Reason: “I did not personally see survivors,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday. “The thing was on fire. It exploded, there’s fire, there’s smoke….This is called the fog of war.”
Financial Times: Speaking during a televised cabinet meeting at the White House, Trump said the defence secretary was doing a “great job”, while Hegseth justified Washington’s military campaign against alleged drug boats. “Narco-terrorists know you can’t bring drugs through the water and eventually on land if necessary, to the American people. We will eliminate that threat,” he said.
The Independent: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday continued what appears to be a deliberate effort to blame a veteran naval officer for the order to launch a second missile strike on an alleged drug-running boat that killed two survivors of an earlier missile hit…
Hegseth added: “We always have the back of our commanders who are making decisions in difficult situations, and we do in this case and all these strikes, they’re making judgment calls and ensuring that they defend the American people. They’ve done the right things. We’ll keep doing that, and we have their backs.”
During a subsequent question-and-answer session with reporters, Hegseth acknowledged that he had given the order for the first missile hit on the boat but claimed he’d already left the room when Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, the commanding officer who oversaw the mission carried out by the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, ordered a second missile fired on the wreckage.
“I watched that first strike live, as you can imagine, at the Department of War, we got a lot of things to do, so I didn’t stick around … a couple of hours later, I learned that that commander had made … the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat,” Hegseth said.
The Hill: Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) on Tuesday slammed President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth following their latest remarks regarding a strike on survivors clinging to the wreckage of an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean.
“This is the biggest crowd of wimps you’ve ever seen,” Warner, who serves as vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said during a Tuesday appearance on MS NOW’s “The Briefing” when asked about the “double tap” attack.
Esquire: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth may not have noticed, but other Very Important People in the employ of this administration have begun to flee his presence the way women used to in various Georgetown bistros. The drumbeats are getting louder. His explanations for his campaign of piracy and murder across the Spanish Main are getting less and less believable, and they didn’t start in a good place.
