US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has denied seeing any survivors from a military strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean Sea in September, prior to a second, deadly strike that has prompted calls for an investigation into possible war crimes.
Speaking at a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Tuesday, Hegseth said he watched the initial strike on September 2 in real time but did not witness the controversial follow-up attack. “As you can imagine, at the Department of War, we’ve got a lot of things to do, so I didn’t stick around… I moved on to my next meeting,” he said at the meeting presided over by President Donald Trump. The administration has referred to the Department of Defense as the Department of War, even as the president has described himself as a peacemaker.
Hegseth said Admiral Frank Bradley, who heads special operations and was the mission commander for the September 2 attacks, made “the right call” to carry out the second strike and “eliminate the threat.” “I did not personally see survivors,” Hegseth added, saying the scene had been obscured by fire and smoke. “This is called the fog of war.” He said the administration fully supported Bradley and had empowered commanders to do “difficult things in the dead of night on behalf of the American people.”
His remarks come as demands for accountability grow over the double-tap strike, which Democratic lawmakers and legal scholars have condemned as a likely war crime. “Secretary Talk Show Host may have been experiencing the ‘fog of war,’ but that doesn’t change the fact that this was an extrajudicial killing amounting to murder or a war crime,” US Senator Chris Van Hollen wrote on X, referring to Hegseth’s previous career as a Fox News host. “One thing is clear: Pete Hegseth is unfit to serve. He must resign.”
Scrutiny of Hegseth’s role intensified after The Washington Post reported last week that military commanders conducted a second strike on two survivors clinging to the vessel’s wreckage to follow his alleged directive that no one be left alive. Hegseth blasted the Post report as “fake news,” “fabricated” and “inflammatory.” The Pentagon’s manual on the laws of war calls orders to fire on survivors of shipwrecked vessels “clearly illegal.”
The Trump administration has carried out strikes on at least 22 vessels in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific as part of a campaign against alleged drug traffickers. At least 83 people have been killed in the strikes, which many legal scholars describe as extrajudicial killings and say violate international law. The administration has not publicly released evidence to support assertions that these boats were carrying narcotics, were headed to the US, or were controlled by members of proscribed cartels.