Top Armed Services Dem says Sept. 2 strike video would show Republicans description completely false

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.” Rep.Adam Smith, D-Wash., appears on ABC's "This Week," December 7, 2025.ABC NewsThat’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. Cotton told reporters he had no doubt about the legality of the strike and 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.”On Saturday, Hegseth recounted what he had been told about the subsequent strike.“I was told, ‘hey, there had to be a reattack, because there were a couple folks who could still be in the fight.Access to radios.

There was a link up point of another potential boat, drugs were still there.They were actively interacting with them,’” the secretary said at the Reagan National Defense Forum. New details emerge about controversial Sept.

2 strike on alleged drug boat that killed survivorsAsked by “This Week” anchor George Stephanopoulos about Hegseth's comments, Smith said, “That's ridiculous.T...