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The journalist who initially revealed that President Donald Trump’s administration killed shipwrecked survivors of its first known boat bombing reported Tuesday that the admiral in charge consulted with a US military lawyer before ordering another strike on the two alleged drug traffickers who were clinging to debris in the Caribbean Sea.
Just days after Trump announced the September 2 bombing on social media, Intercept journalist Nick Turse exposed the follow-up strike that killed survivors, citing US officials. The attack has sparked fresh alarm in recent weeks, since late November reporting from the Washington Post and CNN that Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley ordered the second strike to comply with an alleged spoken directive from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to kill everyone on board, which Hegseth has denied.
After the first strike, “Bradley — then the head of Joint Special Operations Command — sought guidance from his top legal adviser,” according to Turse. He interviewed several sources familiar with the admiral’s recent classified briefing to Congress, former members of the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps, and ex-colleagues of the JSOC staff judge advocate to whom Bradley turned, Col. Cara Hamaguchi.
As Turse reported:
How exactly [Hamaguchi] responded is not known. But Bradley, according to a lawmaker who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a classified briefing, said that the JSOC staff judge advocate deemed a follow-up strike lawful. In the briefing, Bradley said no one in the room voiced objections before the survivors were killed, according to the lawmaker.
Five people familiar with briefings given by Bradley, including the lawmaker who viewed the video, said that, logically, the survivors must have been waving at the US aircraft flying above them. All interpreted the actions of the men as signaling for help, rescue, or surrender.
Bradley, now the chief of Special Operations Command, declined to comment, the reporter noted. SOCOM also declined to make Hamaguchi available, though the command’s director of public affairs, Col. Allie Weiskopf, said: “We are not going to comment on what Admiral Bradley told lawmakers in a classified hearing. He did inform them that during the strike he sought advice from his lawyer and then made a decision.”
Tuesday’s reporting caught the attention of the former longtime executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), Kenneth Roth, who has stressed that not only is it “blatantly illegal to order criminal suspects to be murdered rather than detained,” but “the initial attack was illegal too.”
Various other experts and US lawmakers have similarly condemned the dozens of strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean since September — which as of Monday have killed at least 105 people, according to the Trump administration — as “war crimes, murder, or both,” as the Former JAGs Working Group put it after the Hegseth reporting last month.
“Extrajudicial executions,” declared public interest lawyer Robert Dunham on social media Wednesday, sharing Turse’s new report and tagging the groups Amnesty International USA, HRW, and Reprieve US, as well as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and independent experts who report to the UN Human Rights Council.
Those experts on Wednesday rebuked Trump’s recent aggression toward Venezuela, including not only the boat strikes but also threats to bomb the South American country and attempts to impose an oil blockade. They said that “the illegal use of force, and threats to use further force at sea and on land, gravely endanger the human right to life and other rights in Venezuela and the region.”
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