“The Department of Defense has no choice but to release the complete, unedited footage,” said Sen. Jack Reed.
“I am deeply disturbed by what I saw this morning,” Sen.
Jack Reed (D-RI), the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee,
said after the briefing. “The Department of Defense has no choice but to
release the complete, unedited footage of the September 2 strike, as the
president has agreed to do.”
Reed’s remarks came after Adm. Frank Bradley and Joint
Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Dan Caine briefed some members of the Senate and
House Armed Services and Intelligence committees on the so-called “double-tap”
strike, in which nine people were killed in the initial bombing and two
survivors clinging to the burning wreckage of the vessel were slain in second
attack.
Lawmakers who attended the briefing said that US Defense
Secretary Pete Hegseth allegedly did not give an order to “kill everyone”
aboard the boat. However, legal experts and congressional critics contend that
the strikes are inherently illegal under international law.
“This did not reduce my concerns at all—or anyone else’s,” Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who attended the briefing, told the New Republic’s Greg Sargent in response to the findings regarding Hegseth’s actions. “This is a big, big problem, and we need a full investigation.”
“I think that video should be public,” Smith added.
The Trump administration has tried to justify the strikes
to Congress by
claiming that the US is in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, which some
legal scholars and lawmakers have disputed.
Cardozo Law School professor of international law Rebecca
Ingbe told Time in a Thursday interview that
“there is no actual armed conflict here, so this is murder.”
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), a member of the Foreign
Relations Committee, said Thursday that “clearly, in my view, very likely
a war crime was committed here.”
“We don’t use our military to help intervene when it comes
to drug running, and what the Trump administration has done is manufactured
cause for conflict with respect to going after drug boats and engaging in
extrajudicial killing when the real aim is clearly regime change in Venezuela,” he added,
alluding to President Donald Trump’s massive
military deployment and threats
to invade the oil-rich South American nation.
At least 83 people have been killed in 21 disclosed
strikes on boats the Trump administration claims—without releasing
evidence—were transporting drugs in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. South
American leaders and relatives of survivors say that at least some of the victims of the US
bombings were fishermen with no ties to narco-trafficking.
Reed said that Thursday’s briefing “confirmed my worst fears
about the nature of the Trump administration’s military activities, and
demonstrates exactly why the Senate Armed Services Committee has repeatedly
requested—and been denied—fundamental information, documents, and facts about
this operation.”
“This must, and will be, only the beginning of our
investigation into this incident,” he vowed.
After the briefing, US Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.)—the ranking
member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence—called the footage “one of the most troubling things
I’ve seen in my time in public service.”
“Any American who sees the video that I saw will see its
military attacking shipwrecked sailors,” he added.
Thursday’s calls followed similar demands from skeptical
Democrats, some of whom accused the Trump administration of withholding
evidence.
“Pete Hegseth should release the full tapes of the September
2 attack,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said on the upper chamber floor on Tuesday. “Both the
first and second strike. Not a clip. Not some edited or redacted snippet. The
full unedited tapes of each strike must be released so the American people can
see what happened with their own eyes.”
“Pete Hegseth said he did nothing wrong,” he added. “So
prove it.”
