Footage seen by US senators shows two unarmed, shirtless men struggling to stay afloat before they were killed, sources say
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 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.
Not legally, but there is a duty of care owed to them as unarmed civilians clinging to a disabled vessel at sea. Killing them could only be justified legally if they posed an imminent threat, which obviously they do not. Letting them suffer for an hour while you decide whether to murder them is fucked up but would never specifically be prosecuted as torture unless the explicit intent to torture them was the reason they were kept alive for that hour.
Even enemy combatants are supposed to be rescued at sea once they’re no longer a threat. There’s no interpretation of these guys that makes what they did justified.