Trump Boat Bombings Suddenly on Shakier Ground as Damning Info Emerges

Are Republicans really about to exercise real oversight on President Trump’s reprehensible bombings of alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean Sea? They’re talking a good transparency game in response to the jarring news that U.S. forces killed two men in a follow-up strike as they clung to the wreckage of a boat that had already been bombed, pursuant to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s orders (which he’s denied). Republicans are criticizing the second attack and suggesting oversight will escalate.

Trump himself wants to convey the impression that more transparency is coming. “We’ll look into it,” he told reporters late Sunday about this revelation. “I wouldn’t have wanted that—not a second strike.”

To be sure, this does look like a classic bait and switch. It’s likely Republicans will conduct some moderate oversight on this second strike allegedly killing the two men. But then, whatever they learn, they’ll use that exercise as a back-door way to deflate pressure for transparency on the rest of the operation, which is probably illegal and itself may consist of war crimes.

However, it’s not nothing that Republicans like Representative Mike Rogers and Senator Roger Wicker—the chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services committees—are now vowing real oversight. Democrats can seize on this—because this latest turn exposes how weak and indefensible the case for these bombings truly has become.

In a detailed interview, Representative Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on Armed Services, laid out lines of inquiry that Congress could pursue to get to the bottom of this scandal. Democrats should hold Republicans to this standard of oversight, and hound them relentlessly when they fall far short of it.

First, Smith says the committee is in communication with Frank “Mitch” Bradley, the commander who oversaw the bombing, about getting a possible classified briefing. Bradley appears to have been instrumental: As The Washington Post reports, on September 2, after the bombing of a boat carrying 11 people wrecked the vessel, live drone footage showed two men still alive. Bradley ordered a second strike, and as the Post put it, “the two men were blown apart in the water.”

“Why was the second strike ordered?” Smith asked in our interview. Rogers, the GOP committee chair, appears to be on board for getting this briefing, and Bradley will likely talk to the four leaders of the two Armed Services committees, Smith says. He will try to pin down Bradley on the rationale for the second strike.

That’s critical. Because that second hit, per the Post, was executed to fulfill Hegseth’s spoken order that everybody on the boat must be killed. Legal experts are describing that as a potential war crime, because killing defenseless foes violates international laws of war. Indeed, Jack Goldsmith, former head of the Office of Legal Counsel, argues in a careful analysis that if the Post report is true, Hegseth’s order might have been an illegal one.

Unnervingly, the Post says Bradley ordered the second strike because the survivors were “legitimate targets,” as they could “theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo.” But Goldsmith notes that this would not be an adequate rationale in the face of the laws of war, which the Defense Department binds itself to, and Bradley’s highest duty, says Goldsmith, would have been to refuse to kill the two men regardless of what Hegseth ordered. So hearing from Bradley is essential.

Hegseth, as noted above, denies giving such a spoken order. Perhaps. But even if so, if this report is correct in its other particulars, the live drone feed does in fact show the survivors clinging to the wrecked boat and then getting “blown apart in the water.” So Bradley can be pressed to explain why this happened and what, precisely, Hegseth’s orders were.

There are many more lines of inquiry here. Smith tells me that he will push for public release of a Justice Department memo that purportedly details out a legal justification for the strikes. Experts see the legal case as extremely weak, as it appears to grant Trump unilateral authority to execute civilians who aren’t engaged in an act of war against the United States in any sense. That memo also seeks to preemptively declare that those who carry out these strikes have legal immunity, which some legal types see as a tacit admission of potential legal vulnerability.

“This should be public,” Smith says of the memo. “The public ought to know what the legal justification is for this.” Smith adds that he’ll raise this with Bradley: “It ought to be declassified.”

Finally, there’s the incredibly weak substantive case for the bombings. Tons of evidence has emerged casting doubt on whether those killed—who now number over 80—were even trafficking drugs to the United States. And now that Trump is pardoning the Honduran ex-president who was convicted in a U.S. court for crimes relating to the flooding of the United States with cocaine, what’s the case for these bombings? Smith says he will start pressing Republicans on his committee to agree to subpoena top officials, military and civilian, and to “use whatever leverage is available to us to try to get answers.”

Now combine all those absurdities with the fact that Congress has not debated these strikes and has been given zero serious evidence backing them up. As The New York Times’ David French argues, the bad faith coursing through all of this—along with the likely illegality of it and Congress’s failure to fact-find—is putting military officials in the impossible position of receiving orders from an obviously unfit civilian leadership.

Just look at how Hegseth responded to these latest revelations with the adolescent smirking of a schoolyard bully squashing fireflies or pulling the legs off of a spider:

This sort of snickering, vacuous sadism is something Democrats can leverage to their advantage. Hegseth famously has urged the armed forces to get more serious about their “warfighting.” But as Tom Nichols explains at The Atlantic, everything that Hegseth concretely does to further this idea, from his “Department of War” renaming stunt to his absurd demands for more “lethality,” signals an obvious lust for killing that the actual “warfighters” will see as unserious and venal to its core.

The saga of the two men killed at sea illustrates this vividly. Again, even if this account isn’t precisely accurate, the execution appears to have happened.

As the Post notes:

If the video of the blast that killed the two survivors on Sept. 2 were made public, people would be horrified, said one person who watched the live feed.

Heck, Trump himself saw a need to say he doesn’t support this. Even Trump doesn’t want to be associated with killings that appear too obviously lawless and indiscriminate. Yet the more that we learn about the other killings, the more they will appear just as indefensible.

So Democrats should challenge Republicans: Will you push hard enough to secure release of that legal memo, and demand real evidence backing up the strikes, and insist on testimony from military officials to justify them? If the answer is no, Democrats can hammer Republicans relentlessly: Are you truly willing to debase yourselves so dishonorably, all to shield the likes of Pete Hegseth from scrutiny? Really? Seriously?