“Americans will be prosecuted for this, either as a war crime or outright murder,” one lawmaker said.
Members of Congress have launched a bicameral, bipartisan effort to sharpen oversight of the Pentagon after a report on an alleged order by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to “kill everybody” in the military’s boat strike campaign spurred widespread condemnation over the weekend.
The Republican-led Armed Services Committees in both the House and the Senate have announced that they are launching probes into the Department of Defense after The reported on an alleged “double tap” strike on September 2, when the military first embarked on its Caribbean boat strike campaign.
On Friday, Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) and ranking member Sen. Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island) said that the “Committee has directed inquiries to the Department” following the report. They said the committee would be “conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts” surrounding the alleged strikes.
Further, in a joint statement Saturday, House committee chair Mike Rogers (R-Alabama) and ranking member Adam Smith (D-Washington) said that they “take seriously the reports of follow-on strikes on boats alleged to be ferrying narcotics in the SOUTHCOM region and are taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question.”
Experts have long said that the entire boat operation is illegal and amounts to war crimes and murder. Still, this marks a heel turn from previous remarks. Many Democrats have been critical of the boat strike operation, but Republicans have largely fallen in line thus far, despite the administration’s withholding of information from Congress regarding the aggression.
The statements followed a report that a Special Operations commander ordered a second strike on a vessel off the coast of Trinidad after the live drone footage showed that two people had survived the initial blast.
