Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the Department of Defense will not publicly release unedited footage of the U.S. military’s strikes on an alleged drug-carrying boat that killed two survivors.
“In keeping with longstanding [Pentagon] policy, of course we’re not going to release a top-secret, full, unedited video of that to the general public,” Hegseth told reporters after a closed-door briefing with senators Tuesday alongside State Secretary Marco Rubio.
Members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees will see the footage, “but not the general public,” he added.
Hegseth and Rubio then left a scrum of reporters who continued shouting questions at the Capitol.
Donald Trump’s administration has killed at least 95 people in a series of strikes targeting alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Pacific and Caribbean.
When two survivors emerged from the wreckage of the first strike on September 2, the commander overseeing the operation ordered officials to fire again. That order was reportedly in response to Hegseth’s alleged instructions to “kill everybody” on the vessels, according to The Washington Post, citing officials with direct knowledge of the operation.
News of Hegseth’s alleged command has heightened intense legal and political scrutiny into the Trump administration’s deadly campaign and allegations that the attacks amount to illegal extrajudicial killings, which law-of-war experts speaking to The Independent in recent months have labeled outright murders and war crimes.
Speaking to reporters after Tuesday’s briefing, Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Hegseth and administration officials came to the meeting “empty handed.”
“If they can’t be transparent on this, how can they be transparent on all the other issues swirling about the Caribbean?” Schumer said.
“All senators are entitled to see it,” he added. “I also believe every American should see an appropriate version … of what happened September 2. I saw it. It is deeply troubling. … We don’t want another endless war. We don’t want to stumble into something, and given Trump’s erratic back-and-forth on this issue — I worry about that, and so do many Americans.”
Democratic Senator Adam Schiff plans to issue a resolution that compels the release of the full footage.
“The public should see this,” he said. “I found the legal explanations and the strategic explanations incoherent. But I think the American people should see this video, and all members of Congress should have that opportunity.”
Administration officials insist that the two dozen strikes are fully within legal bounds, supported by the administration’s notice to Congress that the United States is formally engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels that the president has labeled “unlawful combatants.”
In the notice, the administration labeled cartels “nonstate armed groups” whose actions “constitute an armed attack against the United States” and are now engaged in a “noninternational armed conflict” — or war with a non-state actor.
Admiral Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley, who issued the order to fire on the vessel in the Caribbean a second time September 2, also addressed lawmakers in closed-door briefings this month.
The strikes also are part of an apparent pressure campaign against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, labeled a terrorist and cartel leader by the Trump administration, which has also seized an oil tanker from the South American nation and placed hundreds of American troops and ships near its coastline — an operation that critics have labeled violent regime change that risks a wider regional war.
In revealing interviews with Vanity Fair that prompted a deluge of responses and attacks from top administration officials Tuesday, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles said Trump “wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle.”
Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Rubio said the administration is focused on “dismantling the infrastructure of these terrorist organizations that are operating in our hemisphere, undermining the security of Americans, killing Americans, poisoning Americans.”
“The least of my concerns is this freaking video,” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said Tuesday. “Release it, make your own decisions. This is lawful.”
Asked in October why he won’t seek permission from Congress for his military campaign against a regime he claims is fueling a drug epidemic in the United States, Trump said his government is “just going to kill people” instead.
“I don’t think we're going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war. I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK?” Trump said at the time. “They’re going to be, like, dead, OK.”
Democratic Rep. Jason Crow said it was “glaringly obvious” that the administration is not seeking congressional authorization for the strikes at this point.
“They are militarizing a law-enforcement operation,” the former Army Ranger and House Armed Services committee member said Tuesday. The United States is now on a “slippery slope” towards a land campaign in Venezuela, he said.
Venezuela is not a major cocaine-producing country, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Virtually all coca crops are inside Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, and the Drug Enforcement Administration under Trump did not mention Venezuela in a March report on the state of cocaine trafficking.
In another escalation of the president’s militarized campaign against drug traffickers, Trump declared fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction” Monday. But the drug, which is used in hospitals across the United States, is not manufactured in Venezuela or present on the boats allegedly smuggling drugs into the country.
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