🚫 Trump Military Chief Admits Boats They Are Blowing Up Aren't Even Heading to the United States. This Is Just Murder. Plain and Simple.
New CNN reporting shows the “narco-terrorists” Trump and Hegseth killed at sea weren’t bound for America. This was never self-defense. It was murder.
Family,
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So Let’s Start With the Simple Truth: The Boat Wasn’t Even Coming Here
On September 2nd, the Trump administration ordered a strike on a small speedboat off the coast of Venezuela. You know the one I’m talking about. Trump bragged about it on Truth Social. Secretary of State Marco Rubio went on TV and boasted that instead of interdicting the boat, “on the president’s orders, we blew it up — and it’ll happen again.”
Eleven people on that boat were killed. Two of them survived the first blast and clung to the wreckage. They were killed in follow-up strikes.
From the very beginning, Trump framed this as self-defense. He said the “narcoterrorists” were “heading to the United States.” Rubio called them a threat to our homeland. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called the strikes “lethal, kinetic” and insisted they were lawful.
Now CNN has reported something that rips the last excuse away.
According to a special report by CNN’s team — citing Adm. Frank Bradley, the man who actually oversaw the operation — the boat was not heading to the United States. It was headed to rendezvous with another vessel that was bound for Suriname, a small country on the northeast coast of South America.
Suriname is east of Venezuela. That boat was not sailing north toward Florida. It was sailing deeper into South America.
U.S. drug enforcement officials told CNN that routes through Suriname are primarily used for European markets, not U.S. ones. The main routes for U.S.-bound trafficking in recent years have been in the Pacific, not the Caribbean off Venezuela.
Read that again.
The people Trump killed were not “terrorists heading to the United States.” They were on a boat that U.S. intelligence believed was going to hand off drugs to another boat bound for Suriname. From there, maybe the drugs would go somewhere else. Maybe they wouldn’t. But even the admiral in charge has to admit: the boat itself was not coming here.
Trump’s self-defense story was a lie.
“Maybe One Day the Drugs Could Reach Us” Is Not a Legal Justification to Kill Eleven People
According to CNN, Bradley told lawmakers that the intel showed the boat planned to “rendezvous” with a larger vessel that would head to Suriname. The military never even found that second boat. Bradley argued that there was still a possibility that, at some point down the line, some portion of those drugs could make their way from Suriname to the U.S.
That is the flimsy chain of imagination they are now holding up to justify killing eleven human beings.
Not “they had missiles pointed at Florida.”
Not “they were about to ram a Coast Guard cutter.”
Not “they were seconds away from firing on Americans.”
Maybe, eventually, somewhere, some part of that shipment could have ended up in the United States.
If that is enough to justify a cross-border execution from the sky, then there is no limit at all. Every fishing boat, every cargo ship, every person in the Western Hemisphere is a legal target. That is not “defense.” That’s empire talking.
The Boat Turned Around. The Survivors Were Waving. They Were Killed Anyway.
CNN’s report contains more damning details.
Bradley acknowledged to lawmakers that the people on the boat saw the U.S. aircraft and turned around before being struck. They recognized a threat in the sky and tried to get away.
The U.S. military hit them anyway.
CNN says the boat was struck a total of four times:
The first strike split the boat in half and left two survivors clinging to the capsized hull.
The second, third and fourth strikes killed those survivors and sank what remained of the vessel.
Bradley told lawmakers that the survivors were waving at something in the air. He did not say whether they were trying to surrender or begging for help.
Anyone with a conscience knows what that scene looks like: people in the water, alive but shipwrecked, seeing a powerful aircraft overhead — the same machine that just blew their boat apart — and waving for mercy.
They did not get mercy. They got three more missiles.
According to CNN, Bradley understood the mission objective to be to kill all 11 people on board and sink the boat.Hegseth, we now know from earlier reporting, had made clear before the mission that the strikes were to be “lethal.”
I don’t care how many lawyers you bring in after the fact: that is murder.
The Pentagon’s Own Law Manual Says Killing Shipwrecked People Is a War Crime
This isn’t just my moral judgment. It’s in the Pentagon’s own law of war manual.
Under international humanitarian law — the same body of law we use to judge other countries — it is expressly forbidden to kill people who are shipwrecked.
The manual defines shipwrecked people as those:
“In need of assistance and care” who “must refrain from any hostile act.”
Once a vessel is destroyed and people are in the water, unarmed, clinging to wreckage, they are no longer legal targets. They are not “combatants in the fight.” They are people in distress whom you are obligated to rescue or at least not kill.
Killing them is not a gray area. It is an “outrage upon personal dignity” and a war crime.
And yet, the U.S. military — on explicit orders to conduct “lethal” strikes — hit those survivors three more times until the boat and the men holding on to it were gone.
We can play lawyer games about whether Hegseth gave a formal “no quarter” order. Some official told CNN that the orders did not technically say “kill everyone and take no prisoners,” because such an order has “specific implications” and is illegal.
But if you give an admiral a mission that he reasonably understands to mean “kill all 11 and sink the boat,” and that’s exactly what he does, the universe does not care whether your email subject line literally included the phrase “no quarter.”
The people in the water are just as dead.
So What Was This Really?
Let’s be plain.
A U.S. president, who loves strongman theatrics, wanted a show of force. His Secretary of State bragged that they chose to blow up a boat instead of interdicting it. His Secretary of Defense pushed a new “lethal” doctrine in the Caribbean. An admiral was given to understand that the goal was to kill everyone on that boat, even after it turned around.
The target was a small vessel whose alleged contraband was destined — at best — for a larger boat going to Suriname, a country whose sea routes primarily serve Europe, not the United States. The boat was not coming here.
The U.S. military destroyed it in international waters, then fired additional missiles at shipwrecked men waving at the sky.
You can call it a counter-narcotics mission if that helps you sleep. You can use phrases like “designated terrorist organizations” and “narco-terrorists” and “protecting the homeland.” You can have the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel write a memo saying this all happens inside a “non-international armed conflict” where certain killings don’t count as murder.
But strip away the jargon and you are left with this: the U.S. government killed eleven people in international waters whose boat was not even heading for the United States and then finished off the survivors.
If another country did that to our citizens, we would not hesitate to use words like war crime and massacre.
We should not hesitate now just because the murderer is wearing our flag.
Family, if you want someone who will keep saying that out loud — who will not let these crimes slide into euphemism and forgetfulness — I’m asking you to help me keep doing this work. Please click here to become a member so we can keep The North Star free for the world and independent of the very governments and donors whose actions we are naming. And if you’re in a position to support this work at a higher level, please click here to join as a monthly, annual, or founding member.
Love and appreciate each of you.
Your friend and brother,
Shaun
They are literally just blowing people up for fun. It's so gross. It's all lies.
If the U.S. was at war with Venezuela, this would be a war crime. But the U.S. is not at war with Venezuela, so this is mass murder, pure and simple.