Hegseth and Rubio are expected back on Capitol Hill as questions mount over boat strikes

WASHINGTON– WASHINGTON (AP) — Top national security officials in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet are expected back on Capitol Hill Tuesday as questions mount over the rapid escalation of U.S. military force and deadly boat strikes in international waters near Venezuela.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others are expected to brief members of the House and Senate as part of congressional investigations into a September military strike that killed two survivors of an earlier attack on a boat carrying cocaine in the Caribbean. Lawmakers scrutinized the Sept. 2 attack as they considered the rationale for a broader U.S. military buildup in the region, which appears increasingly directed toward Venezuela. Ahead of the briefings, the US military said Monday evening it had attacked three more boats suspected of drug trafficking in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing eight people.

“We have thousands of troops and our largest aircraft carrier in the Caribbean — but no explanation, no explanation of what Trump is trying to accomplish,” said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York.

The closed-door sessions come as the United States builds warships, flies fighter jets near Venezuelan airspace and seizes an oil tanker as part of its campaign against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who has insisted that the real goal of U.S. military operations is to force him from office. The Republican Trump administration has not sought any congressional authorization to act against Venezuela. But lawmakers opposed to military incursions are pushing the war powers’ resolutions toward a potential vote this week.

All of this raises pointed questions that Hegseth and others will be forced to answer. Experts say the administration’s go-it-alone approach without Congress has led to problematic military actions, including the strike that killed two people who had climbed onto part of a boat that was partially destroyed in an initial attack.

“If this is not a war against Venezuela, then we are using armed force against civilians who are just committing crimes,” said John Yoo, a Berkeley law professor who helped craft the legal arguments for President George W. Bush’s administration and justify aggressive interrogations after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “Then this issue, this concern, becomes really pronounced. You know, you’re shooting civilians. there is no military objective to this.”

Yet in the first months, Congress received only a thin trickle of information about why and how the US military’s campaign destroyed more than 20 boats and killed at least 95 people. Sometimes, lawmakers learned about the strikes on social media after the Pentagon posted videos of boats catching fire.

Congress is now requiring — including in language included in an annual military policy bill — that the Pentagon release video of that initial operation to lawmakers.

For some, the images became a case study demonstrating the flawed logic of the entire campaign.

“The American public should see this. I think shooting unarmed people wading in the water, clinging to wreckage, is not who we are as a people,” said Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican who has been an outspoken critic of the campaign. He added: “You can’t say you’re at war and say, ‘We’re not going to give any due process to anyone and blow people up without any kind of evidence.'”

Hegseth told lawmakers last week that he was still deciding whether to release the footage.

Still, many prominent Republicans support the campaign. Senator Jim Risch, Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, last week called the attacks “absolutely, totally and 100 percent legal under American law and international law” and said many American lives were saved by ensuring the drugs did not reach the United States.

But as lawmakers dug into the details of the Sept. 2 strike, inconsistencies emerged in the Trump administration’s explanation of the attack, which the Pentagon initially tried to dismiss as a “completely false” narrative.

Trump argued that the strike that killed survivors was justified because people were trying to overturn the boat. Several Republican lawmakers also made that argument, saying it showed the two survivors were trying to stay in the fight rather than surrender.

However, Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley, who ordered the second strike while commanding the special forces soldiers who led it, acknowledged in private briefings on Capitol Hill last week that even if the two had tried to overturn the boat, they were unlikely to succeed. That’s according to several people who participated in the briefings or were aware of them and spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss them.

The two people had gotten on the overturned boat, made no radio or cell phone calls for backup and were waving, Bradley told lawmakers. The Navy admiral consulted a military lawyer, then ordered the second strike because drugs were believed to be in the boat’s hull and the mission was to ensure it was destroyed.

Experts say the strike appears to run counter to the Pentagon’s laws of war manual, which states that “orders to fire on the castaways would clearly be illegal.”

“The boat was damaged, it overturned and there was no power,” said Michael Schmitt, a former Air Force attorney and professor emeritus at the U.S. Naval War College. “I don’t care if another boat comes to rescue them. They’re shipwrecked.”

The argument at the heart of Trump’s campaign — that drugs destined for the United States amount to an attack on American lives — has led lawmakers to try to analyze whether the laws were violated and, more broadly, what Trump’s goals are with Venezuela.

In addition to Hegseth and Rubio’s briefings on Tuesday, Bradley is also expected to appear on Wednesday for classified briefings with the Senate and House Armed Services Committees.

Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina, said he wanted to “really understand what action, what intelligence they were acting on and whether or not they were respecting the laws of war, the laws of the sea.”