Top Armed Services Dem says Sept. 2 strike video would show Republicans' description 'completely false' [View all]
Source: ABC News
December 7, 2025, 11:30 AM
The top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee said Sunday that surveillance video of U.S. military strikes targeting an alleged drug trafficking vessel in the Caribbean Sea on Sept. 2 would contradict how Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other Republicans have described it.
“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,” Rep. Adam Smith, one of the Democratic lawmakers who saw the video, 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.”
That’s counter to how Hegseth and Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee who also viewed the video, have described the circumstances preceding the second strike.
Read more: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/top-armed-services-dem-sept-2-strike-video/story?id=128185897
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