Republican-led committees in both the House and Senate have announced separate investigations into allegations that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered U.S. forces to kill everyone aboard a suspected drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean.
Sen. Roger Wicker, the Republican chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and his Democratic counterpart, Sen. Jack Reed, issued a joint statement pledging to examine the matter.
They said they are “aware of recent news report — and the Department of Defense’s initial response — regarding alleged follow-on strikes on suspected narcotics vessels,” and promised “vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”
In the House, leaders of the Armed Services Committee, including Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, similarly stated that they are “taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question.”
Public scrutiny has intensified since the initial report surfaced. On Saturday, Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu said that, if accurate, Hegseth’s alleged order could constitute a war crime.
In a social media post, Lieu said he had reviewed a Justice Department memo that exempts service members involved in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific deployment from prosecution, and concluded that nothing in the memo, “or military law, authorizes a second kinetic strike against defenseless survivors.”
“If the reports are true, then a war crime was committed. Also there is generally no statute of limitations for war crimes,” Lieu wrote.
According to the report, Hegseth allegedly directed that everyone aboard the vessel be killed during a U.S. strike in September, leading the military to conduct a second strike to target survivors of the initial attack.
Citing two individuals familiar with the operation, the outlet reported that the second strike killed two survivors after the first strike destroyed the vessel and killed nine others.
“The order was to kill everybody,” one of the sources said of Hegseth’s alleged directive. The strike was reportedly the first in an ongoing campaign that has so far killed more than 80 people.
Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who spent years advising Special Operations forces, told the outlet that the actions amounted to “murder.” Ordering a strike when surviving crew members were no longer capable of posing a threat, he said, “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime.”
Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell dismissed the report, calling the “narrative… completely false.” He said that “ongoing operations to dismantle narcoterrorism and to protect the Homeland from deadly drugs have been a resounding success.”
Hegseth has also denied the allegations, accusing the media of fabricating the story. He said “the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland.”
