Video footage of a highly controversial second strike on an alleged drug boat in September was shown to lawmakers in Washington, shocking and disgusting some, while others defended the decision to target survivors.
Members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate and House Armed Services committees viewed the footage in a closed-door meeting with military brass involved in the strikes. The video showed a suspected drug boat operating in the Caribbean, being struck, and then being struck again as two survivors appeared to cling to wreckage.
“This is a big, big problem, and we need a full investigation,” Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., told The New Republic in an interview. Smith, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, was told that the survivors were “capable of returning to the fight.” He disagrees, though he contends that the boats may have been transporting drugs.
“It looks like two classically shipwrecked people,” Smith said, calling it a “highly questionable decision that these two people on that obviously incapacitated vessel were still in any kind of fight.”
Fellow lawmakers Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., and Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., were appalled by the footage. Himes called it “one of the most troubling scenes I’ve ever seen in my time in public service.” Reed said he was “deeply disturbed” by the video.
“The Department of Defense has no choice but to release the complete, unedited footage of the September 2 strike, as the President has agreed to do,” Reed said.
Republicans had a different take. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. called the second strike “righteous” and “highly lawful and lethal.” Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Ark., said the strikes were carried out in a “highly professional manner.”
Controversy around the second strikes on the survivors has continued to plague the Trump administration, with some calling it a war crime.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said it came about during “the fog of war,” while Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called it “self-defense.”
Volker Türk, the U.N.’s human rights chief, said there was “no justification” for the strikes. “These attacks – and their mounting human cost – are unacceptable,” Türk said in October.
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