Fox’s Brit Hume Says Trump Administration Will Have ‘A Big Problem’ if It Ordered Boat Survivors to Be Killed

Fox News Chief Political Analyst Brit Hume said officials in the Trump administration will have to answer for their actions if they are found to have ordered survivors of a boat strike in the Caribbean to be killed.

On Sept. 2, the U.S. bombed an alleged drug boat off the coast of Trinidad. According to a Washington Post report published Friday, anonymous sources familiar with the matter said Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered everyone aboard killed. After the first strike, which was conducted by the Navy, two survivors remained, clinging to the wreckage. Admiral Frank Bradley reportedly deemed that the survivors were legitimate targets and ordered that Hegseth’s directive be carried out. The Navy carried out a second strike and killed the survivors.

The Trump administration has been bombing what it alleges are drug-running boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, but has provided no evidence for the claims. Experts have said even if the boats in question are carrying illegal drugs, the strikes themselves are legally dubious.

Appearing on Monday’s Special Report, Hume claimed the issue comes down to the intention of the second strike:

That’s what it comes down to, is what the intention of the second strike was. Was it to demolish the rest of the boat that had been hit but not completely destroyed, or for was it for the principal purpose of eliminating the survivors?

Eliminating the survivors would be a big problem if that’s what it was all about. If they were killed in the course of the rest of the boat being destroyed, if it was sufficiently intact caused military personnel to think that the job had not been finished, that’s another matter.

Legal analysts have said broadly that a second strike to kill survivors would flatly violate the law.

“You can only use lethal force in circumstances where there is an imminent threat — imminent like now — to life or really serious injury,” Michael Schmitt, a former Air Force lawyer and professor emeritus at the U.S. Naval War College, told PBS.

Meanwhile, former federal prosecutor Harry Litman wrote in The New Republic, The Defense Department’s Law of War Manual prohibits declaring ‘no quarter,’ forbids conducting operations ‘on the basis that there shall be no survivors,’ and states unequivocally that ‘persons placed hors de combat [out of the fight] may not be made the object of attack.'”

Watch above via Fox News.

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