A classified US military video shown to lawmakers on Thursday depicts two unarmed survivors clinging to wreckage before being killed in repeated strikes on a suspected drug-running boat in the Caribbean, according to two people familiar with the footage.
The September 2 attack—the first in a series of 22 lethal strikes ordered under President Donald Trump’s expanded campaign against drug cartels—began with an airburst munition detonating over the vessel’s 11-member crew.
Continued munitions hitting the debris
The blast shredded the boat and left only two men alive, shirtless and without weapons or communications equipment, struggling to stay afloat on the severed bow.
“The video follows them for about an hour as they tried to flip the boat back over. They couldn’t do it,” one source told Reuters.
Admiral Frank Bradley, then head of Joint Special Operations Command, assessed that the wreckage remained buoyant because of cocaine aboard and could drift long enough to be recovered.
To ensure the mission’s “completion,” he ordered additional strikes. The video shows three more munitions hitting the debris, killing the remaining men.
“You could see their faces, bodies… then boom, boom, boom,” the source said.
‘Deeply disturbed footage’
Bradley and General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, presented the footage in a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill.
Democrats emerged shaken, with Senior Democrat Jim Himes calling it “one of the most troubling things” he had ever seen.
Senator Jack Reed said he was “deeply disturbed” and demanded the footage be made public.
Republicans defended the operation.
Senator Tom Cotton, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he saw “two survivors trying to flip a boat, loaded with drugs bound for the United States, back over so they could stay in the fight,” adding that Bradley and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth acted appropriately.
The Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual forbids attacks on shipwrecked or incapacitated combatants who are no longer engaging in hostilities, calling such killings “clearly illegal.”
But the administration has framed the campaign as a war against armed drug cartels, arguing that narcotics bound for the US pose a lethal threat.
The ‘anti-drug’ strikes have so far killed 87 people, including in the latest operation on Thursday in the eastern Pacific.
