Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth arrives for a briefing at the U.S. Capitol with congressional leaders and Secretary of State Marco Rubio on military strikes against alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean, Nov. 5, 2025. Tom Williams via Getty Images
WASHINGTON — The White House on Monday shifted blame from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the commanding admiral for the deaths of survivors of a U.S. military raid on an alleged drug-smuggling boat.
Killing survivors of a destroyed ship is an example of a war crime in the US Department of Defense Law of War Manual. “For example, an order to fire on a shipwreck would be clearly illegal,” the manual reads.
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Press secretary Carolyn Levitt, however, repeatedly said it was legal — as she further claimed, as President Donald Trump did on Sunday, that Hegseth had no idea it had happened.
“On September 2nd, Secretary Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes. Admiral Bradley acted well within his authority and the law, directing the engagement to ensure the submarine was destroyed and the threat to the United States was eliminated,” she said.
At the time of the attack on the Trinidad coast, Frank Bradley was the head of the Joint Special Operations Command. According to a Washington Post report on the incident, he was the one who relayed the “kill all” order from Hegseth that sent Navy SEALs back to the disabled boat to kill the two men clinging to the wreckage.
In October, Bradley was promoted to run US Special Operations Command.
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Levitt referred more questions to the “War Department,” Trump’s nickname for the Pentagon.
However, an official there said they could not provide more information beyond Hegseth’s recent statements on social media in which he called the Post story “fake news” and, more recently, posted a cartoon to justify the killing of alleged traffickers.
Officials at the US Special Operations Command did not respond to questions from HuffPost.
Later Monday evening, Hegseth posted a statement on social media that Bradley, and not him, ordered the second strike.
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“I stand by him and the combat decisions he made — on the September 2 mission and all thereafter,” Hegseth wrote.
Three months ago, Trump posted portions of a video of the Sept. 2 attack on his social media platform, claiming that 11 “narco-terrorists” were killed in the attack.
The fact that there were 11 people on board suggests that this is not actually drug smuggling, as each unwanted passenger reduces the boat’s payload capacity for drugs by, on average, 180 pounds. Several other strikes against alleged drug boats involved three or four people.
Trump and his administration’s explanations for a series of strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have been misleading or possibly outright false.
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Trump has repeatedly claimed that the raids were aimed at stopping the flow of fentanyl into the United States and has sometimes said that fentanyl was aboard destroyed ships. In fact, the administration has not provided evidence that any of the boats contained any fentanyl, which largely matches the profile of vessels used by low-level cocaine traffickers.
Trump has claimed that the boat and its crew were heading towards America at the time of the attack. That is also false. The boats are too small to reach the US without frequent refueling stops and are unsuitable for long sea routes.
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Trump added a layer of hypocrisy to his policy of killing traffickers by pardoning the former president of Honduras who was convicted in US federal court of directing the smuggling of nearly 500 tons of cocaine into the United States.
Levitt defended the pardon Monday by repeating Trump’s baseless claim that Juan Orlando Hernandez was improperly indicted by Trump’s predecessor, Democrat Joe Biden.
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“His court-appointed attorney was given only three weeks to prepare for trial. He shared that his belief was legitimized by a left-wing party that, quote, had made a deal with the Biden-Harris administration,” she said. “So the president listened to the concerns of a lot of people, as he does, and he is, of course, within his constitutional right to sign pardons that he deems worthy.”
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