Top Military Commander Showed Lawmakers Boat Strike Video—and It’s Bad | Representative Jim Himes said the video showed two survivors in “clear distress.”
Source: thenewrepublic
Top Military Commander Showed Lawmakers Boat Strike Video—and It’s Bad | Representative Jim Himes said the video showed two survivors in “clear distress.”
Source: thenewrepublic
24 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.
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?
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.
**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.
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.