Navy Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, left, accompanied by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, right, arrives for a closed door classified meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill in Washington, Dec. 4, 2025. Top military officers will play for senior members of Congress a video of the Sept. 2 attack on a boat suspected of carrying drugs, including the follow-up strikes that have been at the center of a growing debate over the campaign. (Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times)
Share
|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
WASHINGTON — The two survivors of the U.S. military’s first boat strike on Sept. 2 climbed atop the overturned hull and waved to something overhead, according to multiple people who have seen video of the attack.
The signaling by the survivors has been interpreted in different ways. Some of the people viewing the video thought the waving by the survivors could have been an attempt to surrender, which could raise questions about whether the military had violated the rules of armed conflict during the operation.
Others who viewed the video said the most logical explanation was that the two survivors had seen the U.S. aircraft above them and started signaling for a rescue. But it is not clear from the video that the survivors had definitely seen the U.S. aircraft.
The military officers briefing Congress on Thursday said the survivors could have been trying to beckon to other alleged drug traffickers in a plane or boat to come get them, communications that could have justified the follow-up strike that killed them.
But some lawmakers viewing the video rejected that interpretation. There were no other unknown aircraft or boats in visual range, and no other boats involved in drug trafficking could have rescued them, according to officials who attended the briefings Thursday.
The new detail further complicates the military’s explanations for the actions it took during the Sept. 2 strike in the Caribbean Sea and raises new questions about the propriety of the follow-on attack.
The Sept. 2 strike was the Trump administration’s first attack on a boat suspected of carrying drugs, so the people on the vessel would have had no knowledge that the United States was beginning a military campaign against drug trafficking.
It was not until October that the Trump administration first disclosed that President Donald Trump had “determined” that the United States was in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels and that the crews of boats suspected of carrying drugs for them were “combatants.”
The people killed in the Sept. 2 attack, a month earlier, may not have known that the U.S. military considered them combatants in an purported armed conflict. That is a reason to think it may not have occurred to them that they could “surrender,” so if they were signaling to an American aircraft they may have been pleading for rescue.
—
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
By Julian E. Barnes and Charlie Savage/Tierney L. Cross
c. 2025 The New York Times Company
RELATED TOPICS:
Categories
Trump Strategy Document Revives Monroe Doctrine, Slams Europe
