Republicans on Tuesday invoked drone strikes during then-President Barack Obama’s tenure in a dubious effort to justify what experts say is the Trump administration’s illegal boat bombing campaign against alleged drug traffickers, while falsely claiming that Democrats and the media ignored airstrikes ordered by the former president.
US House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) was asked during a Tuesday press conference about a so-called “double-tap” airstrike—military parlance for follow-up strikes on survivors and first responders after initial bombings—that killed two men who survived a Sept. 2 attack on a boat in the southern Caribbean Sea.
Although US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has denied it, he reportedly gave a spoken order to “kill everybody” in the boat, which was supposedly interpreted by Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley as a green light for launching a second strike after the discovery that two of the 11 men aboard the vessel were alive and clinging to its burning wreckage.
Responding to the question concerning the strike’s legality, Johnson pointed to upcoming congressional consultations on the matter and said that such attacks are “not an unprecedented thing.”
“Secondary strikes are not unusual,” he noted. “It has to happen if a mission is going to be completed.”
“It’s something Congress will look at, and we’ll do that in the regular process and order,” Johnson continued, referring to a classified briefing with Bradley and some lawmakers scheduled for Thursday. “I think it’s very important for everybody to reserve judgment and not leap to conclusions until you have all the facts.”
“One of the things I was reminded of this morning is that under Barack Obama… I think there were 550 drone strikes on people who were targeted as enemies of the country, and nobody ever questioned it,” he said.
RAJU: If defenseless survivors were killed, would that constitute a violation of the laws of war? MIKE JOHNSON: I’m not going to prejudge any of that. I was pretty busy yesterday. I didn’t follow a lot of the news. pic.twitter.com/v38JWhNx0k — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 2, 2025
The lack of attention to Obama’s strikes claimed by Johnson is belied by congressional hearings, lawsuits, and copious coverage—and condemnation—of such attacks in media outlets including Common Dreams.
Progressive lawmakers and Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky were among the numerous US officials who criticized Obama-era drone strikes.
Trump administration officials have reportedly cited the Obama administration’s legal rationale for bombing Libya to justify the boat strikes to members of Congress.
Other Republican lawmakers and right-wing media figures noted on Tuesday that Obama—who bombed more countries than his predecessor, former President George W. Bush and was called the “drone warrior-in-chief”—ordered strikes that resulted in massacres of civilians at events including funerals and at least one wedding.
At least hundreds of civilians were killed in such strikes, including 16-year-old US citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who, according to an Obama administration official, was in the wrong place at the wrong time when he was slain in Yemen in 2011. This, after al-Awlaki’s father—an accused terrorist who was also American—was assassinated by a drone strike ordered by Obama.
Asked by a reporter about the legality of assassinating US citizens without charge or trial, then-White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs infamously asserted in October 2012 that Abdulrahman al-Awlaki should have had “a far more responsible father.”
Buried deep in a New York Times article published earlier that year was the revelation that Obama’s secret “kill list” authorized the assassination of US citizens, and that his administration was counting all military-age males in a strike zone as “combatants” regardless of their actual status in an effort to artificially lower the reported number of civilian casualties.
“Turns out I’m really good at killing people,” Obama once boasted, according to the 2013 Mark Halperin and John Heilemann book Double Down. “Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”
A third member of the al-Awlaki family, 8-year-old Nawar al-Awlaki—also an American citizen—was killed in a US commando raid in Yemen ordered by President Donald Trump in early 2017.
Tens of thousands of civilians were killed by US airstrikes in Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen during the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations as part of the decadeslong so-called Global War on Terror, in which more than 900,000 people were slain, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
At least thousands of civilians have been killed or wounded by US bombs and bullets in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen during Trump’s first and second terms, during which rules of engagement aimed at protecting noncombatants have been loosened.
At least 83 people have been killed in 21 strikes on alleged drug-running boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean since early September, according to Trump administration figures. Officials in Venezuela and Colombia, as well as relatives of victims, claim that some of them were civilians uninvolved in narcotrafficking.
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