US airstrike survivors clung to boat wreckage for an hour before second deadly attack, video shows | US military

Two men who survived a US airstrike on a suspected drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean were trapped in the wreckage for an hour before being killed in a second attack, according to video of the episode shown to senators in Washington.

The men were shirtless, unarmed and visibly carrying radios or other communications equipment. They appeared to have no idea what hit them or whether the U.S. military had decided whether to finish them off, two sources familiar with the recording told Reuters.

The couple desperately tried to erect a severed section of the torso before dying. “The video follows them for about an hour as they try to turn the boat over. They failed to do so,” a source said.

Video of the Sept. 2 attack was viewed behind closed doors by senators on Thursday, amid growing concerns that U.S. defense secretary Pete Hegseth and other officials who ordered the attack may have committed a war crime.

Later Thursday, the Pentagon announced that four people were killed in a new deadly attack on a boat suspected of carrying illegal drugs in the eastern Pacific.

This was the 22nd attack by the US military against boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, resulting in the deaths of at least 87 people.

Video of the latest incident was published on social media It was described by U.S. Southern Command as a “lethal kinetic attack on a vessel operated in international waters by a Designated Terrorist Organization.”

The statement noted: “Intelligence confirmed that the ship was carrying illegal narcotics and transiting a known drug trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific. Four male narco-terrorists on board were killed.”

It was the first publicly announced strike in nearly three weeks and comes as the Pentagon and the White House are struggling to answer questions about the legal basis for a campaign to kill suspected drug traffickers.

Much of the discussion focused on the initial attack, which took place on September 2, after the Washington Post reported: Hegseth had verbally instructed the army to “kill them all”.

U.S. Navy Admiral Frank Bradley, who led the attack, told lawmakers on Thursday that there was no such order to kill everyone on board.

Donald Trump posted video of the initial attack on his Truth Social platform shortly after the operation, but footage of the follow-up attack that killed the two remaining crew members was not released. On Wednesday, Trump promised to make the full video public, but the Pentagon has yet to do so.

Democratic congressman Jim Himes, who watched the video Thursday, called it “one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen in my time in public service.”

He said: “With a broken ship, without any means of movement, there are two people clearly in distress.”

Describing those on board as “bad guys” who were “in no way fit to continue their duties,” Himes added: “Any American who sees the video I saw will see the US military attacking the shipwrecked sailors.”

The attack began when a munition exploded on the ship, killing nine crew members. The two surviving men were later seen floating in the water.

Sources familiar with the recording said Bradley, then head of Joint Special Operations Command, concluded that the wreckage was likely kept afloat because it contained cocaine and could drift long enough to be rescued.

They added that the video showed three more munitions being fired at the damaged ship. “You could see their faces, their bodies… Then boom, boom, boom,” the first source said.

Reactions of MPs who watched the video were divided between parties; While Democrats expressed distress, Republicans argued that the strike was legal.

Tom Cotton of Arkansas, the Republican chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, said: “I saw two survivors try to overturn a boat full of drugs bound for the United States so they could stay in the fight.”

Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University and a former Pentagon lawyer. He disputed Cotton’s comment in a post on Bluesky. “I would like to know how Senator Cotton was able to detect that these shipwrecked people were trying to ‘stay in the fight’ rather than clinging on for dear life in an attempt to survive,” he wrote.

“Even if you believe all the legal lies (that this was an ‘armed conflict’, that drugs were war-supporting objects), the two stricken ships were not engaged in ‘active war activities’ in any way (the real legal test).”

The U.S. Department of Defense’s Laws of War manual prohibits attacks on incapacitated, unconscious or shipwrecked combatants as long as they avoid hostilities and do not attempt to escape. The guidance cites shooting at shipwreck survivors as an example of a “manifestly unlawful” order that should be refused.

The Trump administration has argued that the United States is at war with drug traffickers and that such attacks are legal under the rules of war, but most legal experts reject that logic.

Rebecca Ingber, a Cardozo School of Law professor and former legal advisor to the US state department, told the Guardian this week: “Even if we believe the framework that the people on these ships are combatants, it would still be illegal to kill them if they were non-combatant, meaning they were incompetent… It is clearly illegal to kill someone who has been shipwrecked.”

Marcus Stanley, research director of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Government, said the attacks constituted potential war crimes even before the survivors were killed.

“What’s the next step? Someone commits a street crime, or you claim they committed a street crime in a city in the United States, and then you can unleash the military on them without forensic evidence,” he said.

“The American people should have as much transparency and information as possible here to judge what is being done in their name.”