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VIDEO COLLAPSES HEGSETH’S DEFENSE OF BOAT BOMBING  
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Greg Sargent
December 4, 2025
The New Republic
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_ After viewing the video of the second strike, Representative Jim
Himes said, “You have two individuals in clear distress without any
means of locomotion with a destroyed vessel, who were killed by the
United States.” _

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth defended a deadly follow-up strike on
a suspected drug boat in the Caribbean, citing the “fog of war.”,
screen grab

 

Members of Congress were just permitted to view the video of the
second boat-bombing strike
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that’s consuming Washington in controversy
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.”

_Greg Sargent is a staff writer at The New Republic and the host of
the podcast __The Daily Blast_
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seasoned political commentator with over two decades of experience, he
was a prominent columnist and blogger at The Washington Post from 2010
to 2023 and has worked at Talking Points Memo, New York magazine, and
the New York Observer. Greg is also the __author of the critically
acclaimed book_
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An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Disinformation
and Thunderdome Politics.  _

_The New Republic_ [[link removed]]_ was founded in 1914 to
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challenges facing a nation transformed by the Industrial Revolution
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* Pete Hegseth
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* illegal orders
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* war crimes
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