Washington DC - A top Democratic lawmaker said Thursday that video footage played during a classified hearing showed a US strike killing "shipwrecked sailors" who survived an initial attack on an alleged drug-trafficking boat.
The September 2 incident – the first in a series of strikes targeting purported narcotics-smuggling vessels that have left more than 80 people dead – has sparked widespread criticism of both the military campaign and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The footage showed "the United States military attacking shipwrecked sailors – bad guys, bad guys – but attacking shipwrecked sailors," Representative Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told journalists.
Himes described it as "one of the most troubling things I've seen in my time in public service."
"You have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, who were killed by the United States," he added.
Republican Representative Don Bacon, meanwhile, said on CNN that "these two people were trying to survive and our... rules of war would not allow us to kill survivors."
"The rules are they have to pose an imminent threat. And I think we could say they did not pose an imminent threat to our country," Bacon said.
Both the White House and Pentagon have sought to distance Hegseth from the decision to strike the survivors – which some US lawmakers have said could be a war crime – instead pinning the blame on Admiral Frank Bradley, who directly oversaw the operation.
Pentagon comes under fire for follow-up strike on survivors
Himes said Bradley told lawmakers that Hegseth did not order that all the boat's crew be killed, but Bacon said the Pentagon chief is ultimately responsible because "he's the secretary of defense."
Trump's administration insists it is effectively at war with alleged "narco-terrorists," and the president has deployed the world's biggest aircraft and an array of other military assets to the Caribbean, insisting they are there for counter-narcotics operations.
Regional tensions have flared as a result of the strikes and the military buildup, with Venezuela's leftist leader Nicolas Maduro accusing Washington of using drug trafficking as a pretext for "imposing regime change" in Caracas.