Video footage showing a U.S. military strike on alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean Sea shows two people attempting to flip their capsized vessel when they were attacked again, multiple lawmakers said Thursday after meeting with the Navy admiral who oversaw the controversial mission.
The recording was shown during meetings on Capitol Hill featuring Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the commander who oversaw the Sept. 2 operation that entailed four strikes in all. The attack killed 11 people, including the two people who survived the first blast that hit their boat.
Democrats emerged from the meetings alarmed and vowed to press ahead with congressional probes into the attack’s legality. Some Republicans who have been staunchly loyal to the Trump administration defended the operation.
Rep. Jim Himes (Connecticut), the House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, described the footage as “one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service.” The two survivors, he said, were “in clear distress” after their boat was “destroyed.”
“The video we saw today showed two shipwrecked individuals who had no means to move, much less pose an immediate threat, and yet they were killed by the United States military,” Himes and Rep. Adam Smith (Washington) said in a joint statement Thursday. Smith is the House Armed Services Committee’s ranking Democrat. “Regardless of what one believes about the legal underpinnings of these operations, and we have been clear we believe they are highly questionable, this was wrong.”
Sen. Tom Cotton (Arkansas), Republican chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, disputed the Democrats’ account. He called the repeated strikes “righteous” and said he would have given the same orders if he had been in Bradley’s place.
“The first strike, the second strike, and the third and the fourth strike on September 2nd were entirely lawful and needful, and they were exactly what we would expect our military commanders to do,” Cotton said.
Rep. Rick Crawford (R-Arkansas), who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, also said there was “no doubt in my mind about the highly professional manner” in which the attack occurred.
The September operation marked the start of the Trump administration’s deadly military campaign against boats and semisubmersible vessels suspected to be ferrying drugs off the shores of Latin America. To date almost 20 vessels have been targeted by U.S. forces and more than 80 people have been killed, according to disclosures made public by the administration.
Democrats and experts on the law of war have called the killings illegal, arguing that criminal drug smugglers can’t be treated the same as enemy combatants waging war against the United States.
The footage shown to lawmakers for the first time Thursday is considered a crucial piece of evidence in determining whether the Sept. 2 strike amounted to a war crime.
Sen. Jack Reed (Rhode Island), the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, called on the Pentagon to publicly release the full video of the strike and said that he was “deeply disturbed” by what he witnessed.
“This must and will be the only beginning of our investigation into this incident,” Reed said in a statement Thursday.
Reed and his Republican counterpart, the committee chair Sen. Roger Wicker (Mississippi), were among the first lawmakers to publicly express their concerns about the Sept. 2 attack after The Washington Post reported last week that Bradley ordered a second strike after survivors were identified to comply with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s spoken directive before the operation’s initial strike to kill everybody on board the boat. Wicker declined to comment after exiting Thursday’s briefing.
Hegseth has sought to distance himself from the controversy, pointing instead to Bradley, while also defending the second strike that killed the two survivors. The Pentagon has denied The Post’s requests to interview Hegseth and review video footage of the strikes.
Bradley considered the survivors to be viable targets, not shipwrecked, defenseless mariners, according to Cotton and another person familiar with the briefing.
The two survivors could have radioed for help from associates in the area and continued their “mission” of shipping drugs to American shores, Cotton said. It is not clear whether they attempted to do so or if they had equipment that wasn’t destroyed.
Calling for help could indicate the men were still able to move drugs, but it doesn’t make them combatants who pose a threat and can be killed, said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces on the law of war for seven years. “It’s a pretty flimsy argument,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.
“There was no boat. There was wreckage. There was no radio. There were two guys clinging to a tiny non-awash portion of the keel of a capsized boat,” said one lawmaker familiar with Thursday’s congressional briefings and the video that was shown.
Military leaders told lawmakers that they assessed the survivors might “look” for a radio, the person said. But it’s hard to see how they could after the first strike, the person said. The boat was consumed by a “massive conflagration — then it capsized,” the person said.
Some uniformed personnel who watched the second strike as it happened, or saw the briefing slides afterward, were disturbed by what they witnessed, said one former U.S. official familiar with the matter. “Basically it was, why are we killing people who are stranded and pose no threat?” the former official said.
Much of the scrutiny and expert analysis have focused on Bradley’s assessment that the survivors left after the first strike remained legitimate targets. U.S. and international law requires protection for combatants and others who cannot defend themselves and forbids further attacks. That includes “persons who have been rendered unconscious or otherwise incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck,” according to the Pentagon’s law of war manual.
The strikes have cast rare public scrutiny on decisions within the most secret corners of the military and the admiral tasked with leading the Pentagon’s most elite forces.
Bradley is a career special operator, and he has cultivated a strong reputation as a thoughtful and serious leader who looked out for his troops, said James Hatch, who served with Bradley at Naval Special Warfare Development Group, the unit commonly known as SEAL Team 6.
The admiral’s meetings with lawmakers came at a time when Republican-led committees are escalating their oversight of Hegseth and the U.S. military’s targeting of suspected drug traffickers.
Hegseth and members of the Trump administration have shifted their explanations for what happened during the operation since the second strike was revealed. In recent days, the defense secretary has said that he left the room where live footage of the operation was being streamed after the first strike and that he heard about the second strike hours later.
Hegseth said at a White House Cabinet meeting Tuesday that Bradley “made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat.”
Bradley’s meetings on Capitol Hill could be the first step toward a more formal investigation, lawmakers and congressional aides said. Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also attended the briefings.
While some Republicans have continued to defend Hegseth’s leadership, several members of Congress and aides have said Republican support for the secretary and other top Pentagon officials has atrophied.
Amy B Wang, Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima contributed to this report.
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