We have already seen some wild, unconscionably evil interpretations of various aspects of the evolving story concerning the Sept. 2 “double tap” boat strike against alleged Venezuelan drug smugglers in the Caribbean, in which the U.S. military chose not only to sink a ship and kill its occupants without providing any proof that they were smuggling deadly drugs to the United States, but then chose to hit the capsized ship a second time in order to kill the initial group of survivors. Those actions fit the textbook definition of a war crime under the Department of Defense Law of War Manual, which stresses that in the case of shipwrecked individuals who are “in need of assistance and care” without an operable boat, who “refrain from any hostile act,” the department cannot consider them as active targets.
Tell that to GOP Senator Tom Cotton (AR), though, who after being treated to some snuff footage of the boat strikes as part of a Thursday congressional briefing, said that he not only supported the strikes, but thoroughly enjoyed watching the murder of the Venezuelan nationals, going as far as to laugh about it as he spoke to reporters, according to Huffpost. Calling them “righteous strikes” to reporters assembled on Capitol Hill, Cotton went on to argue that because the two men were not yet entirely dead and still moving, the U.S. military had no logical recourse but to fire two more missiles at them. Which is what it did, according to Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley, who ordered the strikes and spent portions of Thursday briefing members of Congress.
“I 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,” said Cotton, referring to men he reportedly watched bob in the water for 41 minutes, clinging to the wreckage of a boat already destroyed by U.S. missiles. “And potentially, given all the context we heard, of other narcoterrorist boats in the area coming to their aid to recover their cargo and recover those narcoterrorists.” Speaking to CNN today, Cotton added, “(The men) were clearly not incapacitated. They were not distressed.”
There’s a lot to unpack here, but I find myself initially overwhelmed by the sheer, callous misanthropy of this man, a United States Senator, referring to two people who just survived a missile strike on the open ocean, clinging to a piece of wreckage, as “not incapacitated” and even as “not distressed.” Because lord knows, there’s nothing “distressing” about recovering from the shock of an explosion in the middle of the fucking ocean, knowing that you are almost certainly going to drown, or die of exposure, right? That’s not the kind of thing that distresses people. Surely if Tom Cotton found himself in this situation, his cool head would prevail and he would never experience “distress.”
But beyond that, Cotton has the gall to claim that these two men spent nearly an hour in the ocean attempting to right the remaining chunk of their boat “so they could stay in the fight”? What “fight,” exactly, were these men in? Is it the U.S. military that these alleged drug smugglers are fighting? How many shots have they fire to date, in the course of more than 20 boat strikes that have killed more than 80 people? Would the number of shots be … “zero”? After all, it’s kind of hard to “stay in the fight” against an enemy who is firing missiles at you from over the curvature of the Earth when you’re probably a career fisherman tending to an sputtering outboard motor. This is a “fight” that the so-called combatants have literally no chance to participate in; they tend to learn about their part in the fight at the moment that they blow up. From the start, these boat strikes have demonstrated this gross imbalance in the use of overwhelming military might–let’s not forget that before Donald Trump and Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth decided to get into a dick-measuring contest with Nicolás Maduro, the standard operating procedure with these kinds of boats was to interdict them, seize drugs and arrest the occupants, which has the added bonus perk of proving that the boats contained drugs (and thus guilt) in the first place. That all went out the window when we started lobbing missiles first and asking questions later.
Nor, according to the very briefing that Cotton was responding to, were there “other narcoterrorist boats in the area,” which the Senator attempts to wield as a flimsy justification for the totally needless war crime killings. In his questioning before members of Congress on Thursday, Admiral Bradley “acknowledged that the two survivors of the military’s initial strike were in no position to make a distress call,” directly contradicting defense officials who have attempted to suggest since September that the survivors could have been “radioing for backup.” Instead on Thursday, according to lawmakers who were briefed, Bradley told members of Congress that he ordered the second strike after 41 minutes of deliberation as the two survivors futilely attempted to get back on the remaining piece of their vessel, under the rationale that because part of the boat was still floating and might still hold cocaine, the survivors might be able to float that chunk to a place where they could be rescued, and continue somehow trafficking the drugs.
Which brings us to the highlight of CNN’s reporting on the matter, which is the reaction of an unnamed lawmaker to that rationale, who apparently called it “fucking insane.” Yeah! You should go on the record and say exactly that, my nameless friend. If that explanation doesn’t qualify for those words, then what would? Besides Cotton’s equally insane reaction, that is.
Himes: It was exceedingly hard to watch. Even if you stipulate that it is a war, there is a very specific prohibition against killing individuals who have been removed from the fight. And there is no question that these individuals were removed from the fight.
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— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) Dec 4, 2025 at 3:27 PM
Unsurprisingly, Democratic lawmakers speaking to reporters at the Capitol after watching the same footage had very different reactions to watching the men die, and hearing Bradley’s testimony–in which we should note that he is effectively confessing to those war crimes, by the way. Representative Jim Himes (CT), the House Intelligence Committee Chairman, called the video shown to Congress “one of the most troubling things” he’s ever witnessed in his tenure.
“You have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, who are killed by the United States,” said Himes to reporters. “Any American who sees the video that I saw will see the United States military attacking shipwrecked sailors—bad guys, bad guys—but attacking shipwrecked sailors. Now there’s a whole set of contextual items that the admiral explained—yes, they were carrying drugs. They were not in the position to continue their mission in any way.”
These men were, in a single word, defenseless. Utterly defenseless in any capacity you could invoke to prevent anything that the United States would choose to do to them. It would have been completely and totally without risk for U.S. navy boats to simply swing by and pick up the survivors for questioning … but that’s not the image that Trump and Hegseth are attempting to project, one of maximum lethality and performative machismo. At the heart of the matter, there’s absolutely no need for loss of life and deadly action in these operations at all, even if your goal is stemming the flow of drugs (cocaine, and not fentanyl as Trump likes to suggest) coming from one arbitrarily chosen South American country while ignoring drugs from all the others. You don’t need to be killing anyone here, and certainly not when the people in question are those who just so happened to survive your first attempt to kill them. That’s the whole point: The Trump administration doesn’t kill out of need. It kills to inflate its own sense of grandiosity, like a narcissistic serial killer. And if we don’t hold it accountable for blatantly obvious war crimes, said crimes will only get that much bolder and more grand.
