Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is refusing to comment on a report that he ordered the military to kill all passengers aboard a ship suspected of transporting drugs in the Caribbean Sea in September.
According Washington PostThe September 2 ship hit initially left two survivors clinging to the ship. The Post says Admiral Mitch Bradley, head of Special Operations Command, then ordered a second strike to carry out Hegseth’s orders and ensure that survivors could not turn to other smugglers to recover them and their cargo.
If true, it is unclear why Bradley would not have ordered troops to pick up the survivors and their cargo from the water, as the military did in a later attack when two survivors were taken aboard a Navy ship by helicopter. Those survivors were later repatriated to Ecuador and Colombia, although some legal experts said the survivors could have been prosecuted in federal court for narcotics smuggling.
SOCOM also declined to comment on the report.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth arrives to brief senators on U.S. military activity in the Caribbean and the Pacific, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Nov. 5, 2025.
Mandel and/AFP
A person familiar with the details of the Sept. 2 incident confirmed to ABC News that there were survivors of an initial attack on the ship and that those survivors were killed in subsequent attacks.. ABC News has not confirmed, however, the details of Hegseth’s or Bradley’s requests.
“The Department has no response to this article and declines to comment further,” a Pentagon spokesperson said Friday.
Critics of the Trump administration and some legal experts have questioned the legality of the attacks. Under the Geneva Conventions, any party to a conflict must collect and care for wounded or sick combatants.
There have been more than 20 airstrikes against shipping in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing more than 80 people.
Trump and his top advisers say U.S. intelligence clearly shows the ships are trafficking illegal narcotics. They argue that the attacks are legal because Trump has designated the drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations.”
Many legal experts say that line of thinking, however, is unprecedented and say the United States should rely on law enforcement – not the military – to seize shipments and arrest suspected criminals.
