President Trump’s top Cabinet officials overseeing national security are expected back on Capitol Hill on Tuesday as questions mount over the swift escalation of U.S. military force and deadly boat strikes in international waters near Venezuela.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others are set to brief members of the House and the Senate amid congressional investigations into a military strike in September that killed two survivors of an initial attack on a boat allegedly carrying cocaine in the Caribbean. Lawmakers have been examining the Sept. 2 attack as they sift through the rationale for a broader U.S. military buildup in the region that increasingly appears pointed at Venezuela. On the eve of the briefings, the U.S. military said late Monday it attacked three more boats believed to have been smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing eight people.
“We have thousands of troops and our largest aircraft carrier in the Caribbean - but zero, zero explanation for what Trump is trying to accomplish,” said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York.
The closed-door sessions come as the U.S. is building up warships, flying fighter jets near Venezuelan airspace and seizing an oil tanker as part of its campaign against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who has insisted the real purpose of the U.S. military operations is to force him from office. Trump’s Republican administration has not sought any authorization from Congress for action against Venezuela. But lawmakers objecting to the military incursions are pushing war powers resolutions toward potential voting this week.
It’s all raising sharp questions that Hegseth and the others will be pressed to answer. The administration’s go-it-alone approach without Congress, experts say, has led to problematic military actions, none more so than the strike that killed two people who had climbed on top of part of a boat that had been partially destroyed in an initial attack.
“If it’s not a war against Venezuela, then we’re using armed force against civilians who are just committing crimes,” said John Yoo, a Berkeley Law professor who helped craft the President George W. Bush administration’s legal arguments and justification for aggressive interrogation after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. “Then this question, this worry, becomes really pronounced. You know, you’re shooting civilians. There’s no military purpose for it.”
Yet for the first several months, Congress has received little more than a trickle of information about why or how the U.S. military was conducting a campaign that has destroyed more than 20 boats and killed at least 95 people. At times, lawmakers have learned of strikes from social media after the Pentagon posted videos of boats bursting into flames.
Congress is now demanding - including with language included in an annual military policy bill - that the Pentagon release video of that initial operation to lawmakers.
For some, the footage has become a case sample that demonstrates the flawed rationale behind the entire campaign.
“The American public ought to see it. I think shooting unarmed people floundering in the water, clinging to wreckage, is not who we are as a people,” said Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican who has been an outspoken critic of the campaign. He added that, ”You can’t say you’re at war and say, ‘We’re not going to give any kind of due process to anybody and blow up people without any kind of proof.’”
Hegseth told lawmakers last week that he was still deciding whether to release the footage.
Still, there are also many prominent Republicans who back the campaign. Sen. Jim Risch, the GOP chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, last week called the attacks “absolutely, totally, and 100% legal under U.S. law and international law” and claimed that many American lives had been saved by making sure the drugs didn’t reach the U.S.
But as lawmakers have dug into the details of the Sept. 2 strike, inconsistencies have emerged in the Trump administration’s explanation of the attack, which the Pentagon initially tried to dismiss as a “completely false” narrative.
Trump has argued that the strike that killed survivors was justified because the people were trying to overturn the boat. Several GOP lawmakers have also put forward that argument, saying that it showed the two survivors were trying to stay in the fight, rather than surrender.
However, Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley, who ordered the second strike as he commanded the special forces soldiers conducting it, acknowledged in private briefings on Capitol Hill last week that although the two people had tried to overturn the boat, they were unlikely to succeed. That’s according to several people who either were in the briefings or had knowledge of them and spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss them.
The two people had climbed on top of the overturned boat, had not made any radio or cellphone calls for backup and were waving, Bradley told the lawmakers. The Navy admiral consulted with a military attorney, then ordered the second strike because it was believed that drugs were in the hull of the boat and the mission was to make sure they were destroyed.
Experts say the strike seems to run counter to the Pentagon’s own manual on the laws of war, which states that “orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.”
“The boat was damaged, the boat was overturned, and the boat had no power,” said Michael Schmitt, a former Air Force lawyer and professor emeritus at the U.S. Naval War College. “I really don’t care if there was another boat coming to rescue them. They’re shipwrecked.”
The argument at the heart of Trump’s campaign - that drugs bound for the U.S. are the equivalent of an attack on American lives - has resulted in lawmakers trying to parse whether laws were violated and, more broadly, what Trump’s goals are with Venezuela.
Besides the briefings from Hegseth and Rubio on Tuesday, Bradley is also expected to appear for classified briefings with the Senate and House Armed Services Committees on Wednesday.
Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, said he wants to “really understand what action, what intelligence they were acting on and whether or not they follow the laws of war, the laws of the sea.”
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