White House says admiral ordered potential war crime

What happened

The White House and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Monday said Navy Vice Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley ordered a follow-up strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean in September, not Hegseth.

The initial strike killed nine people on the boat, and when live video of the attack showed two survivors “clinging to the smoldering wreck,” Bradley ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s verbal command to “kill everybody,” and the “two men were blown apart in the water,” The Washington Post reported Friday, setting off a furor in Washington and bipartisan congressional investigations into potential war crimes.

Who said what

Hegseth “authorized” Bradley, now head of U.S. Special Operations Command, to “conduct these kinetic strikes” and the admiral “worked well within his authority and the law directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed” and the “threat” to the U.S. “eliminated,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday. Hegseth later posted on social media that Bradley “is an American hero” and “I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made — on the September 2 mission and all others since.”

Leavitt’s “scripted remarks” and Hegseth’s post “elicited a furious backlash within the Defense Department,” the Post said, and left lawmakers and Pentagon officials “increasingly concerned that the Trump administration intends to scapegoat” Bradley. “This is ‘protect Pete’ bulls---,’” one military official told the Post.

If Hegseth, Bradley “or both targeted shipwrecked survivors,” that would “apparently be a war crime even if one accepts the Trump administration’s disputed argument” that the U.S. is in armed conflict with civilian drug traffickers, The New York Times said. “It would be murder outside of armed conflict,” George Washington University law professor Laura Dickinson told Reuters.

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What next?

“We’ll all have clarity on Thursday afternoon,” when Bradley provides a classified briefing to key lawmakers, said House Armed Services Committee chair Mike Rogers (R-Ala). “Hegseth made a big point of saying he was running these operations,” said Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.), the committee’s top Democrat, “so ultimately he’s the one who ought to come in and explain it to us.” Congress will “certainly” get access to “all of the audio and all of the video” of the strike, Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said, and “we’re going to find out what the true facts are.”