Fox News turns on Trump over Caribbean boat strike | UK News

Fox News has taken a swipe at President Donald Trump over the alleged killing of survivors from a boat strike in the Caribbean.

During a live Fox News section, Chief Political Analyst Brit Hume recommended that officers from the Trump administration needs to be held accountable if it is found they ordered the survivors of the boat strike to be killed.

The US launched an assault on a suspected drug boat off the coast of Trinidad on 2 September.

A report by the Washington Post on Friday, 28 November, cited unnamed sources acquainted with the scenario who claimed that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had ordered everybody on board to be killed. After the initial Navy strike, two survivors have been reportedly clinging to the wreckage of the boat.

Admiral Frank Bradley reportedly deemed the pair as reliable targets and thus ordered Hegseth’s directive to be carried out. The Navy then carried out a second strike, which killed the remaining survivors.

The Trump administration has attacked what it claims to be drug-running boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, but no evidence has been offered to back up these allegations. Experts have said that even if the focused boats are transporting unlawful medicine, the legality of the strikes stays unclear.

During his look on Special Report on Monday, 1 December, Hume clarified that the key issue revolves around the intent behind the second assault. He said, “That’s what it comes down to, is what the intention of the second strike was.

“Was it to obliterate the rest of the boat that had been hit but not absolutely destroyed, or was it primarily to eradicate the survivors? If the goal was to eradicate the survivors, that can be a vital issue.

“If they were killed during the destruction of the rest of the boat, if it was sufficiently intact to lead military personnel to believe that the job hadn’t been completed, that’s a different matter.”

Legal specialists have recommended that intentionally concentrating on survivors in a second assault would represent a extreme violation of worldwide law.

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

Former federal prosecutor Harry Litman famous in The New Republic that The Defense Department’s Law of War Manual prohibits declaring “no quarter,” and forbids conducting operations “on the basis that there shall be no survivors,” while also clarifying that “persons placed hors de combat [out of the fight] may not be made the object of attack.”