The Daily - Did a U.S. Boat Strike Amount to a War Crime?

Episode Date: December 3, 2025

Over the past three months, the U.S. military has been firing on boats from South America, killing more than 80 people and prompting Democrats to raise urgent questions about their legality.Now, one of these operations, which killed survivors with a second missile, has prompted congressional Republicans to join those calls for accountability.Charlie Savage, who covers national security for The New York Times, explains the renewed debate and how the administration is justifying its actions.Guest: Charlie Savage, who covers national security and legal policy for The New York Times.Background reading: Lawmakers suggested that a follow-up boat strike could have been a war crime.Amid talk of a war crime, the details and precise sequence of a Sept. 2 attack on a boat in the Caribbean are facing more scrutiny.Photo: Tierney L. Cross/The New York TimesFor more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.  Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. It's been three months since the American military began firing on boats from South America, killing more than 80 people and prompting Democrats to raise urgent questions about whether these attacks might be illegal. But now... We're going to conduct oversight. and we're going to try to get to the facts. New questions about one of those operations in which the military killed survivors with a second missile

have prompted congressional Republicans to join those calls for accountability. There are very serious concerns in Congress about the attacks on the so-called drugboats down in the Caribbean. Today, my colleague Charlie Savage explains the renewed debate and how the administration is justifying its actions. It's Wednesday, December 3rd. Charlie, we had you on the show a couple months ago to talk about the Trump administration's campaign of boat strikes in the Caribbean against boats that they argued were carrying drugs from Venezuela to the United States.

And from the beginning, there were questions about the legality of these attacks, right? And those questions took on new urgency this week with lawmakers, notably Republicans, announcing plans to investigate. And that's where I'd like to start today with the Washington Post story that seems to have kicked all of this off. So the day after Thanksgiving, the Washington Post published a very good story

about the first of Trump's boat attacks way back on September 2nd. Now, that had always been the most questionable of the 21 attacks that have happened so far. And part of the reason for that is that there were some additional complicating details that had come to light in September. including that the boat had turned around before it had attacked,

that there were more missile strikes on the boat before it sank than just the one that was shown in a video that Trump had put out. And The Intercept had reported that there were initial survivors of the first missile strike that died in the subsequent strike. But that was all kind of bare bones. This new story added significant and rich detail about this strike. And among the other things it reported, was that Admiral Frank Bradley, who was running the operation,

had ordered the second strike to kill the survivors of the first one because Secretary of Defense Pete Heggseth had said to kill everyone. This set off a furor that had not happened back in September when the basic outlines of these facts had first come to light. So explain that for a second, Charlie. Why is it that this is now producing this? kind of bipartisan outrage. So to understand that, I think you have to work through the administration's explanation of what it's doing. The administration has put forward a legal theory that this is an

armed conflict. This is a war that Trump has decided we're at war, even though Congress is not authorized one, a war with drug cartels. And that the people on the boat smuggling these drugs supposedly for the drug cartels are not criminals. They are combatants. and a lot of people do not think that is a legitimate interpretation of the law and think this is not an armed conflict. But even if you accept it under the laws of armed conflict very explicitly, you cannot fire upon people who are out of the fight. People who have surrendered, people who are incredibly wounded

and unable to fight you back, or explicitly shipwrecked sailors cannot be fired upon That is a war crime. So based on what you just outlined, this first strike in September that destroys the boat, kills most of the people, but leaves a couple of survivors, that second strike that kills the remaining survivors because of the rules of war about not striking people that basically pose no imminent threat to you seems illegal on its face. And that is why this Washington Post story catches everybody's attention.

What exactly do we know, though, about what Heggseth did or did not do, in relation to that September 2nd strike? Like, what do we know about the order he gave? So Hegsef has acknowledged from the beginning that he authorized a lethal strike on this boat. This was not a capture operation. They weren't aiming to disable the engines and then go arrest the guys.

The aim was to kill the people on the boat, sink the boat, destroy the purported drugs on the boat. So that's not in dispute. But the question is whether the orders he gave contemplated that the first missile wouldn't accomplish all those things and that there might be shipwrecked survivors. And if that happened, should they be killed too? Or was the order silent on that possibility?

But whatever was in those orders, we have been told that Hegeseth gave no additional instructions to Bradley once the attack commenced. In other words, he didn't see or hear that there were initial survivors and then say, something. But this is something Congress needs to figure out. And regardless of what Hegeseth said or intended, the next question is, what did Admiral Bradley understand his orders to be? Is his intent, we want to kill those two people? Does he say anything that leaves a contemporaneous record

that would explain whether he thought he was specifically trying to kill shipwrecked survivors or was just hitting what he thought was a lawful target again, then this starts to get kind of esoteric because what difference does it make if his intent was to specifically kill these people versus destroy the vessel if the same missile is hitting the same object causing the same damage regardless? And this is part of the reason why trying to apply the laws of armed conflict to this situation starts to become very unsatisfactory. Because these rules are written for naval engagements between warships of nation states that have guns, they're flying colors, and if a ship wants to surrender, it can lower its colors and stop firing.

its guns and then it's out of the fight. But this is not a warship. This is a speedboat that may or may not be carrying an illicit consumer product. So basically what you're saying is that if the intent here from Bradley was to simply kill the two remaining survivors,

it would be really pretty clear-cut what he had done and whether it was legal in terms of the laws of war. But if he was aiming to sink the boat or destroy the drugs, which was also part of the initial mandate and order from Hegseth, that's where it gets a bit murkier, right? That's where it gets murkier. Of course, even for that initial order to be lawful, this has to be an armed conflict,

which very, very few people outside of the administration think it is. And so if it's not an armed conflict, the first missile was murder, the second missile was murder, they were all unlawful. How has the administration responded so far? The administration as a whole has defended the entire operation. It is stressed that Heg-Seth did not specifically order the killing of the two initial survivors and has suggested that that is a misinterpretation of what happened. Nevertheless, it has defended the actions of Admiral Bradley in ordering the follow-up strike,

insisting it was lawful. That's the administration as a whole. That said, very interestingly, on Sunday night, President Trump was asked about this by reporters, and he distanced himself from the second strike. No, I wouldn't have wanted that, not a second strike. The first strike was very lethal, it was fine. If there were two people around, but Pete said that didn't happen.

Does that make you? I have great confidence. He said the first one was fine, including the fact that was lethal, but he wouldn't have wanted the second one. Why not? And the suggestion is he has some kind of discomfort with that follow-up strike. This all makes me wonder how this sort of thing would normally work. Like, the legality of these strikes in this kind of detail is the thing at issue. And so I'm curious about who is advising the people involved, like Commander Bradley or Pete Hegseth

about what is legal and what is not in the moment? Well, the way it's supposed to work is the military commanders at each level of the chain are supposed to have

staff, judge-advocate general officers, Jags, who are advising them about the laws of war and what would cross the line. And Pete Hegseth has a general counsel and is part of an administration

that is advised by the Justice Department. But one of the things we know about this operation as it was getting put together in July, August, early September leading up to this initial attack is that the deliberations were very closely held and that few career military lawyers were allowed into the room. There weren't a lot of lawyers, uniform lawyers, non-politically appointed lawyers. being allowed into the deliberations. Pete Hegseth comes up as a platoon leader in war, not a senior commander, and he seems to have acquired a hostility

towards the idea of military lawyers. He talks about them as jagoffs in his memoir. He seems to blame them for rules of engagement that he found to be unduly restrictive about when his troops could open fire on some, someone they saw as a threat. And he seems to misunderstand that the jags are not the ones setting those rules the commanders are.

And he acquires from that, this hostility. And the first thing he does is he fires the top jags of the services. You know, he's been trying to replace them with not career, active duty jags that have come up through the JAG Corps, but with National Guardsmen who are sort of more political officials coming out of states. So, Charlie, what would the legal rationale be for Bradley to order that second strike? Like, what would that be based on? It's hard to answer not knowing the details of the sort of questions that we've been talking about that remain fuzzy.

And one of the issues here that listeners ought to understand is that we now know that behind the scenes, a couple days after this strike, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which is a very powerful node in the executive branch legal system, produced or signed a memo that said it accepted Trump's determination that this is an armed conflict against the drug cartels

and that all this stuff was lawful. And part of the public justification of all this has been, how is it that the cartels are attacking us? They're not attacking us. They're selling an illicit consumer product. That's bad, but it's not an armed attack on us. And the rhetorical justification has been, yes, but tens of thousands of Americans are dying from overdoses each year. And that's equivalent to an attack.

So once it's an armed conflict, you can hit the boat, supposedly. One of the things that this memo says that is different than the public rhetoric, the administration has been putting forward, is that the drugs, the purported cargo on these boats, is a lawful military target. Why? Because the drug cartels could sell those drugs, they could get the profits, and spend them on military equipment to sustain their supposed war efforts against the United States. And so part of this murkiness around what is the reason the U.S. fires on this boat in the first instance keeps firing on it until everyone is dead, then the boat is at the bottom of the ocean, is, was the target of those follow-up strikes especially? Was it the drugs? Was it the boat or was it the people? Was it all of them in some confusing way? Because if Commander Bradley did that second strike in order to target the drugs on the boat and the killing of the two survivors was collateral damage, then theoretically that could be a defense under what the DOJ laid out as kosher, right? Yes. Admiral Bradley is in a much stronger position if that's what he says and if there's contemporaneous evidence backing him up. Again, though, only if you accept in the first place that this is an armed conflict and this is the right.

lens to be bringing to bear on this at all. Because if it's not, they didn't have a right to kill the people in the first place. It sounds like there are compelling reasons why the killing of the survivors of that initial strike could be a war crime if the intent was to kill them, which we do not know. And in fact, there is so much that we don't know that we cannot say it sounds like anything definitively. And because of that, I am reminded of the video that those six Democratic lawmakers released a couple weeks ago, which urged service. members to ignore illegal orders. Given everything that we've discussed, how are service members supposed to understand

what is legal and what is not? It is an extremely difficult dilemma when you're faced with a commander-in-chief who's issuing orders backed by a Justice Department memo that very few people outside of the current executive branch of government think holds water. What are soldiers supposed to do? Right. And just to be clear, when the lawmakers made that video, were they aware of any of this?

Were they talking about this? So one of the interesting things about that video from those lawmakers who are all military intelligence veterans telling soldiers, you should not obey illegal orders, is they don't say what illegal orders they have in mind. So one of the complaints, actually, by the Trump administration, of what are you talking about? Are you saying we've given a legal orders?

legal orders? Which ones? And, you know, it could be something about the fact that Trump has been deploying troops into cities and some of them are acting kind of like police officers. It could be this boat's operation. But the Trump administration responds very fiercely to that video and calls them insurrectionists and opens investigations of them for daring to say this thing, which is actually just illegal truism. And that, I think, is a contributing factor to, to why, as the country's attention is returned to legal controversies surrounding Trump's killing of people on these boats, the reaction has been more fierce now than in September when it was still kind of a new thing that people were trying to wrap their heads around. And this legal cloud has been apparent since early September.

and Congress, controlled by the Republican Party, has not been particularly interested in performing much oversight until now. And so as this effort unfolds in coming days and weeks, it will be interesting to see how broad the focus is, what questions lawmakers ask, and what information they're able to extract. We'll be right back. Charlie, before the break, you told us about these congressional calls for investigation.

What might that look like if it happened? And what power does Congress actually have here? So now that some Republicans on the Armed Services Committees appear to be interested in getting some answers, at least about this second missile strike in this first attack. Congress is therefore awakening. We do not know at this stage how far this oversight effort will go. It could be very searching, it could be very limited. And all of that is going to depend on the appetite of Republicans to make life uncomfortable for the Trump administration, which, as any observer of politics knows,

is not something that is easy for them to do. If they really want to get to the bottom of this, they have a number of things they can ask for and demand and push the limits to try to get. Such as? They can call witnesses and have them give sworn testimony. Hegseth, obviously. Admiral Bradley, obviously.

there are things they could ask for as well the administration has released as we know this sort of 30-second edited surveillance clip that doesn't show the follow-up strikes it doesn't show people surviving the first attack but you know they've got that video in fact the New York Times has filed a lawsuit for the unedited video of that strike

Congress also could demand that video a retired very senior JAG told me then one of the questions that could maybe be parsed through actual evidence is what kind of missile was it that was fired at the boat the second time? Because they can be configured to be anti-personnel or anti-material. Anti-personnel missile can produce a lot of shrapnel to try to kill people, as opposed to one that's trying to produce a big hole in a large object. So, which kind did they shoot? and they have the other kind available. These are all the kinds of sort of evidentiary questions

that if you're really drilling down into the nuances of these nitty-gritty things of what was said and done at each moment, what was the intent, what was the understanding, Congress could demand and then see if the Trump administration is willing to turn over. I just want to understand what Congress can actually do here and what these investigations could even amount to. So, hypothetically, if Congress determines that the military broke the law, what then? So obviously, Congress itself is a political body, and it performs oversight, and it appropriates funds, and it passes laws.

It doesn't prosecute people. It's not its job to bring charges against anyone. Sure. It could cut off funds to the military for further boat strikes if it had the political will, meaning majority vote. to do that in future appropriations bills, it could refuse to confirm Trump appointees until the administration stops doing this thing. It hypothetically thinks it ought to stop doing.

You know, ultimately, in theory, it could impeach Trump and remove him from office. But we all know as a matter of political reality that that's unlikely to happen, even if Democrats retake control of one or both chambers, they won't have the two-thirds necessary to convict in the Senate. What about that DOJ memo that we were talking about, though?

Like, if the military broke the law, but they didn't go outside of the bounds of what that memo authorized, is anybody vulnerable to any consequences? So what you're asking about now is if someone broke the law here, whether it's the entire operation or just this follow-up missile strike, is there a place where theoretically someone could be charged, let's say, with murder or a war crime down the road? And the answer to that is it's very difficult to see where that could happen. The fact is that right now while these actions are happening, the Justice Department's official position is this is lawful. And that you can't prosecute someone just for doing and thing that you yourself, that is the Justice Department, said was lawful at the time. They're relying on your assurances.

You can't bait and switch people. This is a matter of due process. And so this OLC memo, the Justice Department memo, a former head of OLC who teaches at Harvard now named Jack Goldsmith has famously called them, get out of jail free cards, golden shields. You can just write down some nonsense on a piece of paper on OLC letterhead, and suddenly people are free to do whatever that memo says. And there's just not really a check on that. It's just the way the structure, the system is structured. I just want to pause here because what you're saying is kind of remarkable. I mean, you cannot write a contract, for instance, and have two-party sign it that breaks the law and say, well, we have a contract. What you are saying is that if the DOJ writes a memo and says that something is lawful, that protects anybody carrying out orders within the bounds of that memo, even if by any other analysis, those actions are determined to be illegal. Just the fact that that memo exists, it sounds like, protects people from prosecution. Domestic federal prosecution. That's right. This is the power of the Office of Legal Counsel within the Justice Department. And we saw an earlier round of this 20 years ago when after 9-11 the Bush administration had in its Office of Legal Counsel a lawyer named John Yoo who had a idiosyncratically broad view of executive power that most people thought was wrong. And under his view, the president could authorize,

anything he thought was necessary to protect national security, things like wiretapping without warrants, torturing prisoners. These memos are later rescinded, but they were there while this stuff was happening. And when Eric Holder, the liberal attorney general under Barack Obama, comes in in 2009 and opens a criminal investigation into the treatment of detainees by the CIA under the Bush administration, because of this problem of the OLC's assurances at the time, he says, we are only going to look at actions that went beyond the guidance that was blessed by the OLC. So the OLC said you can waterboard people and you waterboarded people, even as everyone else says drowning people is torture and it's illegal.

The OLC said it was okay. We're not going to prosecute you for that. Now, the catch, of course, and this is where we circle back to this conversation about the second strike, is the memo says, apparently, because this is supposedly an armed conflict, strikes that comport with the law of war, the law of armed conflict, are permissible. Right. The second missile strike in the first attack, which kills the shipwrecked survivors of the first missile strike, arguably does not comport with the law of armed conflict. And so that's one place where this particular strike, as opposed to all the others, might be more vulnerable to later legal scrutiny, because especially if there's evidence that Admiral Bradley's specific intent

was to target the still-living crew members, as opposed to the boat or the supposed cargo. That's a point where, despite the OLC memo, you could see a later prosecutor, I guess this would be in the court-martial system, were there the political will to do so, taking a hard look at that. Right. Basically, if the intent was to kill the survivors of that first strike, it arguably would be outside the bounds of that memo and outside the bounds of what is considered legal warfare. So therefore, the people who launched that strike potentially could be prosecuted. Potentially, down the road, if there's no sweeping preemptive pardon. Now, of course, there's also international law. There is a court in the Hague, in the Netherlands, called the

International Criminal Court, and it exists as a standing court to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide. And I should note that we are not a party to the international criminal court. We are not a party. The countries of Venezuela and Columbia, among others, are parties. And so there are circumstances in which, in theory, American officials could be prosecuted in the Hague for actions, let's say, inside Venezuela, against Venezuelans. In the same way right now, the court in the Hague has an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin,

even though Russia is not a member of the treaty that creates the court. for his actions in Ukraine, because Ukraine is a member. But these boats attacks are, for now, at least, all in international waters. And these boats are not flying, as far as we know or have seen on the videos, any country's flag. They're not registered to Venezuela or Colombia. There's little boats. They're not ships. And so without being registered to a country, without being in the country's territory, there's no jurisdiction for the international. International Criminal Court over these attacks.

So nothing, for now, unless this operation spreads to Venezuela, as it might, but for now, nothing on these attacks, including the September 2 attack, would come before the International Criminal Court. Charlie, our conversation today was prompted by, as we discussed, more scrutiny about the second strike on that first boat and whether that violates the rules of armed conflict. But our conversation was not prompted by the question of whether the entire operation, to fire on these boats is illegal, right? And I am curious, as somebody who has been following every turn of this story and is a national security expert, what do you think about this focus very specifically on the second strike? So on the one hand, it is good that people are paying attention. We're seeing congressional oversight committees swinging into action, asking hard questions. We'll see how committed they remain to, you know, getting the answers, but it looks

kind of like the way congressional oversight is supposed to function, and people are interested in something that is objectively very important. On the other hand, the questions of who said what win, with what intent and with what interpretation about the second strike are very narrow once you start really drilling down on it in a way that is arguably distracting from the broader issue that has been apparent from the beginning

and is not limited to the second missile strike, but to all the missile strikes. The United States is engaged in an extraordinary, legally edgy to say the least, operation with literally deadly consequences and the broader issue of is this an armed conflict

is this a war at all hangs over the entire thing and if it's not a war if it's not an armed conflict even if Trump says he's determined that it is one then it's not just those two deaths from that second missile on September 2nd that are at issue.

There have been 21 boat strikes. 83 people have been killed. And if it's not an armed conflict, then all 83 of those killings were arguably just murder. Charlie Savage, thank you so much. Thank you. On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Higseth said that he had watched the September 2nd operation live on video, but said that he, quote, didn't stick around to see the second strike. So you didn't see any survivors, to be clear, after the first strike.

I did not personally see survivors, but I stand because the thing was on fire. It was exploded in fire or smoke. you can't see anything, you got digital, this is called the fog of war. This is what you and the press don't understand. Hexeth also stood by Admiral Frank Bradley's decision to order the second strike. And by the way, Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

I don't want them in our country, I'll be honest with you. Somebody who said, oh, that's not politically correct. I don't care. President Trump unleashed a xenophobic tirade against Somali immigrants on Tuesday. And we're going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. It was an outburst that captured the raw nativism that has animated his approach to immigration. And they complain? playing and do nothing but bitch, we don't want them in our country. Let them go back to

where they came from. The administration has focused on a recent investigation into fraud within the Somali community in Minnesota, where federal prosecutors charged dozens of people with felonies, including accusations that people stole hundreds of millions of dollars from a government program meant to keep children fed during the COVID-19 pandemic. And Matt Van Epps, a Republican former state official and army veteran, won a special election for the House on Tuesday in Tennessee, holding off a surprisingly stiff Democratic challenge in an overwhelmingly Republican district that drew a flood of national attention and money. The result is a boon in the short term for President Trump and the Republican Party, which had worried that its narrow House majority would grow even slimmer. But the relatively tight margin in a deep red district still represents a warning shot

about the party's vulnerabilities ahead of next year's midterms. Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko and Jessica Chung. It was edited by Lizzo Bailin and Paige Cowett. Maintained music by Alicia Beitoupe and Diane Wong and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Special thanks to Julian Barnes. That's it for the Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams.

See you tomorrow.