Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the U.S military to carry out an attack on an alleged drug boat on Thursday, killing four occupants, amid the ongoing “double tap” controversy surrounding the Trump administration’s strikes in the Caribbean.
“On Dec. 4, at the direction of Pete Hegseth, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel in international waters operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization,” U.S Southern Command, which oversees the attacks, posted on social media.
“Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting along a known narco-trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed.”
Video footage posted by SouthCom shows a boat speeding across the ocean surface before becoming engulfed in flames.
The latest attack takes the total number of people killed in the Trump administration’s attacks to 86.
The strike came just hours after Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, the Navy SEAL officer who leads U.S. Special Operations Command, showed House and Senate members on the Armed Services and Intelligence Committees footage of the lethal strikes conducted on September 2 and answered questions.
Democratic Rep. Jim Himes, a ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters the footage was “one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service.”
This is a breaking news story, more follows.
