An Explosion, Then Survivors: Military Officers Show Lawmakers Video of Sept. 2 Boat Attack

Two survivors of the attack were said to struggle to cling to the boat before a second strike. After the briefing with lawmakers, the military disclosed a boat strike on Thursday that killed four people.

The video that key lawmakers viewed on Thursday showed the first strike on Sept. 2, a fiery explosion that destroyed most of a boat in the Caribbean Sea. A black plume filled the air.

When the smoke finally cleared about 30 minutes later, the front portion of the boat was overturned but still afloat, according to lawmakers and congressional staff who viewed the video or were briefed on it. Two survivors, shirtless, clung to the hull, tried unsuccessfully to flip it back over, then climbed on it and slipped off into the water, over and over.

Then Adm. Frank M. Bradley, commander of the operation, gave an order for a follow-up strike. Three flashes of light filled the video screen. And the men were gone.

In the briefings, military officials are said to have told lawmakers they assumed the hull might be afloat because it still contained packs of cocaine. They thought that the survivors might eventually have managed to float back to Venezuela, allowing them to try again to deliver that cocaine, or that another boat could come retrieve it. They assumed the survivors could be communicating.

But the video did not show any radios or satellite phones, according to the people familiar with the briefings, and a surveillance plane apparently did not spot any nearby boat.

Amid preparations for the briefing, multiple U.S. officials had told The Times that they had been told that one of the survivors had radioed for help, but the people said remarks from Admiral Bradley about communications were instead purely speculative. The reason for the disconnect was not clear.

After a day of scrutiny over the boat strikes, U.S. Southern Command on Thursday evening announced that the military had killed four more people in a 22nd boat attack that day, in the Eastern Pacific. In a social media post with an accompanying video, Southern Command said that the strike on the vessel was carried out at the direction of Mr. Hegseth.

Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined Admiral Bradley for the closed-door briefings earlier in the day with leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, as well as military appropriators, about the decision to kill the initial survivors in a follow-up strike.

It has been at the center of a debate over whether the order was a war crime because the laws of armed conflict forbid targeting enemies who have been shipwrecked and are out of the fight. The debate has swollen since a Nov. 28 article in The Washington Post said that Admiral Bradley ordered the follow-up strike because Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had given him a spoken directive to kill everyone.

But while the order was for a lethal mission, the admiral denied that Mr. Hegseth had told him to give an order not to grant quarter, meaning kill enemies who were out of the fight. Instead, he insisted that the follow-up strike was lawful, in part, according to people familiar with the briefings, because of the purported risk that cocaine might have remained.

Some Republicans and Democrats left the closed-door meetings drawing starkly different conclusions after watching the unedited video of the initial strike and the follow-ups on Sept. 2.

Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called the attack “righteous” and “highly lawful and lethal.” He said the video showed two survivors trying to flip a boat “loaded with drugs bound for the United States.”

The follow-up missiles were “exactly what we’d expect our military commanders to do,” Mr. Cotton added.

Representative Rick Crawford, Republican of Arkansas and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said there was “no doubt” in his mind that the Defense Department was carrying out the strikes in a “highly professional manner.”

But Democrats appeared even more concerned about the campaign against drug smugglers that to date has included strikes on more than 20 vessels in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean that have killed 87 people.

Several Democrats characterized the unedited video of the Sept. 2 attack as “disturbing” and called for its public release. They said the footage only prompted more questions that the Trump administration needed to answer.

Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who for years has been read in on sensitive counterterrorism and covert operations, told reporters the video was “one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service.”

“You have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion with a destroyed vessel who were killed by the United States,” he said.

Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that the briefing “confirmed my worst fears about the nature of the Trump administration’s military activities.”

Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has raised questions about the decision to attack the survivors. He did not respond to questions as he left the briefing on Thursday.

Democrats have been highly skeptical of the campaign, arguing that all of the boat attacks amount to extrajudicial killing or even murder. Several said after the briefings on Thursday that they wanted Mr. Hegseth to testify about the administration’s policy of carrying out lethal military attacks on boats it says are carrying drugs, rather than allowing the Coast Guard to intercept the alleged traffickers.

“If President Trump can pardon a convicted narco-terrorist trafficker, how does this campaign where we are targeting and killing folks on the open ocean to prevent their trafficking of drugs anywhere, how is that legitimate?” Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, said after the briefing, referring to Mr. Trump’s decision to pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras.

Lawmakers were expected to press General Caine and Admiral Bradley on a range of questions about their mission, including about the original order from Mr. Hegseth that called for the boats to be sunk, the alleged drugs to be destroyed and the people on the boats to be killed.

The lawmakers were also expected to drill down on the military’s planning for what to do with survivors, the approval of those plans and the reasons Admiral Bradley thought that a follow-up strike was justified.

Military officials have said that the survivors were a legitimate target. Legal experts have questioned that.

While top Republicans on Thursday rejected the idea that the follow-up strike on Sept. 2 constituted a war crime, their Democratic counterparts declined to weigh in, saying they wanted more information from the Trump administration.

“I can’t think of a more serious accusation that could be made,” said Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “I’m not going to make a judgment on that until I have all the information.”

The questions surrounding the Sept. 2 strike have heightened scrutiny of Mr. Hegseth and Admiral Bradley. Current and former military officers have rallied to the admiral’s defense, worried that he might be held singularly responsible for killing the survivors.

William McRaven, the retired admiral who oversaw the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, said on Thursday that while he did not know details of the strike, he had deep trust in Admiral Bradley, whom he called “one of the finest officers I ever served with.”

“In the 30 years that I have known Mitch, he has always displayed a strong moral compass, impeccable character — and someone I trusted to do the right thing under even the most difficult of circumstances,” Admiral McRaven said.

Dave Philipps and Robert Jimison contributed reporting.

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