3 key questions about the US boat strike that killed survivors

Navy Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley will head to Capitol Hill on Thursday to brief senior lawmakers on the Trump administration’s controversial strikes on boats suspected of smuggling drugs in the Caribbean.

Questions have been swirling in recent days about the details of the Sept. 2 attack, which The Washington Post reported last Friday required two strikes to comply with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s alleged order to leave no survivors.

The Trump administration said Bradley, head of the Special Operations Command, ordered the second strike without a specific directive from Hegseth, but has said the admiral was well within his authority to do so.

The bombshell Post report also sparked questions about whether the U.S. military could have committed war crimes by targeting survivors of an attack who were reportedly clinging to the wreckage of a burning boat.

Here are three key questions as the members of the Senate and House Armed Services and Intelligence committees prepare for Thursday’s classified briefing.

What was Hegseth’s order?

Lawmakers will want to know what exactly the Defense secretary said when he authorized the strikes on Sept. 2, the first time the U.S. fired at a Venezuelan boat allegedly carrying drugs and members of a cartel in international waters.

According to The Washington Post, which cited two people with direct knowledge of the operation,” Hegseth “gave a spoken directive” before the initial strike.

“The order was to kill everybody,” one of those people told the Post.

The Post reported that, after the initial strike, commanders watched a livestream for a few minutes while the boat burned. When the smoke cleared, two survivors were identified, prompting Bradley to order a second strike “to comply with Hegseth’s instructions,” according to the Post.

Hegseth, in response to the Post’s reporting on Friday, slammed the “fake news” for “delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland.”

But the secretary did not directly refute that he gave the “kill everybody” order. Instead, he insisted on Friday that the U.S. military’s strikes against alleged drug-smuggling boats are “lawful” and “specifically intended to be ‘lethal, kinetic strikes.’”

The White House outright denied that Hegseth ever gave the “kill everybody” order.

“I saw that quoted in a Washington Post story. I would reject that the Secretary of War ever said that,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a press briefing Monday.

“However, the President has made it quite clear that if Narco terrorists, again, are trafficking illegal drugs towards the United States, he has the authority to kill them, and that’s what this administration is doing,” Leavitt continued.

Hegseth appeared to address the “kill everybody” quote during a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, when he reiterated his criticism of the media coverage of the incident.

“This is what you, in the press, don’t understand. You sit in your air-conditioned offices, you’re up on Capitol Hill, and you nitpick 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,” Hegseth said at the meeting.

What was legal justification for second strike?

Lawmakers on Thursday will also want Bradley to detail his reasoning for ordering a second strike, amid emerging questions about the legal basis for the decision.

According to the Post, Bradley saw the two survivors of the first strike as legitimate targets.

Bradley, after the initial strike, “told people on the secure conference call that the survivors were still legitimate targets because they could theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo, according to two people,” the Post reported.

“He ordered the second strike to fulfill Hegseth’s directive that everyone must be killed,” it added.

Some lawmakers, legal experts and former military officials have argued that targeting survivors of a strike who are clinging to the wreckage of a boat would amount to a war crime.

Former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall on Monday rejected Bradley’s reasoning for launching a second strike.

“Under normal circumstances, it’d be court-martialed. He’d be relieved of his duties, and he’d be court-martialed,” Kendall, who served as secretary under former President Biden, said during an appearance on MS NOW.

“Adm. Bradley was reported to have given an excuse, if you will, for the second engagement. That doesn’t hold water. These people were wounded. They were in the water. They were not a threat to anybody. Again, that’s a textbook example of a war crime,” he added.

The Hill reported Wednesday that the Sept. 2 attack on the alleged drug boat actually involved four strikes: two to kill the 11 people on board and two more to sink the vessel.

What’s on the videos?

Questions remain about what was on the livestream that Hegseth, Bradley and other military officials were watching as the first strike hit its target and the smoke cleared. The Pentagon released a video of the first strike soon after it was carried out, as it has done with nearly two dozen strikes since, but has not released video of the ensuing strikes on Sept. 2.

Hegseth said on Tuesday that  he did not “stick around”  to see the second U.S. military strike, which he said he learned of a couple hours after the fact. He said he had to move on to another meeting, also invoking the “fog of war” in decisions made around the strikes.

Lawmakers have indicated they’re interested in learning more about Hegseth’s actions and whereabouts on that day.

Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) responded to Hegseth’s comments that he didn’t see the second strike because he had another meeting.

“Well, I want to see his calendar for that day. I want to know what meeting he went to. I want to know how long he was where he was, and I want to see — we want to see, the committee wants to see — the whole tape of exactly what transpired,” King said on CNN’s “The Source” late Tuesday.

President Trump on Wednesday suggested the administration would comply, when asked if video of the second strike would be released.

“I don’t know what they have,” he told reporters in the White House, “but whatever they have, we’d certainly release. No problem.”

Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.