By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claims he had nothing to do with killing two survivors clinging to the wreckage of their boat following U.S. missile strikes on September 2. The first strike killed most of the 11 people on board. The Washington Post, citing multiple unnamed sources, reported two people survived, and the officer in charge of the operation called a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s order to “kill everybody.” These actions, along with at least 20 additional lethal boat strikes that followed, are widely considered by legal and military experts to be war crimes.
President Donald Trump has declared, without proof, that these targeted people are narcotics traffickers and thus “terrorists” with whom the U.S. is at war.
“This entire operation, from the outset, is illegal,” David Cole, Georgetown University law professor, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “It is not legal to engage in premeditated targeting of people because you believe they’re engaged in criminal activity. … They’re now actually targeting survivors of these strikes, people who pose no threat whatsoever to the United States, are seeking to hang on for dear life, and the military is targeting them and killing them in cold blood.”
The Intercept’s Nick Turse first reported the killing of the survivors, a week after the attack happened. In that report, Turse wrote:

“A high-ranking Pentagon official … said that the strike in the Caribbean was a criminal attack on civilians and that the Trump administration paved the way for it by firing the top legal authorities of the Army and Air Force earlier this year.”

Hegseth appeared on Fox & Friends on September 3, boasting of the boat strike: “We knew exactly who was in that boat. We knew exactly what they were doing.”
The Washington Post’s report provoked bipartisan concern in Congress and investigations into the strikes as potential war crimes. On Sunday, Trump responded to a reporter’s question on the strike, saying, “I wouldn’t have wanted that, not a second strike.”
Hegseth got the message, apparently, stating in a December 2 cabinet meeting, seated next to Trump, “I watched that first strike live. As you can imagine, at the Department of War, we’ve got a lot of things to do. So I didn’t stick around.”
The decision to kill the survivors, he said, came from the operation’s commanding officer, Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley.
In Trump’s Air Force One comments, he added detail to his boat strike policy that bears mention: “Just look at the numbers … each boat, on average, is responsible for the death of 25,000 Americans.”
As with every aspect of this murderous policy, Trump offered no evidence to back up his math. We know next to nothing about these boats, whether they are engaged in criminal activity, are fishing boats, or something else. Dominican Republic officials reported that one ton, or 1,000 kilograms, of cocaine was recovered from the wreckage of one of the boats the U.S. bombed.
That amount, if accurate, highlights the hypocrisy of Trump’s policies. He just granted a pardon to a convicted cocaine trafficker, Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras. He had spent just over a year of his 46-year sentence in a U.S. prison. In 2024, Hernandez was found guilty of flooding the U.S. with 400 tons of cocaine. That’s enough to fill over 400 of the alleged “narco-trafficker” boats Trump and Hegseth have been blowing up. Thus, using Trump’s math, Hernandez’s prolific cocaine smuggling would have killed over 10 million Americans.
So why pardon the convicted felon?
Trump announced the pardon days before Honduras’ national elections. Just before releasing Hernández on Monday, Trump endorsed Nasry Asfura, the presidential candidate from Hernández’s right-wing party, hoping to gain another Trump-allied Latin American leader. By Thursday, the centrist candidate Salvador Nasralla was leading Asfura with 80% of the votes counted. Trump, seeing his preferred candidate losing, claimed fraud.
Meanwhile, the largest U.S. military buildup in the Western Hemisphere since the Cuban missile crisis is underway in the Caribbean, as Trump escalates U.S. threats against Venezuela. He has again invoked the pretext of narco-trafficking, claiming Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro runs a cocaine cartel, offering a $50 million dollar reward for information leading to his arrest or conviction.
Trump recently pledged that strikes on Venezuelan land would begin “very soon.” In response, a bipartisan group of senators including Democrat Tim Kaine of Virginia and Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky have put forth Senate Joint Resolution 98, barring U.S. military action against Venezuela without congressional authorization.
Meanwhile, the family of Alejandro Carranza Medina has filed a complaint against the U.S. with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alleging the U.S. illegally killed him in his boat on September 15.
“We’ve only just begun striking narco boats and putting narco-terrorists at the bottom of the ocean,” Hegseth bragged on December 2. Hopefully, a war crimes inquiry against Hegseth will be beginning soon as well.

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