David E. Sanger writes:

One of the many oddities of the huge buildup of American forces off Venezuela is the speed at which the Pentagon has released short clips of what it has identified as drug boats being struck and destroyed by American missiles — part deterrence, part bravado, and, to the many legal scholars questioning the legality of the operation, part evidence of extrajudicial killings.

So it was striking that on Tuesday, just as the Pentagon released three more videos, bringing the known death toll on the boats to 95, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced there was one the public would never see. It is the video of the now-famous “second strike” on a boat in September that killed two survivors clinging to the remains of an overturned vessel.

“We’re not going to release a top secret, full, unedited video of that to the general public,” he told reporters after a classified Senate hearing, citing “longstanding Department of War policy.”

It would hardly be the first time national security was invoked by the government to withhold something that might prove embarrassing, or even legally incriminating. Some members of Congress who have seen the full video have called it shocking, while others describe it as grotesque.

But Mr. Hegseth’s decision, weeks after President Trump said he had “no problem” with releasing the video, only to backtrack, is a glimpse into the depth of the administration’s concern that becoming too transparent about what is happening on the high seas could turn the American public against the strikes. Mr. Hegseth’s critics argue it suggests a coverup underway.

“Pete Hegseth happily releases a video after each strike,” said Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “He recognizes when the American people see this video, they will be repulsed. It is basically the summary execution of two people clinging to wreckage.”

The Pentagon has refused to say why, after the release of roughly two dozen videos of boats being struck in the Caribbean and the Pacific, there is a national security concern about this one. Video of the first strike was released hours after the incident happened; at the time, the Pentagon made no mention of the fact that it had seen two survivors, or that they had been killed in a follow-up strike. Both international law and the military’s own code prohibit killing survivors who no longer pose a threat or are clinging to a shipwreck.

In briefings for select members of Congress a few weeks ago, senior military officials suggested that the two survivors may have remained in the fight, and were waving, either to a nearby boat or to a plane or drone above. It is possible that Mr. Hegseth is basing his national security concern on that set of acts, though it is unclear whether an adversary would learn anything from watching the survivors appealing to be rescued. In the video, they are killed by an American missile just moments after waving for help.

More likely, members of Congress who viewed the video say, the concern is that the two survivors can be seen close up, perhaps from video taken by a nearby drone. “It’s very personal,” said Senator Chris Coons, the Delaware Democrat who has been highly critical of the Pentagon’s changing story about the second strike, and its refusal to make the video public. “We need to all pause and reflect on what is being done on our name.”

“It’s pretty striking that a secretary of defense who has posted, gleefully, video of strikes of drug boats, now says we cannot post a strike of a drug boat,” he concluded. [Continue reading…]