For Hegseth, there is one boat strike he doesn’t want the public to see
One of the many oddities of the huge buildup of U.S. 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, U.S. 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 on 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 “long-standing Department of War policy.”
