Footage of the U.S.’s “double tap” boat strike in the Caribbean on September 2 is extremely disturbing, says a lawmaker who was shown the video in a closed door briefing by top military officials on Thursday.
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Dan Caine and Special Operations Command head Frank Bradley visited Capitol Hill on Thursday. During that visit, officers briefed the top Republicans and Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee, the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the House Intelligence Committee regarding the strikes.
Rep. Jim Himes (Connecticut), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the officers showed lawmakers the footage on Thursday morning.
“What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service,” he told reporters afterward. “You have two individuals in clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, who were killed by the United States.”
Himes raised the fact that a U.S. military manual lists an attack on a shipwrecked vessel as an example of an impermissible strike.
Indeed, the Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual uses an attack on a shipwreck as an example — not just as an illegal order, but also as one that is so “clearly illegal” that military personnel would be expected to refuse the order if given.
“The requirement to refuse to comply with orders to commit law of war violations applies to orders to perform conduct that is clearly illegal or orders that the subordinate knows, in fact, are illegal. For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal,” the manual says.
“Any American who sees the video that I saw will see the United States military attacking shipwrecked sailors,” Himes said. He added that he believes they’re “bad guys,” but “were not in the position to continue their mission in any way.”
With regards to the order to kill them, Himes said officials were not given any orders to “kill them all” or “grant no quarter,” standing in contrast to the account by other military officials told to The Washington Post.
The Post, which originally reported on the double-tap strike last week, indeed said that the video of the blast would cause people to be “horrified” if made public, one source said.
Sen. Jack Reed (Rhode Island), the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he was “deeply disturbed” by the footage, per CNN, and called for its public release. “This briefing confirmed my worst fears about the nature of the Trump Administration’s military activities,” he said.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), on the other hand, said that the strikes were “lawful and needful,” and that he would also order multiple strikes.
“I saw two survivors trying to flip a boat, load it with drugs bound for the United States, back over so they could stay in the fight,” he told reporters, per CNN’s Manu Raju. “And just like you would blow up a boat off of the Somali coast or the Yemeni coast, and you’d come back and strike it again if it still had terrorists and it still had explosives or missiles.”
Legal experts have persistently said that every one of the 21 publicly announced strikes in the administration’s boat attack campaign is illegal, and that there are no circumstances under which they would be anything other than murder. This includes not just the second strike on the vessel on September 2, but also the first one.
The strike on the survivors, however, has sparked scrutiny from both Democrats and Republicans, who are now expressing concern over Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the illegality of the campaign.
The Trump administration has tried to defend the follow-up strike as legal, with officials telling The New York Times that Hegseth had approved several different contingency plans for the strike — including a plan that the military would strike survivors if they took an action they deemed “hostile,” like communicating with “suspected cartel members.”
Former Pentagon special counsel and co-editor-in-chief of Just Security Ryan Goodman said that this argument is “absurd,” however.
“First it’s absurd on its face that communicating to be RESCUED is a hostile act. That’s the definition of being shipwrecked and helpless. The whole point of a legal prohibition on killing people who are shipwrecked is that they must be rescued or left to be rescued instead,” Goodman said in a post on X.
He added that the entire discourse over the second strike, however, is “Alice in Wonderland for legal experts.”
“That’s because the truth is: It’s not an armed conflict. The laws of war thus don’t apply,” Goodman wrote. “The more restrictive rules of human rights apply. It’s extrajudicial killing.”
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