White House Throws Admiral Under The Bus In Killing Of Alleged Drug Boat Survivors | EUROtoday

WASHINGTON – The White House on Monday shifted the blame for killing the survivors of a U.S. navy strike on an alleged drug smuggling boat from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and onto the commanding admiral.

Killing survivors of a destroyed vessel is actually an instance of a conflict crime within the U.S. Department of Defense Law of War Manual. “For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal,” the guide reads.

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt, nonetheless, repeatedly acknowledged that it was authorized – whilst she additional claimed, as President Donald Trump did Sunday, that Hegseth was unaware that it had occurred.

“On Sept. 2, Secretary Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes. Admiral Bradley worked well within his authority and the law, directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated,” she stated.

At the time of the assault off the Trinidad coast, Frank Bradley was head of the Joint Special Operations Command. According to a Washington Post report in regards to the incident, it was he who relayed the order from Hegseth to “kill everybody” by sending Navy SEALs again to the disabled boat to have them kill the 2 individuals clinging to the wreckage.

In October, Bradley was promoted to run the U.S. Special Operations Command.

Leavitt referred additional inquiries to the “Department of War,” Trump’s nickname for the Pentagon.

An official there, nonetheless, stated they might supply no additional info past Hegseth’s statements in latest days on social media by which he known as the Post’s story “fake news” and, extra lately, posted a cartoon to justify the killing of alleged smugglers.

Officials at U.S. Special Operations Command didn’t reply to HuffPost queries.

Later Monday night, Hegseth posted a press release on social media confirming that Bradley, and never he, had ordered the second strike.

“I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made — on the September 2 mission and all others since,” Hegseth wrote.

Three months in the past, Trump posted parts of a video of the Sept. 2 assault on his social media platform, bragging that the assault had killed 11 “narcoterrorists.”

That 11 individuals had been aboard the vessel means that it was not, the truth is, smuggling medication, as a result of each pointless passenger would lower the boat’s payload capability for medication by, on common, 180 kilos. Most of the opposite strikes towards alleged drug boats have had three or 4 individuals aboard.

Trump and his administration’s explanations in regards to the sequence of strikes towards small boats within the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific have been deceptive or probably downright false since they began.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the aim of the strikes has been to cease the circulate of fentanyl into the United States and has at occasions stated that fentanyl had been aboard the destroyed vessels. In reality, the administration has provided no proof that any fentanyl has been on any of the boats, which largely match the profile of vessels utilized by low-level cocaine smugglers.

Trump has additional claimed that the boats and their crews had been en path to the United States on the time of the assaults. That can be false. The boats have all been too small to get to the U.S. with out repeated refueling stops and are ill-suited for lengthy ocean passages.

Over the Thanksgiving vacation, Trump added a layer of hypocrisy to his coverage of killing smugglers by pardoning a former president of Honduras who had been convicted in a U.S. federal courtroom for his half in directing the smuggling of some 500 tons of cocaine into the United States.

Leavitt on Monday defended that pardon by repeating Trump’s unfounded declare that Juan Orlando Hernández had been unfairly prosecuted by Trump’s predecessor, Democrat Joe Biden.

“His court-appointed lawyer was only given three weeks to prepare for trial. He shared that his conviction was lawfare by the leftist party who, quote, struck a deal with the Biden-Harris administration,” she stated. “So the president heard the concerns from many people, as he does, and he’s, of course, within his constitutional authority to sign clemency for whomever he deems worthy of that.”