Top Democratic and Republican lawmakers in Congress on Thursday said that the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, had not ordered the military to kill surviving members of a deadly attack on a boat alleged to be carrying drugs in the Caribbean, but differed over whether the double strike was appropriate.
The allegation that Hegseth ordered the killing of survivors sparked bipartisan concern in Washington that he or others involved may have committed a war crime. On Thursday, US navy admiral Frank Bradley, who commanded the attack, and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Dan Caine, appeared before the House and Senate’s armed services and intelligence committees for a closed briefing in which they showed video and discussed the attack with lawmakers.
Strike comes amid congressional turmoil over legality of US attacks on suspected drug smugglers
The Pentagon announced on Thursday that the US military had conducted another deadly strike on a boat suspected of carrying illegal narcotics, killing four men in the eastern Pacific, as questions mount over the legality of the attacks.
Video of the new strike was posted on social media by the US southern command, based in Florida, with a statement saying that, at the direction of Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, “Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel in international waters operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization”.
Up to 150,000 residents of El Fasher are missing since North Darfur capital fell to paramilitary Rapid Support Forces
The Sudanese city of El Fasher resembles a “massive crime scene”, with large piles of bodies heaped throughout its streets as the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) work to destroy evidence of the scale of their massacre.
Six weeks after the RSF seized the city, corpses have been gathered together in scores of piles to await burial in mass graves or cremated in huge pits, analysis indicates.
Two men who survived a US airstrike on a suspected drug smuggling boat in the Caribbean clung to the wreckage for an hour before they were killed in a second attack, according to a video of the episode shown to senators in Washington.
The men were shirtless, unarmed and carried no visible radio or other communications equipment. They also appeared to have no idea what had just hit them, or that the US military was weighing whether to finish them off, two sources familiar with the recording told Reuters.
Report says ‘systemic failures’ led to collapse of trial, but found no evidence of UK government interference
Parliament’s security committee has criticised prosecutors for pulling their charges against two men accused of spying for Beijing, in a damning report that concluded the handling of the case was “shambolic”.
MPs said that a process “beset by confusion and misaligned expectations” and “inadequate” communication between the government and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had contributed to the collapse of the trial, while several “opportunities to correct course were missed”.
It was “unclear” why the CPS had concluded that a July 2024 ruling concerning a Bulgarian spy ring “altered the legal landscape so significantly” that they had to change their approach.
It was “surprised” the CPS had deemed the government’s evidence insufficient to put to a jury when it had set out how China “posed a range of threats to the United Kingdom’s national security” that “amounted to a more general active threat”.
The government “did not have sufficiently clear processes for escalating issues where there was a lack of clarity” and “the level of senior oversight” from cabinet ministers and national security advisers “was insufficiently robust”.
