Days after President Trump declared he had “no problem” releasing a video of a second strike on a boat in the Caribbean on Sept. 2 that killed two alleged drug smugglers hanging to remnants of the hull, he reversed himself on Monday and said he would let Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth decide whether to make it public.
The video was shown to a few members of Congress last week, in the Pentagon’s first effort to tamp down intense criticism, some from Republicans, of the decision to attack the boat again. Some members of Congress have said that if the follow-on strike was intended to kill the remaining two survivors of the crew of about 11, it could be a war crime as well as a violation of the U.S. military’s own code of conduct.
Democrats who emerged from a showing of the video described it showing the two men clinging to wreckage to avoid drowning, and that the images were shocking and would repulse the public. Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that the two survivors “were barely alive, much less engaging in hostilities,” when the follow-up strike took place.
Mr. Trump told reporters who asked about the video last week, “I don’t know what they have, but whatever they have, we’d certainly release, no problem.”
But on Monday he denied ever endorsing its release and referred the issue to Mr. Hegseth. On Saturday, Mr. Hegseth told the Reagan National Defense Forum that he would not commit to making the video public.
“We’re reviewing the process, and we’ll see,” Mr. Hegseth said. “Whatever we were to decide to release, we’d have to be very responsible about reviewing that right now.”
The Pentagon has possessed the video since the mission took place in early September. It immediately released a video of the initial strike on the boat, which killed most of the crew and capsized the craft. But it did not initially make mention of the fact that it took more strikes to sink the boat, and that survivors had been seen.
The Pentagon’s story about where the boat was headed at the time has changed repeatedly, and the administration has refused to release the legal rationale, drafted at the Justice Department, justifying the strikes on the boats. The U.S. military has carried out 22 such strikes, killing at least 87 people.
Outside experts say that because drug-runners are not armed military forces, the strikes are illegally targeting civilians who should, instead, be subject to apprehension and arrest by the Coast Guard.
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
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