Trump himself wants to convey the impression that more transparency is coming. “We’ll look into it,” he told reporters late Sunday about this revelation. “I wouldn’t have wanted that—not a second strike.”
However, it’s not nothing that Republicans like Representative Mike Rogers and Senator Roger Wicker—the chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services committees—are now vowing real oversight. Democrats can seize on this—because this latest turn exposes how weak and indefensible the case for these bombings truly has become.
First, Smith says the committee is in communication with Frank “Mitch” Bradley, the commander who oversaw the bombing, about getting a possible classified briefing. Bradley appears to have been instrumental: As The Washington Post reports, on September 2, after the bombing of a boat carrying 11 people wrecked the vessel, live drone footage showed two men still alive. Bradley ordered a second strike, and as the Post put it, “the two men were blown apart in the water.”
That’s critical. Because that second hit, per the Post, was executed to fulfill Hegseth’s spoken order that everybody on the boat must be killed. Legal experts are describing that as a potential war crime, because killing defenseless foes violates international laws of war. Indeed, Jack Goldsmith, former head of the Office of Legal Counsel, argues in a careful analysis that if the Post report is true, Hegseth’s order might have been an illegal one.
Hegseth, as noted above, denies giving such a spoken order. Perhaps. But even if so, if this report is correct in its other particulars, the live drone feed does in fact show the survivors clinging to the wrecked boat and then getting “blown apart in the water.” So Bradley can be pressed to explain why this happened and what, precisely, Hegseth’s orders were.
“This should be public,” Smith says of the memo. “The public ought to know what the legal justification is for this.” Smith adds that he’ll raise this with Bradley: “It ought to be declassified.”
Now combine all those absurdities with the fact that Congress has not debated these strikes and has been given zero serious evidence backing them up. As The New York Times’ David French argues, the bad faith coursing through all of this—along with the likely illegality of it and Congress’s failure to fact-find—is putting military officials in the impossible position of receiving orders from an obviously unfit civilian leadership.
For your Christmas wish list… pic.twitter.com/pLXzg20SaL
— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) December 1, 2025The saga of the two men killed at sea illustrates this vividly. Again, even if this account isn’t precisely accurate, the execution appears to have happened.
If the video of the blast that killed the two survivors on Sept. 2 were made public, people would be horrified, said one person who watched the live feed.
So Democrats should challenge Republicans: Will you push hard enough to secure release of that legal memo, and demand real evidence backing up the strikes, and insist on testimony from military officials to justify them? If the answer is no, Democrats can hammer Republicans relentlessly: Are you truly willing to debase yourselves so dishonorably, all to shield the likes of Pete Hegseth from scrutiny? Really? Seriously?
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