“I think it’s really important that this video be made public,” Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) said today on Face the Nation. Himes was referring to a video of the September 2 U.S. military strike on a small boat with 11 people on it. In that attack, the first strike broke the boat apart and set it on fire. The strike killed nine people but left two alive, clinging to the remains of the vessel.
“It’s not lost on anyone, of course, that the interpretation of the video, which, you know, six or seven of us had an opportunity to see last week, broke down precisely on party lines. And so this is an instance in which I think the American public needs to judge for itself.”
Himes said he knew how the public would react because it left him profoundly shaken, even though as the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, he has “spent years looking at videos of lethal action taken,” including against terrorists. Himes said he realizes that “there’s a certain amount of sympathy out there for going after drug runners. But,” he added, “I think it’s really important that people see what it looks like when the full force of the United States military is turned on two guys who are clinging to a piece of wood and about to go under, just so that they have sort of a visceral feel for what it is that we’re doing.”
On Friday, Julian E. Barnes and Charlie Savage of the New York Times reported that those who have seen the video reported that the two survivors of the first strike were waving to something overhead before the second strike killed them. The journalists also note that, as there had been no announcement of the administration’s new plan to strike alleged drug traffickers rather than stopping them and turning their operators over to law enforcement, the men had no way of knowing they were under attack.
Some of those who saw the video thought the men were waving to be rescued. Those who support President Donald J. Trump’s argument that the civilians potentially trafficking drugs are enemy combatants—an argument legal analysts widely reject—say the men could have been trying to wave to other alleged drug traffickers to come get them and salvage the cocaine on the boat, although there were no other boats or aircraft in visual range.
Also on Friday, Natasha Bertrand of CNN reported that the boat the U.S. military struck on September 2 was not, in fact, headed for the U.S., a claim from the president that had always seemed doubtful because of how far away from the U.S. the small boats the U.S. has been hitting are. Instead, Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, who was overseeing Special Operations on that day, told Congress that the intelligence he received said the boat was on its way to meet a larger vessel bound for Suriname, a small South American country to the east of Venezuela, to transfer drugs to it. Bradley told the lawmakers that the military could not find the second, larger vessel.
According to U.S. drug enforcement officials, drugs trafficked through Suriname generally are bound for Europe. Bradley also confirmed that after the people on the boat appeared to see American aircraft, they had turned the boat back toward land.
Bill Kristol of The Bulwark wrote: “If the Sep. 2 boat really had ‘narco-terrorists’ on board, questioning the survivors would have been a way to learn about how the organization worked, where more drugs were stashed, etc. But this isn’t a counter-terrorism campaign. It’s a shooting gallery with helpless targets.”
In a speech at the the Reagan National Defense Forum at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute in California yesterday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told attendees: “The war department will not be distracted by democracy building, interventionism, undefined wars, regime change, climate change, woke moralizing and feckless nation building.” He said that Trump has the power to take military action “as he sees fit” to defend the U.S., and defended the strikes on small boats off the coast of Venezuela, including the strikes of September 2.
Democrats and some Republicans are not okay with Hegseth’s assertion of the president’s power to strike the boats without input from Congress. They have been calling for the release of the September 2 video since they saw it on Thursday. Amelia Benavides-Colón of NOTUS reported today that Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) told MS NOW he has already talked to the chairs of the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committees—he sits on both—about using a subpoena to get the video released.
Representative Adam Smith (D-WA), the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, today told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News: “It seems pretty clear they don’t want to release this video because they don’t want people to see it, because it’s very, very difficult to justify.”
When asked if he would make the footage public, Hegseth told the defense forum: “Whatever we were to decide to release, we’d have to be very responsible about reviewing that right now.”
Coming less than a week after the release of a damning report from the inspector general of the Defense Department about Hegseth’s use of the non-secure messaging app Signal, this rings hollow. After the chair and ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee requested an investigation, the acting inspector general, Steven A. Stebbins, reviewed Hegseth’s use of Signal in a March chat revealed by editor in chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg, who had been inadvertently included in it.
Stebbins’s report, released to the public on December 2, concluded that Hegseth “sent sensitive, nonpublic, operational information” over Signal on his personal cell phone, against Department of Defense policy. It explained that U.S. Central Command, whose area of responsibility includes the Middle East, Central Asia, and parts of South Asia, sent Hegseth seven emails classified as secret and not releasable to foreign nationals (SECRET/NOFORN) before and during a set of strikes on Houthi militants in Yemen on March 14 and 15. Hegseth transmitted the information in them, including details about targets, weapons packages, aircraft, and strike times, to the people on the Signal chat.
The defense secretary has the authority to declassify information, and Hegseth claimed he had done so. He said he determined the material he shared didn’t have to be classified because “there were no details that would endanger our troops or the mission.” On Wednesday, the day after the report came out, Hegseth relied on his authority to declassify material to claim he had not shared anything inappropriately and that the report had cleared him. “No classified information. Total exoneration,” he wrote on social media. “Thank you for your attention to this IG report.”
But while the inspector general acknowledged that, by virtue of his position, Hegseth had the power to declassify information and thus avoid consequences for sharing such information, he nonetheless concluded that “if this information had fallen into the hands of U.S. adversaries, Houthi forces might have been able to counter U.S. forces or reposition personnel and assets to avoid planned U.S. strikes. Even though these events did not ultimately occur, the Secretary’s actions created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots.”
Hegseth refused to cooperate with the investigation, refusing either to talk to Stebbins or to let the inspector general have access to his phone. For information about the messaging, Stebbins had to rely on The Atlantic’s publication of the messages. The article showed messages the printout offered by the Defense Department didn’t have because Signal had been set to delete them—another breach of policy, which requires that official records be retained.
Representative Smith’s suggestion that the White House and Hegseth don’t want people to see the September 2 video seems more likely than Hegseth’s concern about being “very responsible” about reviewing the video footage.
Although American lawmakers are deeply troubled with strikes that seem illegal and may be war crimes, Russian officials are happy with U.S. foreign policy. They welcomed the National Security Strategy the Trump administration released on Thursday, saying that “[t]he adjustments we’re seeing...are largely consistent with our vision.”
That document announced the U.S. will back away from the global alliances formed in the wake of World War II and called for making sure the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the organization that has opposed first Soviet and now Russian aggression since 1949, doesn’t continue to expand. The administration’s document calls for a world dominated not by a rules-based international order in which countries must respect each other’s sovereignty, but by a few major powers that control weaker nations in their sphere of influence.
There has been an outcry over the National Security Strategy, with Europeans and other U.S. allies warning that they can no longer trust the U.S. Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk posted on social media: “Dear American friends, Europe is your closest ally, not your problem. And we have common enemies. At least that’s how it has been in the last 80 years. We need to stick to this, this is the only reasonable strategy of our common security. Unless something has changed.”
But former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul posted on social media yesterday: “At a moment in American politics in which Trump has very low approval ratings, Democrats are winning elections, many predict a blue wave in 2026 & a Democratic president in 2028, and a solid majority of Americans support NATO, it would be imprudent to get too fatalistic about the death of Transatlantic relations because of an incoherent National Security Strategy written by a small group in the Trump administration. Play the long game.”
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