Hegseth Defense Collapses as Dems
Reveal Horrific Video Strike Details
The ranking Democrat on the House
Armed Services Committee tells TNR after watching the video: “This is a big,
big problem.”
Members
of Congress were just permitted to view the video of the second boat-bombing strike that’s consuming Washington in controversy,
during a classified briefing with Admiral Frank Bradley, who oversaw the
operation. What they saw was deeply unnerving. And it pushes Defense Secretary
Pete Hegseth’s story closer to collapse.
Representative
Adam Smith, ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in an
interview that the video of the second strike—which killed two men who’d been
clinging to the wreckage of a boat destroyed in an earlier strike—badly
undermines Hegseth’s stance in this scandal.
“This
did not reduce my concerns at all—or anyone else’s,” Smith told me. “This is a
big, big problem, and we need a full investigation.”
Smith
said the video shows two men, sitting without shirts, atop a portion of a
capsized boat that was still above water. That portion, Smith said, could
barely have fit four people.
“It
looks like two classically shipwrecked people,” Smith told me. But in the
briefing, lawmakers were told that “it was judged that these two people were
capable of returning to the fight,” Smith added. He called it a “highly
questionable decision that these two people on that obviously incapacitated
vessel were still in any kind of fight.”
Lawmakers
pressed Bradley for a “considerable period of time” on the obviously
incapacitated nature of the two men, Smith says. And the response was deeply
unnerving. “The broader assumption that they were operating off of was that the
drugs could still conceivably be on that boat, even though you could not see
them,” Smith said, “and it was still conceivable that these two people were
going to continue on their mission of transmitting those drugs.”
To
be clear on what this means: The underlying claim by Trump and the
administration is that all of the more than 80 people killed on these boats are
waging war against the United States. They are “narco-terrorists,” in this
designation. But this very idea—that these people are engaged in armed conflict
with our country—is itself broadly dismissed by
most legal experts. They should be subject to police action, these experts say,
but not summary military execution, and Trump has effectively granted himself
the power to execute civilians in international waters.
Yet
here it gets even worse. The laws of war generally prohibit the killing of
people who are no longer “in the fight” in any meaningful sense, specifically
including the shipwrecked. But these lawmakers were told in the closed-door
briefing that the two men were still deemed to be “in the fight” by virtue of
the fact that there could have been still-transmittable drugs
in the capsized and wrecked boat, Smith says. And that those two men sitting
atop the wreckage could have continued with their delivery of
them.
“The
evidence that I’ve seen absolutely demands a further and continued
investigation,” Smith told me. “It strains credibility to say that they were
still in the fight.”
This
badly undermines the story Hegseth has told. He has said that he did not see the two men
before the second strike was ordered, suggesting both that he’d gone off to do
other things and that the “fog of war” had prevented a clear viewing of the two
men.
Obviously
what these lawmakers saw contradicts the latter suggestion: The two men were,
in Smith’s telling, very visible, so the “fog of war” line appears to be
nonsense. And Hegseth’s implication that the strike was justified due to
confusion about the men’s status also appears to be in profound doubt.
Republicans
who have seen the video have insisted this was all lawful. Senator Tom Cotton,
for instance, said it showed the
two survivors attempting to flip a boat “loaded with drugs bound for the United
States.” But if Smith’s account of the video is correct, that’s in doubt: The
boat looked incapacitated and the drugs weren’t in fact visible.
The
military officials stressed in the briefing that Hegseth never directly ordered
them to “kill them all,” meaning all the people on board, something that was
implied by Washington Post reporting and that Hegseth denied
to Trump. And they confirmed that Hegseth didn’t give the direct order for the
second strike, Smith says.
But
they did say that Hegseth’s declared mission was to kill all 11 people, Smith
notes. “It was, ‘Destroy the drugs, kill all 11 people on board,’” Smith told
me. “It is not that inaccurate to say that the rules of
engagement from Hegseth were, ‘kill all 11 people on that boat.’” And so, by
all indications, that second strike appears to have been ordered to comply with
Hegseth’s command.
Smith
did confirm that he’s “somewhat satisfied” by the intelligence he saw that the
boat originally did have drugs on it. But again, the idea that any of these
people, even if they were trafficking drugs, are “in the fight”—in the sense of
waging war against the United States—is already indefensible to begin with.
“They
have an unbelievably broad definition of what ‘the fight’ is,” Smith said, and
in that context, the order to kill all 11 people on the boat, no matter what,
looks even worse: “It’s bad.”
Another
Democrat, Representative Jim Himes, seconds this interpretation. “You have two
individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion with a destroyed
vessel who were killed by the United States,” he said.
Importantly,
Smith told me that he and others urged military officials to release the video.
“I think that video should be public,” Smith said, adding that he also wants to
see the much-discussed legal memo supposedly authorizing the strikes released
as well. But the military officials said public release isn’t their call. So
now the pressure should intensify on Trump and Hegseth to authorize release of
both.
There’s
also been some discussion of
radio communications that the two men may have sent for help. The idea is
supposed to be that if they could get assistance, they could get back “in the
fight,” meaning they were legit targets. But Smith said the officials confirmed
to lawmakers they have no recording of these communications. So this piece of
support for the Hegseth-Trump stance may not really exist.
Brian
Finucane, a former State Department lawyer, says the entire operation is
illegal, but that a full investigation could establish more clearly
whether this particular strike deliberately targeted the men or just targeted
the boat. From what we’re now learning from Smith and others, it clearly seems
like the former.
“Based
on the descriptions of lawmakers, it does sound as if the men were shipwrecked,
and targeting them would be a war crime,” Finucane told me. “It sounds like the
men were the target.” He said the stories being told by Hegseth and others are
now falling apart: “None of these narratives withstand scrutiny.”
