Democrat challenges Pentagon to release tape of deadly attacks on drug ships

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) called on the Pentagon to release video of a second attack on a suspected drug trafficking ship in the Caribbean that has sparked widespread backlash.

Appearing Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” moderator Kristen Welker directly asked Schiff whether he believes the Trump administration’s Sept. 2 attack that killed survivors of an initial attack on the ship was “legal.”

His question came after Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Sunday on “Meet the Press” that it was “entirely appropriate to attack the ship again to ensure its cargo was destroyed.”

Cotton argued that the measure was “in no way a violation of the law of war.”

Speaking with Welker, Schiff called the strikes “illegal” and “unconstitutional.”

“Killing two people who are shipwrecked at sea is also morally repugnant,” he said. “I agree with Tom: We should do everything we legally can to stop the scourge of drugs coming into this country. But this is absolutely not legal or constitutional.”

The California senator argued that if the Pentagon and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are “so proud of what they’re doing,” then they should “let the American people see that video.”

“Let the American people see two people standing on a capsized boat or sitting on a capsized boat [get] deliberately killed and [let them] “Decide for yourself if you are proud of what your country is doing,” he continued. “I can’t imagine people would be proud of that.”

On Saturday, Hegseth declined to say whether the Pentagon would release images of the controversial operation.

fake images

“We’re reviewing it right now to make sure of the sources, the methods, I mean, it’s an ongoing operation… We have operators doing this right now, so whatever we decide to release, we would have to be very responsible,” Hegseth said during an interview at the Reagan 2025 National Defense Forum in Simi, California.

Meanwhile, Trump said Wednesday that his administration would “certainly release” any video of the attacks following a report alleging that the US military issued an order to kill two survivors.

“I don’t know what they have, but whatever they have, we will certainly release it, no problem,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

Schiff then told Welker: “As you pointed out, the law of war manual makes it explicit that killing shipwrecked people is illegal, it is a violation of the law.”

The Democrat went on to say that “the most concerning thing” he heard Cotton say is that “it didn’t really matter what these people were doing on that capsized boat, whether they were signaling distress and asking for rescue or what they were doing.”

Schiff argued: “It does matter.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Schiff said that the attacks are not only “illegal,” but “they are a form of extrajudicial execution.”

“These ships are not invading the United States in an armed assault. They are thousands of miles away. Some of them, perhaps even this ship, if the reports are accurate, were not even headed to the United States,” the politician said. “And I think the fact that we are engaged in this kind of unauthorized campaign of extrajudicial killings could not be a clearer violation of the law.”

He also noted that even if the Trump administration “can put a group of organizations, terrorists, narcoterrorist organizations on a list,” that “does not change the legal capacity [and] “It does not give a president the ability to kill them at sea.”

Concluding his comments, Schiff added that “we need a thorough investigation to find out what the orders were” for the attacks and “whether it was to kill all the members of an organization without knowing specifically who those people were or what the situation was.”

Watch Schiff’s appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” below.

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