(RNS) — Archbishop Timothy Broglio, who heads the Catholic Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA, said in a statement Wednesday (Dec. 3) that an order to kill survivors of an attack by U.S. forces on a boat in the Caribbean would be wrong if they posed no immediate danger to those forces.
To deliberately kill “survivors on a vessel who pose no immediate lethal threat to our armed forces,” Broglio said, is “illegal and immoral.” He explained that “the moral principle forbidding the intentional killing of noncombatants is inviolable.”
Last week, The Washington Post reported that on Sept. 2, in the first of a wave of attacks on alleged drug traffickers, who the Trump administration says were headed towards the United States, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered that all people on the boat be killed, resulting in a second strike that killed two survivors of the first strike.
Since then, the Trump administration has said that Adm. Frank Bradley, who oversaw the operation, ordered the second strike to sink the boat. Bradley is expected to appear before Congress on Thursday. Some legal experts, including a group of former military judge advocate generals, have said that if The Washington Post’s reports are true, then the act was a war crime.
“No one can ever be ordered to commit an immoral act, and even those suspected of committing a crime are entitled to due process under the law,” wrote Broglio.
Broglio called on political and military leaders “to respect the …