The airwaves were hot on Dec. 7 with arguments over whether the Pentagon will make available to the American public the full video of the Sept. 2 boat strike, the one that Admiral Bradley showed to members of Congress on Dec. 4. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was noncommittal. “We’re reviewing it right now,” Hegseth told Fox News’ Lucas Tomlinson in a Dec. 6 interview at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, citing concerns over “sources, methods” and ongoing operations.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that he did not “have any problem” with releasing video of the strikes, though he noted that the Defense Department “may have valid concerns about revealing” alleged cartel tactics or U.S. sources or methods. “What matters is that they [the two survivors of the first hit] were not in a shipwreck state, distressed, dog-paddling in the water,” he claimed.
Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, contradicted Cotton’s description of the video. “When they [the survivors] were finally taken out, they weren’t trying to flip the boat over. The boat was clearly incapacitated. A tiny portion of it remained, capsized, the bow of the boat. They had no communications device. Certainly, they were unarmed,” he said. “Any claim that the drugs had somehow survived that attack is hard, hard to really square with what we saw.”
Smith called the video “deeply disturbing” and said “it did not appear that these two survivors were in any position to continue the fight.”
Appearing on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” on Dec. 7, Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, urged that it’s “really important that this video be made public,” noting that the interpretation of the video from lawmakers who were briefed “broke down precisely on party lines.”
“And so this is an instance in which I think the American public needs to judge for itself,” Himes said. “I know how the public is going to react because I felt my own reaction.”
Himes said he’s spent hours looking at videos of lethal action taken by the U.S., while noting that he was “profoundly shaken” by the video of the Sept. 2 strikes. “There’s a certain amount of sympathy out there for going after drug runners, but I think it’s really important that people see what it looks like when the full force the United States military is turned on two guys who are clinging to a piece of wood and about to go under, just so that they have sort of a visceral feel for what it is that we’re doing,” Himes said.
