The controversy over a possible war crime perpetrated by the Pentagon in the first in the Caribbean, last September, shows no signs of abating. This Thursday, Admiral Frank Bradley appeared before Congress, who, according to the Donald Trump Administration, after a first blow sank the ship, gave the order to launch a second round that killed the survivors. One of the legislators present at the closed-door meeting described the video of those moments as “one of the most disturbing things” he has ever seen.
Bradley, according to lawmakers, has denied receiving any instructions, written or verbal, requiring him to “kill them all” or “give no quarter.” With this he rejected the information that claimed that the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, had ordered the second attack to leave no survivors.
But the details about what was told in that briefing have been coming out in dribs and drabs. And the conclusions are different, depending on the party to which the legislator who tells it belongs. Democrats declare themselves horrified. The Republicans who have spoken out point out that the attack was “legal and lethal”: the US military commanders behaved “exactly as expected of them”, declared Republican Senator Tom Cotton. Congressman Rick Crawford, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has said that “without a doubt” the attack was carried out “in a very professional manner.”
The ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, Jim Himes, has stated in contrast that the video shown during the session – without accompanying audio – is problematic. “You have two individuals (the survivors) clearly in need of help, without any means of transportation, with a destroyed boat, who were murdered by the United States,” maintains the legislator.
He and his colleagues on the bench declared themselves as concerned as before about the campaign against drug boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific that so far has sunk at least 21 boats and killed 83 people, in an operation that the Pentagon calls “Spear of the South” and that experts and legislators consider to be of more than dubious legality. Washington maintains that the military deployment it maintains in the Caribbean is aimed at fighting drugs, although the Government of , and others, consider that the real mission is to try to force a regime change.
The session had been called at the request of legislators after the newspaper Washington Post would have published last Friday that, after the first hit against the boat on September 2, there was a second that the Pentagon had not reported, and which killed two survivors. The hit, the media noted, had been ordered to comply with an alleged verbal order from Hegseth that called for “killing them all.” The head of the Pentagon flatly denies having given that order. The laws of war prohibit killing survivors of an attack at sea.
The session coincided with the publication this Thursday of an official report that accuses Hegseth of having endangered troops when he sent messages to a group on a social network with confidential information about bombings in Yemen, in a scandal dubbed Signalgate.
The document finds that by using a commercial social network for his communications and sharing information about an ongoing military operation, the Secretary of Defense risked revealing US military tactics and exposing US soldiers. But it does not accuse him of having disclosed classified information, determining that the former presenter of the Fox television network has the power in his position to declassify any information he wants before sending it. The document does not comment on whether Hegseth’s declassification policy is appropriate or not.
The investigation began after last March a journalist, the director of the progressive magazine The AtlanticJeffrey Goldberg, was mistakenly included in a group on the encrypted platform Signal, in which senior officials of the Trump Administration exchanged information and comments about an operation to bomb Yemen. The journalist, who initially thought it was some kind of prank, revealed the existence of the group when he verified that it was authentic and that the messages had indeed been describing a real operation to bomb Houthi militia facilities in Yemen.
Throughout the thread in the so-called “small group of senior officials on the Houthis”, the head of the Pentagon and other senior officials – personalities such as the Vice President, JD Vance, the Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, and the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, were included in the conversation – communicate various details about the operation. Two hours before the bombing takes place, on March 15, Hegseth sends a program with the planned flight and attack times.
The revelation cost the position of the National Security Advisor until then, Mike Waltz, who was the one who made the mistake of including Goldberg in the group. As a result of the ruling, Waltz was proposed as ambassador to the UN, a position for which he was confirmed in the summer, and his functions as coordinator of US foreign policy have since been covered by the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.
Faced with the scandal, legislators from both parties demanded that the Pentagon inspector general, in charge of ensuring that this Department complies with its internal rules, examine the case. In April, the inspector general announced the opening of an investigation. That same month it came to light that Hegseth had shared sensitive information in a second chat, which included his wife and brother.
