Democratic and GOP lawmakers contradict each other in describing ‘double tap’ boat strike footage
Democrats and Republicans clashed on the Sunday show circuit over the Trump administration’s military strikes on boats in the Caribbean, with a Sept. 2 strike in particular becoming a focal point for the White House’s critics.
GOP lawmakers, with a few exceptions, have offered defenses of the ongoing attacks against vessels the administration says are carrying drugs bound for American streets.
No public evidence has been offered by the White House to support those claims, and the president is relying on the administration’s designation of drug cartels as terrorist organizations to justify the escalation of force against persons and groups previously dealt with by law enforcement means.
Drug trafficking remains a criminal offense and is not considered an act of war.
Democrats continue to argue that one strike that killed survivors of a primary U.S. attack who were reportedly attempting to cling to wreckage to stay alive may, in fact, constitute a war crime.
Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, used similar terms as he spoke on Sunday on ABC’s This Week about his experience viewing classified footage of the attack in a closed House briefing on Thursday.
Meanwhile, Sen. Adam Schiff, who sits on the Intelligence panel, called the strike “unconstitutional” and “morally repugnant” on NBC’s Meet the Press.
“It’s no different than any of the dozen-plus videos they’ve already released. It seems pretty clear they don’t want to release this video because they don’t want people to see it, because it’s very, very difficult to justify,” said the congressman.
“If they release the video, then everything that the Republicans are saying would clearly be betrayed to be completely false.”
Sen. Tom Cotton has been one of his fiercest defenders and was one of the Republicans who participated in the closed briefing on Thursday as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He said on Sunday that he believed the strikes were legal under the president’s constitutional authority, though he mixed up which president was exercising that authority.
“I think President Bush has every power under the Constitution to strike boats in international waters,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press.
Cotton maintained that the survivors of the second strike on Sept. 2: “They were not incapacitated…They were sitting on that boat. They were clearly moving around on it.”
“It is a highly effective and efficient way to stop these drugs from reaching our shores,” said the senator.
Senior Democrats in Congress now largely accuse Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of being an unserious showman whose lack of a background in military command positions and general inexperience show as he attempts to manage the Pentagon’s bureaucracy.
