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Secretary of War Pete Hegseth chastised the press following media reports that he signed off on a second strike against an alleged drug boat after the first one left survivors.
The Trump administration has come under renewed scrutiny for its strikes in the Caribbean targeting alleged drug smugglers, after the Washington Post reported on Friday that Hegseth verbally ordered everyone onboard the alleged drug boat to be killed in a Sept. 2 operation. The Post reported that a second strike was conducted to take out the remaining survivors on the boat.
On Monday, the White House confirmed that a second strike had occurred, but disputed that Hegseth ever gave an initial order to ensure that everyone on board was killed, when asked specifically about Hegseth’s instructions.
Hegseth said that he watched the first strike live, but did not see any survivors at that time amid the fire and the smoke — and blasted the press for their reporting.
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“This is called the fog of war. This is what you in the press don’t understand,” Hegseth told reporters at a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday. “You sit in your air-conditioned offices or up on Capitol Hill and you nit pick, and you plant fake stories in the Washington Post about ‘kill everybody’ phrases on anonymous sources not based in anything, not based in any truth at all. And then you want to throw out really irresponsible terms about American heroes, about the judgment that they made.”
Hegseth said that after watching the first strike, he left for a meeting and later learned of the second strike. The White House said Monday that Hegseth had authorized Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley to conduct the strikes, and that Bradley was the one who ordered and directed the second one.
At the time of the Sept. 2 strike, Bradley was serving as the commander of Joint Special Operations Command, which falls under U.S. Special Operations Command. He is now the head of U.S. Special Operations Command.
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According to Hegseth, carrying out a subsequent strike on the alleged drug boat was the right call.
“Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat,” Hegseth said Tuesday.
Meanwhile, reports of the second strike have attracted even more scrutiny from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill and calls for greater oversight, amid questions about the strikes’ legality.
“This committee is committed to providing rigorous oversight of the Department of Defense’s military operations in the Caribbean,” Reps. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and Adam Smith, D-Wash., who lead the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement on Saturday. “We take seriously the reports of follow-on strikes on boats alleged to be ferrying narcotics in the SOUTHCOM region and are taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question.”
Hegseth said Tuesday that although there has been a pause in strikes in the Caribbean because alleged drug boats are becoming harder to find, the Trump administration’s campaign against the influx of drugs will continue.
“We’ve only just begun striking narco-boats and putting narco-terrorists at the bottom of the ocean because they’ve been poisoning the American people,” Hegseth said.
The Trump administration has carried out more than 20 strikes against alleged drug boats in Latin American waters, and has bolstered its military presence in the Caribbean to align with Trump’s goal to crack down on the influx of drugs into the U.S.
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