“‘Kill Them All’ and Then Deny: How a Drug Boat Strike Blew Up Trump’s Tough-Guy Myth
The Trump administration’s latest national security scandal began with a single burning boat on a dark Caribbean sea and has now spiraled into a political and moral crisis that officials are struggling to contain. On September 2, U.S. forces launched what the White House hailed as the first in a new wave of “lethal, kinetic strikes” on alleged drug traffickers at sea, destroying a Venezuelan speedboat and killing most of the 11 people on board. What the public did not learn until months later was that 2 men survived the initial missile strike, clinging to the wreckage, only to be killed in a follow up attack ordered while U.S. commanders watched the scene in real time through drone feeds. That second strike turned a harsh new counterdrug tactic into something critics now warn could qualify as a war crime, and it exposed deep cracks in the administration’s story about who gave the orders and who knew what, and when. At the center of the storm is Defense Secretary Pete Hegset...