Two men who survived a US airstrike on a suspected drug smuggling boat in the Caribbean clung to the wreckage for an hour before they were killed in a second attack, according to a video of the episode shown to senators in Washington.
The men were shirtless, unarmed and carried no visible radio or other communications equipment. They also appeared to have no idea what had just hit them, or that the US military was weighing whether to finish them off, two sources familiar with the recording told Reuters.
The pair desperately tried to turn a severed section of the hull upright before they died. “The video follows them for about an hour as they tried to flip the boat back over. They couldn’t do it,” one source said.
The video of the attack on 2 September was seen by senators behind closed doors on Thursday amid growing concern that the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, and other officials who ordered the attack may have committed a war crime.
Later on Thursday, the Pentagon announced another deadly strike on a boat suspected of carrying illegal narcotics, killing four men in the eastern Pacific.
This was the 22nd attack the US military has carried out against boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean and took the death toll of the campaign to at least 87 people.
Video of the latest incident was posted on social media by the US Southern Command, which described it as a “lethal kinetic strike on a vessel in international waters operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization”.
Its statement added: “Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting along a known narco-trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed.”
It was the first publicly announced strike in nearly three weeks and comes as the Pentagon and the White House have struggled to answer questions about the legal basis for the campaign to kill suspected drug smugglers.
Much of the debate has focused on the first attack on 2 September after the Washington Post reported that Hegseth had verbally directed the military to “kill them all”.
Adm Frank Bradley of the US navy, who commanded the attack, told lawmakers on Thursday there was no such order to kill everyone on board.
Donald Trump posted video of the initial strike on his Truth Social platform shortly after the operation, but no footage of the follow-up attack that killed the two remaining crew members has been released. On Wednesday, Trump vowed to make the entire video public, but the Pentagon has not yet done so.
Jim Himes, a Democratic congressman who saw the video on Thursday, described it as “one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service”.
He said: “You have two individuals in clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel.”
Describing those on board as “bad guys” who “were not in the position to continue their mission in any way”, Himes added: “Any American who sees the video that I saw will see the United States military attacking shipwrecked sailors.”
The attack began with an airburst munition exploding above the vessel and killing nine crew members. The two men who survived were then visible floating in the water.
Bradley, who was the head of the Joint Special Operations Command at the time, concluded that the wreckage was likely being kept afloat because there was cocaine inside and could drift long enough to be recovered, said the sources familiar with the recording.
They added that the video shows three additional munitions being fired at the damaged vessel. “You could see their faces, bodies … Then boom, boom, boom,” the first source said.
Reactions of the lawmakers who watched the video split along party lines, with Democrats voicing distress and Republicans defending the strike as legal.
Tom Cotton of Arkansas, the Republican chair of the Senate intelligence committee, said: “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.”
Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University and a former Pentagon lawyer, took issue with Cotton’s interpretation in a post on Bluesky. “I’d love to know how Senator Cotton … was able to detect these shipwrecked people were trying to ‘stay in the fight’ versus clinging to dear life in an effort to survive,” he wrote.
“Even if you buy all the legal falsehoods (that this is an ‘armed conflict’, that drugs are war-sustaining objects), the two shipwrecked were in no way, shape or form engaged in ‘active combat activities’ (the actual legal test).”
The US Department of Defense’s Law of War manual forbids attacks on combatants who are incapacitated, unconscious or shipwrecked, so long as they abstain from hostilities and do not attempt to escape. The manual cites firing upon shipwreck survivors as an example of a “clearly illegal” order that should be refused.
The Trump administration has argued that the US is at war with drug traffickers and that such strikes are legal under the rules of war, but most legal experts reject that rationale.
Rebecca Ingber, a professor at Cardozo School of Law and a former legal adviser to the US state department, told the Guardian this week: “Even if we buy into their framing that the individuals on these vessels are combatants, it would still be unlawful to kill them if they are hors de combat, which means they’re incapacitated … It is manifestly unlawful to kill someone who’s been shipwrecked.”
Marcus Stanley, director of studies at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said the strikes themselves constitute potential war crimes, even before the killing of survivors.
“What’s the next step? There’s somebody committing a street crime, or you claim they’re committing a street crime in a United States city, and then you can unleash the military on them without judicial evidence,” he said. “The American people should get as much transparency and information here to judge what’s being done in their name as possible.”
