U.S. Military Killed Boat Strike Survivors for Not Surrendering Correctly

Two men clung to what remained of their capsized boat. One moment, they had been cutting through the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea at a rapid clip. The next, their vessel exploded and was engulfed in fire and shrouded in smoke. The men were shipwrecked, helpless or clearly in distress, six witnesses who saw video of the attack say. The survivors pulled themselves onto the overturned hull as an American aircraft filmed them from above. The men waved their arms.

Minutes ticked by. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. As the men bobbed along, drifting with the current, for some 45 minutes, Adm. Frank Bradley — then the head of Joint Special Operations Command — sought guidance from his top legal adviser. At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on September 2, he turned to Col. Cara Hamaguchi, the staff judge advocate at the secretive JSOC, The Intercept has learned.

Could the U.S. military legally attack them again?

How exactly she responded is not known. But Bradley, according to a lawmaker who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a classified briefing, said that the JSOC staff judge advocate deemed a follow-up strike lawful. In the briefing, Bradley said no one in the room voiced objections before the survivors were killed, according to the lawmaker.

Five people familiar with briefings given by Bradley, including the lawmaker who viewed the video, said that, logically, the survivors must have been waving at the U.S. aircraft flying above them. All interpreted the actions of the men as signaling for help, rescue, or surrender.

“Obviously, we don’t know what they were saying or thinking,” one of the sources said, “but any reasonable person would assume that they saw the aircraft and were signaling either: don’t shoot or help us.”

Raising both hands is a universal sign of surrender for isolated members of armed forces. Under international law, those who surrender — like those who are shipwrecked – are considered hors de combat, the French term for those out of combat, and may not be attacked. The Pentagon’s Law of War Manual is explicit in this regard. “Persons who have been incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack,” reads the guide.

But that’s not how Bradley — now the chief of Special Operations Command, or SOCOM — saw it. Bradley declined to comment to The Intercept, but a U.S. official familiar with his thinking said he did not perceive their waving to be a “two-arm surrender.”

Some 45 minutes after the men had been plunged into the water, a second missile screamed down from the sky on Bradley’s order. Two more missiles followed in rapid succession, sinking the remnants of the boat.

Nothing remained of the men.

Special Operations Command refused to make Hamaguchi available for an interview and declined to answer questions about Hamaguchi’s legal guidance or Bradley’s statements to the member of Congress.

“We are not going to comment on what Admiral Bradley told law makers in a classified hearing. He did inform them that during the strike he sought advice from his lawyer and then made a decision,” Col. Allie Weiskopf, the director of public affairs at Special Operations Command, told The Intercept. Multiple military officials attempted to dissuade The Intercept from naming Hamaguchi in this article, citing safety concerns.

Four former judge advocates — better known in the military as JAGs, as they are lawyers within the judge advocate general’s corps — blasted the supposed defense that the survivors’ waving hands did not constitute a two-arm surrender. Two used the word “ridiculous” to describe it.

“Waving is a way to attract attention. There was no need to kill them,” said Eugene Fidell, who served as a judge advocate in the Coast Guard and is now a senior research scholar at Yale Law School focused on military justice. “We don’t kill people who are doing this. We should have saved them. None of it makes any sense.”

The lawmaker who watched the video footage of the attack expressed skepticism about the U.S. official’s claim. “My impression is that these were two shipwrecked individuals,” they said after viewing the video. “I do think at least one of them used two arms.”

The Intercept was the first outlet to report that the U.S. military killed survivors of the September 2 boat strike in a follow-up attack. Since then, questions have swirled around the exact roles of President Donald Trump, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and Bradley in the operation, and how they arrived at the conclusion that their monthslong campaign of killings in the Caribbean and Pacific is lawful. Military and legal experts have said the strikes are tantamount to murder. But until now, less attention has been paid to the legal guidance Bradley sought.

The legal underpinnings for the campaign of extrajudicial killings that have so far taken the lives of at least 105 civilians began taking shape over the summer, when Trump signed a secret directive ordering the Pentagon to use military force against certain Latin American drug cartels.

A classified opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel claims that narcotics on supposed drug boats are lawful military targets because their cargo generates revenue for cartels whom the Trump administration claims are in a “non-international armed conflict” with the United States. Government officials told The Intercept that the memo was not actually signed by Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser until days after the September 2 attacks. Attached to that secret memo is a similarly secret list of designated terrorist organizations, or DTOs, and an annex containing pertinent findings from the U.S. intelligence community.

In August, Hegseth, the “target engagement authority,” signed an execute order, or EXORD, directing Special Operations forces to sink suspected drug smuggling boats, destroy their cargo, and kill their crews, according to government officials. Pentagon briefers have told U.S. officials that they do not need to positively identify all of those killed in strikes and only need to show a connection to a DTO or affiliate. Those sources say the affiliate label is “quite broad” and some of those killed may have only a tenuous link to a drug smuggling cartel.

Hegseth gave the go-ahead order to Bradley, who presided over the September 2 mission from the JSOC joint operations center at Fort Bragg, according to four government sources. Present with him was Hamaguchi and other JSOC personnel, including his top deputies, and specialists in intelligence, targeting, and munitions. “I wish everybody could be in the room watching our professionals … Adm. Mitch Bradley and others at JSOC. … The deliberative process, the detail, the rigorous, the intel, the legal … that make sure that every one of those drug boats is tied to a designated terrorist organization,” said Hegseth later.

Before the initial strike, Bradley consulted with Hamaguchi, then gave the order to elite SEAL Team 6 operators to attack the four-engine speedboat, according to government sources. Some 45 minutes after that strike, Bradley issued the order for the follow-up attacks after again consulting with Hamaguchi.

Hamaguchi has been present in the JSOC war room for all the boat strikes, unless she delegated to a deputy, according to a SOCOM official. Most of the campaign has been conducted since Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga took command of JSOC in September.

During a recent briefing, Bradley explained that the JSOC staff judge advocate specifically said that the second strike on September 2 was lawful, according to the lawmaker. Bradley said that after initial debate, there was no dissent in the room before the follow-up strike that killed the survivors, that member of Congress told The Intercept.

Trump posted edited footage of that strike on his Truth Social account on September 2. He wrote that the attack was conducted “on my Orders.” After the killings sparked a congressional firestorm, however, Trump and Hegseth distanced themselves from the attack on the survivors. “I wouldn’t have wanted that. Not a second strike,” said the president. The war secretary claimed that he “did not personally see survivors” amid the fire and smoke and had left the room before the second attack was ordered.

Bradley apparently has no reservations about having ordered the attacks. “He’s happy to take responsibility for those decisions,” a SOCOM official told The Intercept.

Hamaguchi, a former communications officer who served in the Army for nine years before she became a judge advocate, is well known within the small group of lawyers who advise special operations units. She was publicly identified as JSOC’s staff judge advocate in materials published by the U.S. Naval War College earlier this year.

Hamaguchi boasts an impeccable reputation according to seven former colleagues, who praised her as “sharp,” “smart,” and “a good person and attorney.” Only two years into her career as an attorney and days after being promoted to major, Hamaguchi found herself providing legal advice concerning a 16-count homicide in Afghanistan. Back in the U.S., she acted as a prosecutor at the sentencing proceedings of Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales. A military jury handed Bales the stiffest sentence possible for his massacre: life in prison without parole.

Most former colleagues of Hamaguchi who spoke with The Intercept expressed surprise or dismay at the prospect of her playing a role in the boat strikes.

It’s possible Hamaguchi voiced some objection or wrote a memorandum delineating her concerns about the September 2 attacks or subsequent strikes. “Without hearing directly from the JAG, it’s impossible to know to a certainty what she said or did,” said Todd Huntley, a former Navy judge advocate who served as a legal adviser on Joint Special Operations task forces conducting drone strikes in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and called Hamaguchi “fantastic, very smart, experienced and professional.”

JAGs are expected to speak up when they have legal concerns. But Huntley said that if someone repeatedly disputed the legal underpinnings of a monthslong campaign, they would not remain in that post long. “When the relationship between a commander and his JAG has broken down to the point where the commander no longer trusts or listens to the JAG’s advice, that JAG would typically be reassigned to a different unit or role within the command. Such a situation might arise if the JAG is seen as always saying ‘no’ to the commander,” he told The Intercept.

Former colleagues also told The Intercept that Hamaguchi is scheduled to retire when her JSOC tour ends in 2026 — but stressed her departure was not premature.

“I would be completely shocked if she thought these strikes were lawful,” said one former Defense Department colleague. “I’m sure she knows this is illegal. She knows that you can’t summarily execute criminal suspects in peacetime and can’t summarily execute criminal suspects during war. Any JAG worth their salt knows this.”

That colleague and four others said specifically that they were saddened to hear Hamaguchi was involved in attacks that all said were extrajudicial killings. Another former colleague said Hamaguchi had previously exhibited a “strong moral compass.” That person added: “I can’t tell you how sad this makes me.”

Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., the chair of the House Armed Services Committee, apparently called for a briefing by the judge advocate present with Bradley during the strike. “I want the lawyer there, too,” Rogers said earlier this month. Rogers’s office did not respond to questions by The Intercept about whether a briefing with Hamaguchi ever occurred.

Six other lawmakers or congressional staff said they were unaware of any briefings by Hamaguchi. Most did not know her by name.

Lawmakers are growing frustrated with what they describe as the War Department’s consistent failure to disclose key information about the attacks. “For months, in multiple briefings, the Department omitted the fact that there were two survivors in the initial September 2^nd strike,” said Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, last week. “We learned the circumstances of the strike from press reports.”

Reed called for the committee to be provided EXORDs; unedited video of all boat strikes; and all audio, transcripts, and chat logs of communications between commanders, aircraft, and others involved in the September 2 strike, among other pertinent information.

Since the execution of the men on September 2, the U.S. has appeared to refrain from killing survivors of subsequent boat strikes. Following an October 16 attack on a semisubmersible in the Caribbean Sea that killed two civilians, two other men were rescued by the U.S. and quickly repatriated to Colombia and Ecuador, respectively. Following three attacks on October 27 that killed 15 people aboard four separate boats, a survivor of a strike was spotted clinging to wreckage, and the U.S. alerted the Mexican Navy. Search teams did not find the man, and he is presumed dead.

“This tells you all you need to know,” said one government official briefed on the strikes. “They didn’t kill the later survivors because they know it was wrong. The first strike was obviously bad. They know it was not just immoral, it was illegal.”