Hegseth and a top military commander are facing serious questions about why the U.S. on Sept. 2 killed survivors of a military strike against a suspected drug boat.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and a top military commander are facing serious questions about why the U.S. on Sept. 2 killed survivors of a military strike against a suspected drug boat, when the laws of war say survivors on the battlefield should be rescued.
The White House acknowledges that a second strike was ordered on a boat already hit by the military in the Caribbean Sea, and ABC News has confirmed that survivors from the initial strike were killed as a result.
Democrats say that alone could be enough to suggest a war crime occurred. The laws of war require either side in a conflict to provide care for wounded and shipwrecked troops.
Hegseth told Fox News the day after that he watched the operation unfold in real time and defended it as legal. He appears to be leaning on the same legal playbook carved out during the war on terror, in which the U.S. justified the killing of people transporting weapons that it said posed a threat to U.S. forces.
“We’re going to conduct oversight, and we’re going to try to get to the facts”, Sen. Roger Wicker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters on Monday. “And to the extent that we’re able to see videos and see what the orders were, we’ll have a lot more information other than just news reports.”
Here are three key questions about the orders to kill drug smugglers:What did Hegseth order exactly?
A key question for lawmakers is what Hegseth’s initial “execute order” included and what intelligence was used to justify it.
According to The , sources say Hegseth told the military to ensure that none of the 11 passengers aboard the boat should be allowed to survive. After the initial strike left two people clinging to the wreckage, the Post says, Adm. Mitch Bradley made the decision as head of the Joint Special Operations Command to launch a second strike to fulfill Hegseth’s initial order to kill everyone.
