\n<\/p>\n
Lawmakers in the United States have urged the release of a video of a controversial double-tap strike on a vessel in the Caribbean amid growing scrutiny of the legality of Washington\u2019s militarised anti-drug trafficking campaign.<\/p>\n
The bipartisan calls on Sunday came amid mounting controversy over revelations that military officials ordered a follow-up strike in the September 2 operation targeting a suspected drug-smuggling vessel, killing two survivors of the initial attack.<\/p>\n list of 4 items<\/span>end of list<\/span><\/section>\n Democratic and Republican lawmakers watched footage of the strikes last week in a closed-door briefing with military officials, but emerged from the screening with substantially different accounts of what happened.<\/p>\n Reactions to the footage\u00a0split along partisan lines, with Democrats expressing deep concerns about the legality of the strikes and Republicans insisting they were justified.<\/p>\n Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives\u2019s armed services committee, said the targeted vessel had been \u201cclearly incapacitated\u201d in the initial strike, and the survivors were unarmed and without any means of communication.<\/p>\n \u201cThey ought to release the video. If they release the video, then everything that the Republicans are saying will clearly be portrayed to be completely false, and people will get a look at it, and they will see,\u201d Smith said in an interview with the ABC News programme This Week with George Stephanopoulos.<\/p>\n \u201cIt seems pretty clear they don\u2019t want to release this video because they don\u2019t want people to see it because it\u2019s very, very difficult to justify,\u201d Smith added.<\/p>\n Jim Himes, who leads the Democrats on the House\u2019s intelligence committee, said the American public should have the chance to judge the video for themselves.<\/p>\n \u201cLook, there\u2019s a certain amount of sympathy out there for going after drug runners, but I think it\u2019s really important that people see what it looks like when the full force the United States military is turned on two guys who are clinging to a piece of wood and about to go under just so that they have sort of a visceral feel for what it is that we\u2019re doing,\u201d Himes told CBS News\u2019s Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.<\/p>\n Several Republicans said they would support the release of the video, even as they defended the strikes.<\/p>\n Senator Tom Cotton, whose account of the survivors trying to \u201cflip\u201d the boat and continue their voyage has been disputed by Democrats, said he would not object to the video\u2019s release, but would defer to the judgement of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t find it distressing or disturbing. It looks like any number of dozens of strikes we\u2019ve seen on Jeeps and pickup trucks in the Middle East over the years,\u201d Cotton, who chairs the intelligence committee in the Senate, told NBC News\u2019s Meet the Press.<\/p>\n John Curtis, a Republican senator from Utah, also suggested that he would support the video\u2019s release, saying officials should \u201cerr on the side of transparency\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThe American people, they like to make decisions too based on facts, not just on what we tell them,\u201d Curtis told CNN\u2019s State of the Union.<\/p>\n President Donald Trump, whose administration has carried out at least 22 strikes against alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific, said last week he would have \u201cno problem\u201d with releasing the footage.<\/p>\n Hegseth on Saturday struck a more cautious note during an appearance at a defence forum in California, telling a Q&A that officials were reviewing the possibility, but needed to make a \u201cresponsible\u201d decision.<\/p>\n Scrutiny of the strikes has mounted since The Washington Post reported last month that US military officials carried out a second attack on two people clinging to the vessel\u2019s wreckage after Hegseth directed commanders to leave no survivors.<\/p>\n Hegseth has repeatedly denied the report, which cited two unnamed sources, labelling it \u201cfake news\u201d, \u201cfabricated\u201d and \u201cinflammatory\u201d.<\/p>\n Legal scholars have argued that both the double-tap strike and the Trump administration\u2019s military campaign against suspected drug traffickers more generally are illegal.<\/p>\n \u201cThe United States is not currently operating in a context of armed conflict in its strikes in the Caribbean. For that reason, this is not a context in which war crimes apply,\u201d Tom Dannenbaum, an expert in the laws of war at Stanford University, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n \u201cInstead, all of the strikes qualify as murder in violation of domestic criminal law, and extrajudicial killings in violation of international human rights law.\u201d<\/p>\n At least 87 people have been killed in the strikes, which the Trump administration began in September.<\/p>\n The Trump administration has yet to make public any evidence to back its claims that the boats were carrying narcotics, were headed to the US, or that they were being commandeered by members of proscribed cartels.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Lawmakers in the United States have urged the release of a video of a controversial double-tap strike on a vessel in the Caribbean amid growing scrutiny of the legality of Washington\u2019s militarised anti-drug trafficking campaign. The bipartisan calls on Sunday came amid mounting controversy over revelations that military officials ordered a follow-up strike in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4682,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-us-canada-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4681\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Recommended Stories <\/h2>\n
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