Deadly boat strike brief

Top Pentagon brass to brief lawmakers on deadly boat strike

Gen. Dan Caine will accompany Adm. Mitch Bradley to Capitol Hill Thursday for a closed-door meeting with the top four Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.

Joe Gould

The Trump administration is sending its top military official to brief senior lawmakers on Thursday about a missile strike that reportedly killed survivors of an earlier attack in the Caribbean.

Gen. Dan Caine, the Joint Chiefs chair, will accompany Adm. Mitch Bradley to Capitol Hill on Thursday for a rare, high-stakes closed-door meeting with the top four Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.

Senior lawmakers in both parties have said they plan to investigate the Sept. 2 operation after the Washington Post reported that the first strike on a suspected drug-smuggling boat left survivors clinging to wreckage and that U.S. forces killed them in a second strike. Some Democrats and legal experts have said that, if confirmed, the attack could constitute a war crime.

“We are going to have the admiral who was in charge of the operation as well as the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff to join us, and we’re going to go into detail as precisely what happened, particularly with the second strike,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the Senate Armed Services Committee’s ranking member, told the journalist Aaron Parnas in a video clip posted Wednesday.

Lawmakers are also set to view unedited video of the strikes, according to one person familiar with the sensitive matter who was granted anonymity to discuss it.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday he’s open to releasing the video footage.

Lawmakers also want to see the intelligence that led the military to label the vessel a legitimate target, the rules of engagement in place at the time, the casualty assessments and criteria used to distinguish combatants from civilians and the legal rationale behind the operation, Reed said Wednesday in a floor speech.

Lawmakers say the briefings mark the start of a bipartisan inquiry, which delves into one of the most contentious national security controversies of the Trump administration.

Lawmakers from both parties are expected to use the meeting to seek a detailed accounting of the timeline, the decisions involved, the chain of command and whether U.S. forces saw or should have seen survivors in the water before the second strike took place — and, if so, whether a rescue was possible.

Caine has already spoken with the lawmakers who Bradley will brief on Thursday, according to a Pentagon readout. But the classified session is expected to yield the first comprehensive reconstruction of the events directly from Bradley, who was then running Joint Special Operations Command and has since been promoted to the chief of U.S. Special Operations Command.

Reed, in a floor speech on Wednesday, signaled the depth of concern, citing the report that survivors were killed.

“Multiple legal experts, including former judge advocate generals, have stated that if this reporting is accurate, this strike appears to constitute a war crime,” Reed said. “Indeed, many of my Republican colleagues have joined Democrats in recognizing that the reported facts of this strike would be clearly illegal.”

The White House has defended the operation, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt saying this week that Bradley acted “within his authority and the law.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday he “did not personally see survivors” and that Bradley made a “correct decision” to sink the boat “a couple of hours later.”

Congressional leaders, including Republicans, say they want unfiltered answers. Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) has pledged “a full investigation,” while House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) said lawmakers will seek “complete clarity about what did and did not happen.”