US President Donald Trump will hold a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, as the military operation that killed the survivors of an airstrike has come under bipartisan scrutiny. According to the White House, Navy Vice Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley ordered the second strike and was “within his authority and the law.”
The US military struck a boat in the Caribbean on September 2, as part of its ongoing military campaign against drug-trafficking networks. According to a Washington Post report, two people who had survived the first strike were killed in what is known as a double-tap strike.
Clearly unlawful: experts
Even as the Trump administration insists that it was lawful for the US military to kill survivors of its air strike, experts in the military code say this was clearly illegal.
“I can’t imagine anyone, no matter what the circumstance, believing it is appropriate to kill people who are clinging to a boat in the water,” Michael Schmitt, a former Air Force lawyer and professor emeritus at the US Naval War College, told The Associated Press. “That is clearly unlawful.”
Brian Finucane, a senior adviser with the International Crisis Group and a former State Department lawyer, also expressed similar views.
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“The term for a premeditated killing outside of armed conflict is murder,” Finucane told AP, adding that US military personnel could be prosecuted in American courts. “Murder on the high seas is a crime,” he said.
“Conspiracy to commit murder outside of the United States is a crime. And under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Article 118 makes murder an offense.”
AP also noted that the Pentagon’s own manual on the laws of war says, “orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.”
House and Senate to investigate the killings
Leaders of the Armed Services committees in both the House and Senate have opened investigations into the killing of the two survivors.
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Republican Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, chairman of the Senate’s committee, and its top Democrat, Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed, said the committee “will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”
The revelation about the double-tap strike came more than a week after six Democratic lawmakers, all of them veterans of the armed services and intelligence community, posted a video on social media encouraging US service members and intelligence community members to refuse orders if those orders were unlawful.
Trump and many Republicans heavily criticized the video, and the US President described it as “seditious behaviour, punishable by death.”
What Trump administration said about the strike
Hegseth had initially rejected the report of the double tap strike and called it “fake news” on social media, saying the boat strikes are “in compliance with the law of armed conflict — and approved by the best military and civilian lawyers, up and down the chain of command.”
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But on Sunday, Trump said the administration “will look into” it, but added that “I wouldn’t have wanted that — not a second strike.”
He noted that Hegseth told him “he did not order the death of those two men.”
However, on Monday, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt confirmed that a second strike was conducted and insisted it was done “in self-defense” and in accordance with the laws of armed conflict.
Leavitt said Bradley had ordered the second strike and “was well within his authority to do so.” She also denied that Hegseth said to leave no survivors.
