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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Saturday refused to say whether the Pentagon would release video of the early September operation that targeted survivors of a strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean.
“We’re reviewing the process, and we’ll see,” Hegseth said in a Q&A session after addressing a defense forum hosted by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. “Whatever we were to decide to release, we’d have to be very responsible about reviewing that right now.”
Eleven people were killed in the Sept. 2 missile attack on an alleged drug boat, the first of several such assaults off Latin America’s coastal waters. The Trump administration has faced heavy criticism after the Washington Post reported last week that a second missile was launched on the boat, killing two survivors of the initial strike.
The White House confirmed that the boat was struck by a second missile, but both the White House and Hegseth have denied that Hegseth ordered that second strike.
Hegseth said earlier this week that the second strike was ordered by Navy Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley — head of Special Operations Command, who was leading the Sept. 2 mission — a claim he reiterated Saturday
“In this particular case, it was well within the authorities of Adm. Bradley,” Hegseth said.
On Thursday, congressional lawmakers were shown video of the second strike and briefed on the incident by Bradley and Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a closed-door session.
GOP Sen. Tom Cotton, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters after the briefing that Bradley told them that he had not been ordered to leave no survivors. The initial Post report quoted an anonymous source as saying that, before the first strike, Hegseth verbally ordered that everyone on the boat be taken out. “The order was to kill everybody,” the Post’s story quoted the source as saying.
Hegseth on Saturday vehemently denied having issued a kill order on survivors, as was reported by the Post.
“You don’t walk in and say ‘Kill them all.’ It’s just patently ridiculous,” he said, adding the reporting was “meant to create a cartoon of me and the decisions that we make.”
But he acknowledged that he does “fully support that strike. I would have made the same call myself.”
The two survivors were attempting to climb back onto the boat before it was struck by the second missile, a source familiar with the matter told CBS News on Wednesday.
On Friday, two sources familiar with the video that was shown to lawmakers said that that the two survivors were waving overhead before the second strike killed them. One of the sources said the action could be interpreted as the survivors either calling for help or trying to wave off another strike.
Some legal experts have questioned whether the second strike may have constituted a war crime.
The Sept. 2 missile strikes were the first in a series of attacks on alleged drug-running boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. In total, at least 87 people have been killed in 22 vessel strikes, according to numbers provided by the Pentagon.
Mr. Trump on Wednesday said he would support the release of all footage of the Sept. 2 strikes.
“I don’t know what they have, but whatever they have we’ll certainly release, no problem,” Mr. Trump told reporters Wednesday.
However, the Pentagon chief on Saturday was noncommittal as he was asked multiple times whether the video would be released.
“We are reviewing it right now,” Hegseth said.
During his speech Saturday, Hegseth insisted the strikes against the alleged drug-trafficking boats and their “narco-terrorists” will continue.
“We are killing them. We will keep killing them so long as they are poisoning our people with narcotics so lethal they’re tantamount to chemical weapons.”
U.S. authorities have not provided specific evidence that the boats were ferrying drugs.
