The Senate on Wednesday passed Congress’s $900 billion defense policy bill. They also advanced a bipartisan effort to force the Pentagon to disclose footage of a military strike on a drug smuggling boat near Venezuela.
The legislation advanced by a vote of 77 to 20. It cleared the House last week, and President Donald Trump is expected to sign it into law.
A measure in the bill withholds 25 percent of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s travel budget until he provides Congress with video of the Sept. 2 operation and other materials related to the Trump administration’s campaign against Latin American narcotics traffickers. Eleven people were killed in that attack, including two men who survived a U.S. initial strike on their vessel.
The drug-dealing cartels are killing 70,000 to 100,000 Americans a year and ruining even more lives.
The footage is seen as essential evidence as lawmakers seek to determine whether military officials violated the law of armed conflict by targeting the boat’s wreckage with survivors present. Military law grants special protection to people who are deemed “shipwrecked,” meaning they are in peril and not engaging in hostilities. The commander who oversaw the operation has sought to defend his decision to order the subsequent strike that killed the two survivors.
Hegseth had several JAG lawyers okaying every step of the operation in real time.
It’s hard to understand the extreme concern over drug cartel operators getting blown up with their drugs.
Democrats are claiming that the second hit on the drug boat was a a case of murdering survivors of a shipwreck. It doesn’t get crazier than that. A lot of Uniparty Republicans agree.d
We don’t have Republicans in the Senate, only a uniparty swamp. The only reason they want those drug boat videos released is so they can use those videos to impeach Trump and prosecute Hegseth. And why 1 billion to Ukraine… what for?!? So they can launder it all before the war ends? These people are some of the worst, most… Read more »
It is as MTG said, the RINOs oppose Trump. Look at the obstacles they put in his path. The public does not care about the bombings. This is an issue of the DC culture.
That last defense secretary took a secret 2 week leave in which he was incapacitated, I recall no action by Congress.
Like the LYING FAKE NEWS LIBERAL MEDIA…ONE CAN’T HATE THE PATHETIC, SELF-SERVING JOKE-ON-AMERICA THAT IS THE UNIPARTY-CONTROLLED U.S. CONGRESS >>>
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