Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said he didn’t order the second strike on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat — but he would have, in new comments about the decision to target survivors of a Sept. 2 US attack.
“I fully support that strike,” Hegseth said during his remarks at the Reagan National Defense Forum on Saturday. “I would have made the same call myself.”
Last week, a group of House and Senate lawmakers were briefed in a classified setting by Admiral Frank Bradley about the strikes. Democrats said they came away horrified by what they learned, while Republicans in the briefing largely stood by Hegseth.
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President Trump has supported releasing footage of the strikes, but Hegseth was noncommittal during a question-and-answer session at the Reagan National Defense Forum.
“We’re reviewing it right now to make sure sources, methods, I mean, it’s an ongoing operation, [tactics, techniques and procedures], we’ve got operators out there doing this right now,” Hegseth explained, when asked by Fox News’s Lucas Tomlinson.
The Sept. 2 attack was the first of 22 known attacks on alleged drug vessels by the Trump administration.
At least 86 people have been killed in the strikes.
The Pentagon says Bradley, a Navy SEAL, was the one who ordered the second strike on the boat — which Democrats claim could amount to a war crime.
So far, only snippets of the strikes have been released to the public. Lawmakers briefed on the strikes were shown the full footage of how the attack unfolded.
“What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, vented to reporters afterwards
“You have two individuals and clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, [who] were killed by the United States.”
Several Republicans who received a similar briefing, including Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), have sided with the Pentagon assessment that the survivors remained a threat.
“I saw two survivors trying to flip a boatload of drugs down the United States back over so they could stay in the fight, and potentially, given all the context — we heard of other Narco terrorist boats in the area coming to their aid to — recover the cargo and recover those Narco terrorists,” Cotton told reporters following his briefing.
“…It’s my expectation, and my deep hope, this will continue.”