Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is attempting to distance himself from the U.S. airstrike on September 2 that targeted two shipwrecked men who had survived an earlier U.S. strike on a boat the Pentagon says was carrying drugs, without providing evidence. Legal experts say the strike was likely a war crime. Last week, The Washington Post reported Hegseth had given a verbal order to “kill everybody” on the boat. Hegseth spoke Tuesday during a White House Cabinet meeting.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth: “I watched that first strike live. As you can imagine, at the Department of War, we’ve got a lot of things to do. So I didn’t stick around for the hour and two hours, whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs. So I moved on to my next meeting. A couple of hours later, I learned that that commander had made the — which he had the complete authority to do, and, by the way, Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat.”

Hegseth was sitting right next to President Trump during the three-hour Cabinet meeting, in which Trump appeared to fall asleep several times.
Since September, the U.S. has bombed at least 21 boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, killing more than 80 people.

Meanwhile, the family of a Colombian fisherman killed in a U.S. boat strike on September 15 has filed a complaint against the U.S. with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The family of Alejandro Carranza Medina says he was the victim of an “extrajudicial killing.”

In more news from the region, a bipartisan group of lawmakers have introduced a War Powers Resolution to block the Trump administration from engaging in hostilities against Venezuela without congressional authorization.