Top Military Commander Showed Lawmakers Boat Strike Video—and It’s Bad | Representative Jim Himes said the video showed two survivors in “clear distress.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/203962/lawmakers-boat-strike-video-pete-hegseth-defense
Top Military Commander Showed Lawmakers Boat Strike Video—and It’s Bad | Representative Jim Himes said the video showed two survivors in “clear distress.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/203962/lawmakers-boat-strike-video-pete-hegseth-defense
44 comments
>Lawmakers were shocked and appalled Thursday after they were shown video footage of the September 2 double tap that killed two survivors of an airstrike in the Caribbean.
>Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley met behind closed doors with members of the House and Senate in an attempt to defend the Trump administration’s decision to slaughter two individuals who clung to the wreckage of their boat. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine was also in attendance at the meeting.
>Ahead of the meeting, military attorneys claimed that there could be a legitimate explanation for the second strike if Bradley was able to prove the survivors posed a credible threat to U.S. military personnel. But the footage supposedly left no room for doubt that that was not the case.
>“What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service,” Representative Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN. “You have two individuals [in] clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, [who] were killed by the United States.”
Murder. Pure and simple.
It’s quite literally just murder.
Cold blooded murder …and not even a smidgen of remorse. Great way to cover any evidence that these were just innocent victims in a fishing vessel.
A headline that doesn’t just mindlessly use the unfounded “drug boat” allegation the DOD insists on repeating without evidence? Nifty.
Watch, their next excuse will be that they were showing kindness by not allowing survivors to die while adrift.
This admin more than any other in my lifetime openly relishes in its ability to seemingly murder anyone anywhere by just claiming they are terrorists or now apparently drug runners. They know they can just kill anyone and they fucking get off on it. Maybe previous admins did more drone strikes but they at least had the common sense to keep that shit behind closed doors when possible. They were not advertising their blatant murders every day demanding to be praised for it.
And the party of fiscal responsibility thinks it’s fiscally responsible to use million dollar missiles to kill two dudes floating on some debris.
The initial strikes are bad enough. We have and still do interdict suspected drug boats to search and seize drugs and arrest drug runners. There is no justification for blowing these boats up.
Killing shipwrecked sailors even in a state of war is a war crime, period. We are not at war which makes it even worse in my opinion, though it’s straight up murder either way.
This country is a shitty hoa on steroids…with lethal weapons.
Cruelty is the point.
Conservatives in 2025 are all for murdering fisherman and raping children. Literally
What Pete ordered, via tRump, violated international law. It was outright murder.
Thou shall not kill! …Unless they brown!!
Might this just be that they could have proven they were only fisher men ?
There is no way there was a clear and present threat to US military personnel to justify the first strike. Why would there suddenly be once they are in the water?
This is a big example of the military “just following orders” and murdering people. They’re not on the People’s side.
The Americans will become more dangerous under Trump.
It just pisses me off that Trump and Hegseth murdered 2 people in cold blood and yet will never see the inside of a prison cell.
I still don’t understand why it took the 2nd attempt at murder to get people enraged. We should NEVER in a million years be raining munitions down upon a random boating vessel, if you want to stop them, do it the right way and stop the vessel, board them, arrest them, and search for evidence.
You can obviously engage them militarily if they use violence to thwart the stop, but in what world can we just decide, “yea, I don’t like that boat. Make them go boom-boom”?
And WHO ordered the second strike. Is NOW the time to talk about how military personnel have a duty to REFUSE ILLEGAL ORDERS.
Remember, nobody supports Trump because of economic policies. They support Trump because he is hurting people they don’t like
**blows up boat in middle of ocean**
**two guys survive and cling for anything that floats**
Hegseth: “THEY’RE COMIN RIGHT FOR US!”
So much for the explanation they they were “ trying to salvage the drugs” as an excuse for why the second strike was ok.
Oh shit, here we go. GOP members need to just suck it up and admit they shouldn’t have allowed an alcoholic fox and friends weekend host to run the most powerful military in history. Fuck.
More people died from a single boat strike than an entire riot in Benghazi.
Why should we support the troops when they murder people?
There is NO proof, NONE, that there were any drugs on any of the boats that they destroyed. I don’t understand why the media is skipping over this FACT. I don’t understand why people are so upset about the second strike when the first strikes were just as illegal.
So Admiral Bradley claims the survivors were actively continuing the drug mission? Hmmm. How damaged was the boat? How was the military/Hegseth sure of the survivors’ intentions? And even if those were their intentions, would they be able to carry them out in a presumably heavily damaged boat? And finally, why is our military killing suspected drug smugglers? That is not a crime punishable by death. We are supposed to pick them up and try them in court. If found guilty, they may spend many years in prison, but that crime is not ever punishable by death. This stinks to high heaven.
The Supreme Court says murder is legal if you’re the president.
They need to be frogmarched for corruption and seditious conspiracy.
Trump is president… nothing is going to happen to Pete, unfortunately. This is a no-accountability administration.
I hope people are paying attention to which of their representatives and leaders are playing word games to rationalize extra judicial murder.
Their favorite phase is some variation of “stay in the fight” parroted by Hegseth’s DoD and the likes of Tom Cotton.
What FIGHT to begin with?! Also, how the hell are two guys gonna flip over a blown up “drug boat” and use it to “stay in the fight”?!
This whole ordeal is disgusting. It’s like the Manning gunship video scandal but it’s all just playing out right in front of us with the Government saying it’s A-Okay!
“Kill them all”. He said, as though he practiced it in the mirror, for this moment.
Imagine my shock that Tom Cotton thinks it was perfectly fine.
“He noted that Bradley had “confirmed that there had not been a kill them all order, and that there was not an order to grant no quarter,” according to CBS News.”
Someone gave that order, the 20 something year old pushing the button doesn’t just get to fire off 4 missiles at a destroyed target without someone above him giving permission.
Have to imagine there would be someone asking what was going on after the second $500,000 missile launched, then the third, then the fourth.
Unless this dude barricaded himself in the room and was firing them off like a maniac, someone gave an order.
Since we learned what happened, here’s a timeline of excuses:
Here are the last 5 days of the drug boat excuses:
Day 1: Fake News
Day 2: Admiral Bradley made the ‘combat decision’.
Day 3: The fog of war caused the second strike
Day 4: “I left the room before the second strike.” – Pete Hegseth
Day 5: The Navy aimed the second strike at the boat, not survivors.
Day 6: it wasn’t a ‘double tap’ we hit them 4 times. Lol…ok. Quad tap
Day 7: The survivors were ‘legitimate targets’.
Day 8: There was never a ‘Kill everybody’ order even thought Hegseth and DJT have repeatedly said to ‘Kill them all’.
I’m sure there’s a few I’ve missed. I cannot describe the ‘greatness’ I feel. /s
I’m sure I’ve missed some now.
Tom Cotton claims the video shows survivors attempting to flip over the wreckage and recover the “drugs” so they could stay in the fight.
Never been on the receiving end of a hellfire missile, but I imagine recovering cargo would be the last thing on my mind.
Pretty obvious it was going to be bad when Hegseth was all “these orders were totally legitimate and legal, but also, I wasn’t the one giving them”
“Fog of war”… fucking clown shoes.
After they had destroyed the boat – they sent one more missile to kill the survivors – and then they sent two more missiles to make sure the boat sunk. They clearly wanted to make sure that there was no evidence left (perhaps this wasn’t a drug-boat at all).
The Trump administration through Hegseth ordered the illegal murder of these people using the U.S. military as their criminal instrument.
I’m thinking of the film Hunt for Red October. Towards the end, the Russian captain gets his crew to leave the sub for a fake radiation leak, and they are picked up by a US warship.
His crew being rescued by the Americans was BALED INTO HIS PLAN because he knew the US would respect human life.
If you made that film today, he couldn’t be so sure.
So from what I’m hearing is that it’s not Trump’s fault, because he didn’t know about it. Kegsbreath says he didn’t give the second order and there was the fig of war. The admiral in charge is saying there was no order other than kill the 11 people and the boat. The video clearly shows people alive after the first strike then the people were murdered.
It looks like whoever pulled the trigger is going down for this.
Need names of all crew members so they can be put on trial. It’s unamerican to treat anyone this way
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