Transcript
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Foreign.
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December 4, 2025 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, a Democrat of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said, you have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion with a destroyed vessel killed by the United States.
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Himes was talking about a video of a US Strike against two survivors of a first strike in the Caribbean on a small boat allegedly carrying cocaine to the US Today. Admiral Frank Mitch Bradley, the Special Operations commander who ordered the strike, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Kane briefed members of Congress in a closed door session on the events of that day. The US attacked the boat on September 2 in an unannounced operation against what it claims are drug runners, meaning the men on the boat had no way of knowing they were targets. After the strike, the administration announced its it had begun strikes against what it insists are drug boats manned by gang members.
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The administration says President Donald Trump has determined that the US Is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels and that those in the boat are formally combatants, but it has not reinforced those claims with the legal authority they need. After informing Congress of the strikes on September 4th to ensure Congress was fully informed, consistent with the War Powers Resolution, Trump has since ignored that resolution, which requires congressional approval for hostile actions to continue longer than 60 days, a deadline that passed in early November. As Charlie Savage explained today in the New York Times, legal experts say this operation is not lawful. Civilians engaged in trade, even illicit trade, are not enemy combatants. For that matter, the public so far has seen no hard evidence, but only heard the administration's claim that the boats are engaged in drug trafficking. Katie Bo Lillis, Natasha Bertrand and Haley Britsky of CNN explained that the initial strike of September 2 killed nine of the 11 people on the boat. Immediately, it set the vessel on fire and split it in half, capsizing it and leaving two survivors clinging to the wreckage. For the next 41 minutes, US officers watched as the men struggled to right what was left of the boat. Then, rather than rescuing the two men, Admiral Bradley ordered a second strike that killed them, now saying he intended to destroy the vessel, which the administration claims was a military target. Shelby Holiday and Alexander Ward of the Wall Street Journal reported last night that Bradley would tell Congress that the men appeared to be communicating by radio with other enemy vessels in the area and thus were still combatants, an argument defense officials have been making for weeks now. But Bradley did not say that today. Instead, he admitted the men were in no position to communicate with other vessels. He told congressional lawmakers that he ordered the strike because the vessel appeared to be afloat thanks to packages of cocaine and that the survivors could have floated to safety and continued to traffic the drugs. A source told the CNN reporters that Bradley's rationale was was insane. Even if the US Is at war with drug traffickers, a dubious argument it is a war crime to kill individuals who are outside of combat, no longer posing an imminent threat. It's hard to imagine that two unarmed shipwrecked men trying to right the remains of a capsized boat in the ocean hundreds of miles from the US Posed a threat. While some Republicans, notably Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, are defending the strike, Senator Rand Paul, a Republican of Kentucky, said there's a difference between being accused of being a bad guy and being a bad guy. It is called the presumption of innocence. It is called due process. It is called basically justice that our country was founded upon. Paul told Ms. Now columnist Eric Michael Garcia he wanted Hegseth to testify before Congress under oath, saying that Congress, if they had any kind of gumption at all, would not be allowing the administration to summarily execute people that are suspected of a crime. He said he wanted the full video of the strikes released. If the public sees images of people clinging to boat debris and being blown up, I think that there is a chance that finally the public will get interested enough in this to stop this.