Key Highlights
- 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”.
