A Navy admiral at the center of a deadly strike on a suspected drug-smuggling boat told lawmakers Thursday there was no order from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to “kill them all,” but members of Congress left a series of classified briefings divided over what they saw on video of the attack.
Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley and Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met behind closed doors with key House and Senate committees to discuss the Sept. 2 strike near Venezuela, including a follow-up attack that killed two survivors after the initial missile hit, per The Associated Press.
Bradley “was very clear that he was given no such order, to give no quarter or to kill them all,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who leads the Senate Intelligence Committee, said after the briefing, saying the orders from Hegseth were written “in great detail.”
Cotton and other Republicans defended the decision to carry out the second strike and argued the survivors remained lawful targets, CNN reported.
Democrats who viewed the same unedited footage described it differently, according to the AP. Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the video was “one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service,” describing “two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel” who “were killed by the United States.”
Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee, said the original order for the mission was essentially to “destroy the drugs, kill the 11 people on the boat,” per The Associated Press.
He said the survivors seen in the follow-up strike were “basically two shirtless people clinging to the bow of a capsized and inoperable boat, drifting in the water — until the missiles come and kill them.”
Republican Rep. Rick Crawford of Arkansas, told CNN he belived the second strike was justified. “I feel confident and have no further questions of Hegseth,” he said.
The briefings are part of a growing congressional investigation into the Sept. 2 operation and Hegseth’s role in authorizing and overseeing the mission. Lawmakers in both parties have signaled support for continued oversight.