Adam Smith goes to war with Pentagon brass over strike that killed stranded survivors

Washington Congressman Adam Smith said he is set to meet this week with the admiral at the center of a controversial U.S. military strike on a suspected drug‑smuggling boat.

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley gave the order for a second strike on the boat on September 2. The Washington Post reports the second strike killed two survivors seen clinging to the wreckage of the vessel.

“Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat,” Hegseth said.

Smith took issue with that.

“The law of war is that you cannot kill people who are no longer a threat,” Smith said. “And clearly, two wounded people clinging to a sinking boat — there is no plausible argument for how those two people are a threat.”

When asked by KIRO Newsradio if that second strike could be considered a war crime regardless of who issued it, he responded, “It certainly looks like one.”

But Smith said information is only now coming to light, “so we’ve got a lot of digging to do to get to the absolute truth of what happened.”

Lawmakers scrutinize deadly strike amid legality questions

As ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, Smith said he, the committee’s chair, and their two counterparts in the U.S. Senate expect to meet with Bradley, who is commander of U.S. Special Operations, “to get direct information from him on how this all played out.”

Lawmakers opened investigations after The Washington Post reported Hegseth gave a spoken directive to “kill everybody” on the boat, which prompted the second strike.

“The specific details of what order Secretary Hegseth gave and how it played out are something we are now diving into to try to get those answers,” Smith said.

Smith confirms he spoke with Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, over the weekend, but that Caine could not give specifics.

“Ironically, it was a call over Signal, so it was not a secure — it was not a classified — call,” Smith said.

Hegseth was criticized earlier this year for using Signal to exchange information about strikes against Houthis in Yemen.

The boat destroyed on September 2 was the first of more than 20 vessels hit by U.S. forces in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean that have left more than 80 people dead.

Smith, a Democrat, has long been a critic of the operation.

“It is of highly questionable legality, and the White House and the Pentagon have done very little to actually provide transparency on what they’re doing, where it’s going, and what the legal justification is,” Smith said.

The Trump Administration has argued that narcotics smuggled into the U.S. kill tens of thousands of Americans every year, which constitutes an attack. President Donald Trump has declared drug cartels to be foreign terrorist organizations.

“I want those boats taken out,” President Trump said Tuesday, adding, “And if we have to, we’ll attack on land also, just like we attack on sea.”

Read more of Heather Bosch’s stories here.