Sen. Tom Cotton let his imagination run wild as he offered a series of justifications for Pete Hegseth’s deadly strike on a suspected drug trafficking boat near Trinidad.
Cotton backed the defense secretary’s second strike on the two remaining survivors of the initial Sept. 2 attack, insisting they were “valid targets” because they were “not incapacitated.”
“They were sitting on that boat. They were clearly moving around on it,” Cotton said on Meet the Press Sunday,
“Maybe they were signaling to other drug cartels. At one point the guy takes off his t-shirt, maybe he was trying to get a sun tan,” he said of the actions of two initial survivors, who were then hit by a second missile.
The Arkansas senator disputed guidance in the Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual, which suggested that the second strike could be illegal.
“‘Orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal,’” Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker read from the text, asking Collins how Hegseth’s second missile could be legal in light of the directive.
The senator argued that the survivors’ very signs of life acted as an invitation for them to be killed.
“They were not incapacitated, they were not in the water surviving only because they had a life jacket or hanging on a plank of wood,” he said.
Cotton then compared the mission to an October incident in which two survivors of a boat strike weren’t killed, arguing that in that case “they were essentially just dogpaddling in the water” and thus were allowed to go home.
On Thursday, Admiral Mitch Bradley and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine showed a video of the strike to lawmakers, with Welker pointing out that Bradley had a very different take on what the footage revealed.
“He saw that video and he said it looked like two classically shipwrecked people,” Welker said. “Others say the two men appeared to raise their arms potentially signal that they were trying to surrender.”
Asked why Bradley could “interpret those actions as anything other than these two men trying to seek to surrender and survive,” Cotton simply replied: “They weren’t in the water.
“It didn’t matter what they were trying to do. It looked like they were trying to continue their mission.”
“Or to stay afloat,” Welker suggested. After Cotton bizarrely suggested that one of the men was trying to tan before being hit by a missile, the anchor pushed: “Again, your colleagues say they were waving their arms around. Isn’t it possible that even the act of taking off a t-shirt could have been part of making an attempt to get help?”
Cotton stayed true to his version of the events, musing: “Or an attempt to signal to another cartel boat to come pick them up and pick up the cargo.”
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