Navy Adm. Frank M. Bradley has told lawmakers that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not give a "kill all" order during a September 2 strike on a suspected drug‑smuggling boat in the Caribbean, even as a classified video of a follow‑on strike on two survivors has triggered a fierce partisan dispute over whether the operation was lawful.
The dispute centers on U.S. strikes against a suspected drug‑smuggling vessel near Venezuela on September 2, 2025, that were carried out under a Trump administration campaign targeting so‑called narco‑terrorists.
According to reporting by NPR and The Daily Wire, U.S. forces hit the roughly 40‑foot boat in an initial strike that disabled the vessel and left it burning and capsized, with two survivors in the water.(tpr.org) Lawmakers who viewed classified footage say the follow‑on strike that killed those survivors has raised the most serious legal and ethical questions.
Adm. Frank M. Bradley — at the time the commander responsible for the operation and now head of U.S. Special Operations Command — briefed members of Congress behind closed doors on December 4, 2025, about the sequence of strikes.(washingtonpost.com) In that session, Bradley defended his decision to authorize a second strike, arguing that the two men in the water remained legitimate targets because they were attempting to regain control of the capsized vessel and the drugs aboard, according to accounts from Republican lawmakers. Sen. Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, said after the briefing that he saw in the video “two survivors trying to flip a boat” and “board it with drugs,” and he called the first, second, third and fourth strikes on September 2 “entirely lawful and needful.”(dailywire.com)
Bradley also addressed an anonymously sourced Washington Post report that had alleged a verbal directive from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to "kill them all" on the boat. In an interview with NPR’s Michel Martin, Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said he asked Bradley directly in the briefing whether such an order had been given and that Bradley replied "absolutely not." Himes said he had no reason to disbelieve the admiral’s denial.(tpr.org) The Daily Wire likewise reported that Bradley “flatly denied” receiving a “kill all” instruction.(dailywire.com)
Democrats who viewed the video have offered a starkly different account of what it shows. Himes told NPR he saw “two men with no weapons, with no radio” who were “clinging to a little piece of wood” from what he described as a roughly 40‑foot boat that was largely underwater after a munition set it ablaze. He said the footage depicts “shipwrecked sailors” who appeared likely to drown and argued that killing them, in his view, matched the Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual definition of a war crime because shipwrecked individuals are not lawful targets.(tpr.org)
Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, told PBS and other outlets that he was “deeply concerned about the legality of the strike” and of the broader counter‑drug operation, saying the matter requires further investigation “for a possible war crime,” according to The Daily Wire’s account of his remarks.(dailywire.com)
Republicans have largely rallied to the Pentagon’s defense. Cotton and other GOP lawmakers contend that the survivors remained combatants because the vessel still carried narcotics and could potentially be used to continue smuggling or coordinate with other trafficking boats.(dailywire.com) Rep. Dan Crenshaw, Republican of Texas, dismissed Democratic criticism as “manufactured and disingenuous,” The Daily Wire reported, and mocked the war‑crime accusations on social media.(dailywire.com)
Some Republicans have broken with that line. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has publicly questioned the legality and morality of striking what he has called “distressed, shipwrecked” survivors and has joined Democrats in urging the release of the strike video so the public can judge for itself, according to conservative and mainstream reports.(washingtonpost.com)
The Pentagon has pushed back hard against claims that Hegseth personally ordered troops to kill everyone on the boat. Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell demanded that The Washington Post retract its anonymously sourced story, calling the report a “hoax” against Hegseth in a statement reported by The Daily Wire. “The Washington Post must retract their story which led to this latest hoax against Secretary Hegseth,” he said, calling it an insult to Americans and to service members.(dailywire.com)
NPR and Reuters report that the incident is part of a wider campaign of U.S. strikes on suspected narco‑trafficking vessels in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific.(reuters.com) The Daily Wire, citing Pentagon figures, has reported that since September the administration has carried out more than twenty boat strikes, killing over 80 suspected traffickers.(dailywire.com) On December 4, the same day Bradley briefed lawmakers, Hegseth publicly confirmed another strike on a boat in the Eastern Pacific that he said killed four people linked to a designated terrorist organization, according to Time and other outlets.(time.com)
Legal experts and lawmakers across the spectrum say the central question remains whether, at the moment of the second strike on September 2, the two men in the water still posed an imminent threat or were instead incapacitated shipwreck survivors. The Pentagon has maintained that the operation complied with the law of armed conflict. Democrats arguing the opposite are pressing for the full, unedited video and related legal analysis to be made public as multiple congressional and Pentagon reviews move ahead.(reuters.com)
