Command. According to a Washington Post report about the incident, it was he who relayed the order from Hegseth to “kill everybody” by sending Navy SEALs back to the disabled boat to have them kill the two people clinging to the wreckage.
In October, Bradley was promoted to run the U.S. Special Operations Command.
Leavitt referred further questions to the “Department of War,” Trump’s nickname for the Pentagon.
An official there, however, said they could offer no further information beyond Hegseth’s statements in recent days on social media in which he called the Post’s story “fake news” and, more recently, posted a cartoon to justify the killing of alleged smugglers.
Officials at U.S. Special Operations Command did not respond to HuffPost queries.
Later Monday evening, Hegseth posted a statement on social media confirming that Bradley, and not he, had ordered the second strike.
“I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made — on the September 2 mission and all others since,” Hegseth wrote.
Three months ago, Trump posted portions of a video of the Sept. 2 assault on his social media platform, bragging that the attack had killed 11 “narcoterrorists.”
That 11 people were aboard the vessel suggests that it was not, in fact, smuggling drugs, because every unnecessary passenger would decrease the boat’s payload capacity for drugs by, on average, 180 pounds. Most of the other strikes against alleged drug boats have had three or four people aboard.
Trump and his administration’s explanations about the series of strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific have been misleading or potentially downright false since they started.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that the purpose of the strikes has been to stop the flow of fentanyl into the United States and has at times said that fentanyl had been aboard the destroyed vessels. In fact, the administration has offered no evidence that any fentanyl has been on any of the boats, which largely match the profile of vessels used by low-level cocaine smugglers.
Trump has further claimed that the boats and their crews had been en route to the United States at the time of the attacks. That is also false. The boats have all been too small to get to the U.S. without repeated refueling stops and are ill-suited for long ocean passages.
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Trump added a layer of hypocrisy to his policy of killing smugglers by pardoning a former president of Honduras who had been convicted in a U.S. federal court for his part in directing the smuggling of some 500 tons of cocaine into the United States.
Leavitt on Monday defended that pardon by repeating Trump’s unfounded claim that Juan Orlando Hernández had been unfairly prosecuted by Trump’s predecessor, Democrat Joe Biden.
“His court-appointed lawyer was only given three weeks to prepare for trial. He shared that his conviction was lawfare by the leftist party who, quote, struck a deal with the Biden-Harris administration,” she said. “So the president heard the concerns from many people, as he does, and he’s, of course, within his constitutional authority to sign clemency for whomever he deems worthy of that.”