The most damning revelation yet: they KNEW.

Despite "fog of war" denials, Hegseth's team watched drug boat for an hour -- and saw the survivors -- before killing everyone.

This morning’s lead story on DEFIANCE Radio (broadcast link below) is the most damning development yet in the boat-strike scandal.

We now know the Pentagon was fully aware there were survivors after the September 2 strike in the Caribbean, and it still went ahead with a second missile attack anyway. Even more disturbing, reports suggest top lieutenants of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were watching the drone feed for more than an hour before launching that follow-on strike, though it’s unclear if Hegseth himself was, too.

We’ve been covering this a lot. But we’re going to keep covering it. Because this entire story is the exemplar of the Trump administration’s corruption, lawlessness, and relentless lying to the American people. You can listen to our coverage this morning on DEFIANCE Radio, below, or keep reading for the story.

Today's News - The "Illegal Orders" Presidency - Thurs, Dec 4

According to new reporting from the Associated Press and CBS News, U.S. officials monitoring the live video of the Sept. 2 strike saw the first missile set the boat ablaze, killing nine people instantly. An hour later, two survivors were visible on the wrecked hull, clambering back aboard amid scattered bales of cocaine. And after all that time — after watching, assessing, and deliberating — the Pentagon made a choice: Don’t rescue them. Strike again.

The administration’s coverup line is now: “We weren’t killing survivors. We were just sinking a boat.”

Facing public outrage, the Trump regime now claims the follow-on strike wasn’t meant to execute the men but simply to “sink the vessel.” I’d find this to be a comical deflection, if it weren’t about human lives. The argument is only believable if you are willing to buy the idea that a derelict boat, drifting in open water, presented an imminent threat to the United States.

Meanwhile Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley (the special operations commander who reportedly fired the second missile) is heading to Capitol Hill today to argue the survivors were “continuing their drug mission” and, thus, remained legitimate targets. Because they were still near the narcotics, the logic goes, they were fair game.

Whether Bradley understands he’s been designated the fall guy is unclear. But the argument he’s about to make is indefensible.

So I want to foot-stomp the point about what that argument actually requires you to believe. According to the Pentagon’s own account of the Sept 2 attack, these two men had just survived a missile strike that killed nine others… were stranded on a burning, crippled boat… were surrounded by scattered bundles of cocaine… were not attacking U.S. forces… were not firing weapons… and could not have possibly posed an imminent threat to anyone on earth (save for any maritime creatures stupid enough to swim near a burning boat).

Yet the administration’s official legal position is apparently that sweeping up spilled cocaine on a sinking vessel represents constitutes “continuing the mission” — making these men battlefield combatants — and therefore making it “lawful” to kill them with a second missile.

Even for fools willing to suspend their disbelief in order to placate Donald Trump, you cannot possibly see this as lawful. At best, it’s a bad rationalization camouflaged in military-speak as national security. But I suspect any first-year law student would eye-roll at the absurdity. In U.S. and international law, there is one serious justification for killing people from the air rather than arresting them, and that’s if they pose an imminent threat.

In other words, your life or someone else’s life needs to be in immediate danger if you’re going to kill the aggressor instead of arrest them. For instance, if a bad guy is firing on U.S. troops, advancing with an IED, aiming a missile, or otherwise poised to kill, that bad guy is a lawful target. Even if you assume this strike happened on a battlefield (which it did not), the targets had to be putting someone in immediate danger in order to be targets. And if they were firing at U.S. forces (which they were not), they would cease being targets once they were shipwrecked or stranded and stopped attacking. Then they’d be protected persons. And they must be rescued.

But based on the accounts, these men were not attacking anyone. They were allegedly sweeping up coke. The only “imminent threat” then was that they might accidentally get high off their own supply. Yet they were killed by the U.S. government, not arrested.

The administration’s justifications for murder keep shifting.

At least in the twenty years I’ve worked in the U.S. national security community, moving drugs around on a boat has never been considered an act of war. It’s a crime — often a serious one — but it doesn’t become a battlefield activity simply because the president is angry about drugs statistics. It simply doesn’t.

Ask yourself, seriously, in what universe do two wounded men on a burning hull, hundreds of miles from U.S. shores, represent an immediate threat to American lives because there are packages of cocaine nearby? Did the cocaine magically convert into weapons? Was it about to spring off the deck and kill U.S. soldiers?

Of course not.

So while the crime was a bad one — and the alleged drug dealers should have been arrested and prosecuted for it — to compare these low-level dope runners to battlefield combatants like the 9/11 plotters or the Nazis in World War II is beyond belief.

The only thing at risk in that moment was the evidence. Surviving people on that boat would have been living proof that the administration launched an airstrike that was obviously unlawful. Such surviving evidence could have pointed a finger back at the people who authorized the strikes. So apparently, in the eyes of those who ordered it, that evidence needed to be sent to the bottom of the ocean.

The administration’s sudden obsession with saying their goal was “sinking the vessel” (instead of killing the men on board) is not accidental. It conveniently mirrors the leaked Justice Department memo — the classified document written by the Office of Legal Counsel — which reportedly claims that drug boats themselves are what’s being treated as military targets. The dead people are just collateral damage.

So now the White House is reverse-engineering its story to match the memo: “We weren’t executing survivors,” they’re effectively saying, “we were just doing what we had to do in order to sink a boat.” Right.

That shift is revealing. Because if the real goal were public safety or adherence to law, they wouldn’t need to hide the memo. They wouldn’t need to invent stories about “continuing the mission.” They wouldn’t need to blame a Navy admiral in order to protect a Fox-News-host-turned-Pentagon-chief. They could just release the legal justification because it would provide clarity about why this was so necessary.

But it wasn’t necessary.

I can tell you from having overseen the agencies who do these operations that I’ve never once seen or heard of the need to blow up a drug boat instead of intercepting it. From every detail I’ve seen so far, there was no real and imminent threat to the U.S. homeland. There was only a president who wanted to do something illegal… the people whose consciences probably begged for them to recognize that truth… and the premeditated decision to ignore the facts, lest they defy the Commander-in-Chief’s murderous musings. I don’t write that facetiously. I mean every word of it.

So I have to say it again that this was an execution without trial.

This week, Pete Hegseth sat next to the president in a Cabinet meeting and said this all happened because of the “fog of war.” The second strike was done in the heat of battle. Of course, that’s what you say when bullets have been flying and you needed to make a split-second decision to save your life or the lives of your fellow troops. Mistakes happen in those moments. But you can’t invoke the “fog of war” when you’re sipping coffee in a Pentagon conference room, watching a drone feed for an hour, and then giving the order to fire again on civilians.

And then there’s the “self defense” excuse. The White House is adding to Hegseth’s meager defense but claiming the strike was done in “self defense.” Self defense for whom? At against what? Who was defending themselves against immediate harm? What was the assailant using to attack? And who were they attacking in real-time? You can’t invoke “self-defense” when the only danger is that your targets might survive long enough to tell their story.

And you can’t pretend this is about protecting Americans from fentanyl when the individuals being vaporized are untried suspects, on a burning boat, in international waters… who weren’t even transporting fentanyl!

So it bears repeating that what happened on Sept. 2 was an apparent trial-less execution carried out by what is supposed to be the freest country in the world. Based on the information available, it was a deliberate killing of civilians whom the U.S. government chose not to capture, when they very well could have. No lawyerly gymnastics about “continuing the mission” changes any of that. And it goes far beyond the Sept. 2 scandal.

Even if you’re not a dope runner, this should matter to you.

Thankfully, lawmakers of both parties are now demanding the video, the memo, and real answers. They’re right to do that because this scandal isn’t about one strike. It’s about all of them. Every one of the 20-plus boat strikes (and killing of 80-plus people) rests on a legal theory the administration invented out of thin air and which collapses under the slightest scrutiny.

If the United States can redefine a fishing boat as a “battlefield,” redefine shipwrecked survivors as “legitimate targets,” and redefine executions as “sinking a vessel,” then the law of armed conflict means nothing anymore. Worse than that, the rule of law itself begins to dissolve. That’s why I’ve been screaming about this for months. And I won’t stop.

Once our government convinces itself that it can suspend the law abroad, it becomes far easier to suspend it at home. That’s why this story should matter to you. You don’t need to have any sympathy for these horrible drug cartels. None whatsoever. To care, you just need to realize that your own rights are in trouble — because they are.

Your friend, in defiance,

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