The meetings, held behind closed doors with the leaders of the Intelligence and Armed Services committees, shed new light on an episode that's become a flashpoint in the fierce debate over President Trump's aggressive approach to fighting drug traffickers from Latin America.
Bradley was in charge of the opening volley of Trump's drug war, on Sept. 2, which targeted alleged drug runners near the coast of Venezuela. The operation gained outsized attention last week after The Washington Post reported that the initial strike on the boat was followed by several others targeting a pair of survivors who were clinging to the vessel. Both suspects were killed.
The revelations sparked a firestorm of controversy in the Capitol, where Democrats — and even some Republicans — voiced concerns that the follow-up strikes constituted war crimes. Indeed, the Pentagon's own manual detailing the laws of war specifies that "orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal."
The story raised numerous questions about where the orders originated, and the precise roles played by Bradley, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon's legal team in the lead up to the attack — questions lawmakers were hoping to get answered during Thursday's briefings.
Bradley, the commander of Joint Special Operations Command, denied that Hegseth issued an order to "kill everybody" aboard the alleged drug-smuggling vessel, multiple lawmakers said.
"Admiral Bradley was very clear that he was given no such order, not to give no quarter or to kill them all. He was given an order that, of course, was written down in great detail, as our military always does," Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters after the Thursday closed-door, classified briefing.
The Washington Post had reported last week that Hegseth gave a spoken directive ahead of the Sept. 2 attack to "kill everybody" but both the White House and Pentagon chief denied that he issued such an order. The White House has said the strike killed 11 "narco-terrorists."
Cotton, a defense hawk, came out in the defense of the U.S. military's Sept. 2 operation in the Caribbean, praising the military leaders; declaring that the mission was "lawful;" and proclaiming the lethal strikes since then, which have killed at least 83 people, are "justified and righteous."
Following the first strike that killed nine alleged drug traffickers, the two survivors tried to flip the boat and continue with their mission, according to Cotton.
But Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee, said the video he was shown during the classified briefing showed the two survivors shirtless and sitting on a part of the capsized vessel that was still above water.
"It looks like two classically shipwrecked people," Smith said in an interview with The New Republic. During the closed-door session, lawmakers were told that it was "judged that these two people were capable of returning to the fight."
Smith said it is "a highly questionable decision that these two people on that obviously incapacitated vessel were still in any kind of fight."
While Cotton was defending the operation in light of the new information, Democrats had a decidedly different response after viewing the video of the subsequent strikes.
Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, emerged from the briefing to say the evidence showed clearly that U.S. forces had targeted survivors who posed no threat to American security. He characterized the footage as "one of the most troubling things I've seen in my time in public service."
"I reviewed the video, and it's deeply, deeply troubling," Himes said. "The fact is that we killed two people who were in deep distress and had neither the means nor obviously the intent to continue their mission."
Read the full report at thehill.com.
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