Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attacked a story on the alleged extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean as «more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting.”
Since September, the United States military has been blowing up boats allegedly trafficking drugs in the Caribbean.
Whether these attacks are legal is hotly debated. Congress hasn’t declared war or even authorized the use of force. The Trump administration has simply designated various — alleged — drug traffickers as “terrorists” or members of “terrorist organizations,” and then waged war upon them. The legal finding supporting all of this has not been released to the public. But whatever the administration’s case in private is, it was sufficiently weak that the British government announced in early November it no longer would share intelligence with the U.S. relevant to the Caribbean operation over concerns about its lawfulness.
On Friday, the dropped a bombshell report about the first of these operations. During the strike, the Navy not only took out a suspected drug-trafficking boat — as had been reported previously — but when survivors were spotted clinging to the wreckage, the special operations commander overseeing the operation also ordered a second strike on the survivors, in order to comply with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s order to kill everyone involved.
“Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation,” the Post reported. “‘The order was to kill everybody,’ one of them said.
