US lawmakers are pressing the Trump administration for answers about military strikes on suspected Venezuelan drug boats after reports that a follow-up strike was ordered to kill survivors of the initial attack.
Following the report, Republican-led committees that oversee the Pentagon have vowed to “strictly monitor” US boat attacks in the Caribbean.
On Friday, The Washington Post reported that two people survived a US attack on a boat on September 2, but that a second attack was carried out to comply with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s order to “kill everyone” on the boat.
Hegseth condemned the report as “fake news” and President Donald Trump said he believed it “100%.”
The US has expanded its military presence in the Caribbean and carried out a series of deadly attacks on suspected drug-trafficking boats in international waters off Venezuela and Colombia in what it calls an anti-narcotics operation.
More than 80 people have died since the beginning of September.
The Trump administration says it is acting in self-defense by destroying boats carrying illegal drugs into the US.
In its report on Friday, The Washington Post wrote that Secretary Hegseth “gave a verbal directive” to kill everyone aboard one such ship, and a special operations commander overseeing the operation “ordered a second attack to follow Hegseth’s instructions”.
Republican and Democrat lawmakers appearing on Sunday’s talk show said they support a congressional review of U.S. military strikes on ships suspected of drug trafficking in the Caribbean.
The leaders said they did not know whether the Washington Post report was true, but said attacking survivors of the initial missile strike raises major legal concerns.
“If that’s true, it rises to the level of a war crime,” Democratic Senator Tim Kaine said on CBS’s Face the Nation.
Republican Congressman Mike Turner said that Congress was not aware that a follow-up attack had occurred.
“Obviously if that happened, it would be very serious, and I agree it would be an illegal act,” Turner, the former chairman of the Intelligence Committee, told CBS.
The comments come after the Republican-led Senate Armed Services Committee announced Friday that it planned to conduct “rigorous oversight” of the attacks.
“The Committee is aware of recent news reports and the Defense Department’s initial response regarding alleged follow-on attacks on suspected narcotics vessels in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility,” the committee’s Republican chairman, Senator Roger Wicker, and his Democrat counterpart, Senator Jack Reed, said in a statement.
“The committee has directed the department to investigate, and we will conduct a vigorous investigation to determine the facts surrounding these circumstances,” he said.
The House Armed Services Committee followed suit, saying they were “taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question”.
In a post on He wrote that the series of attacks on boats was “lawful under both US and international law”.
“Every smuggler we kill is affiliated with a designated terrorist organisation,” he wrote.
On Sunday, speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, President Trump defended his defense secretary, saying: “He said he didn’t say that. And I believe him 100%.”
Trump said the administration would “look into the matter” and said “I don’t want that – not another attack”.
On Sunday, Venezuela’s National Assembly condemned the boat attacks and vowed to conduct a “rigorous and thorough investigation” into allegations of a second attack, which reportedly killed two survivors.
The Venezuelan government has accused the US of stoking tensions in the region with the aim of toppling the government.
The US is not a signatory to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, but US military legal advisers have previously said the US should “act in a manner consistent with its provisions”.
Under the convention, countries agree not to interfere with ships operating in international waters. There are limited exceptions that allow a state to seize a ship, such as “hot pursuit” where a ship is pursued from the country’s territorial waters into the high seas.
“Force can be used to stop a boat but generally it should be a non-lethal measure,” Professor Luke Moffett of Queen’s University Belfast recently told BBC Verify.
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