AMY GOODMAN: Pressure is growing on the Trump administration to release video of a U.S. airstrike on September 2nd that killed two men who were left shipwrecked in the Caribbean after an earlier U.S. strike on the vessel that killed nine people. The Trump administration claims all the passengers on the boat were involved in drug trafficking, but offered no proof.

CNN is reporting that Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley told lawmakers last week the boat planned to link up with another, larger vessel that was bound not for the United States, but for Suriname.

On Sunday, Democratic Representative Adam Smith of Washington state spoke to ABC News.

REP. ADAM SMITH: There were two survivors on an overturned boat. And Senator Cotton’s description of it is simply not accurate. When they were finally taken out, they weren’t trying to flip the boat over. The boat was clearly incapacitated. A tiny portion of it remained capsized, the bow of the boat. They had no communications device. Certainly, they were unarmed. Any claim that the drugs had somehow survived that attack is hard to really square with what we saw. So it was deeply disturbing. It did not appear that these two survivors were in any position to continue the fight.

AMY GOODMAN: Congressman Adam Smith’s comments came a day after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spoke at the Reagan Library at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California. He defended the strike on the shipwrecked men and was questioned about releasing the strike video.

LUCAS TOMLINSON: So, Mr. Secretary, you will be releasing that full video?

DEFENSE SECRETARY PETE HEGSETH: We are reviewing it right now.

LUCAS TOMLINSON: Is that a yes or no?

DEFENSE SECRETARY PETE HEGSETH: That is for — the most important thing to me are the ongoing operations in the Caribbean with our folks that use bespoke capabilities, techniques, procedures in the process. I’m way more interested in protecting that than anything else. So we’re reviewing the process, and we’ll see.

AMY GOODMAN: Hegseth’s comments contradict President Trump, who was questioned about releasing the video last week.

SELINA WANG: Mr. President, you released video of that first boat strike on September 2nd, but not the second video. Will you release video of that strike so that the American people can see for themselves what happened?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I don’t know what they have, but whatever they have, we’d certainly release, no problem.

AMY GOODMAN: Since September, the Pentagon has struck at least 22 boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific.

We’re joined now by Reed Brody, war crimes prosecutor, member of the International Commission of Jurists and author of the book To Catch a Dictator: The Pursuit and Trial of Hissène Habré.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Reed.

REED BRODY: Thanks, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Are these war crimes?

REED BRODY: Well, if this was a war, they would be war crimes. But because it’s not a war, it’s murder. I mean, in order to have a war, you need to be actually fighting against a — either another country or an organized armed group, and there has to be a level of conflict such that it is an armed conflict. President Trump has taken a metaphor, “the war on drugs” or “the war against narcos,” and tried to convert it into an actual war. But, you know, that’s no more valid than saying, “OK, we’re fighting a war on corruption, so we can target alleged insider traders,” or “We’re fighting a war on disinformation, so we can — Trump can bomb the BBC.”

I mean, this is — I mean, let’s remember that this is a law enforcement operation. The United States can make drug smuggling a crime, as we have. We can interdict these people. We can bring them to the United States. We can prosecute them. If they’re found guilty, they go to jail. What we can’t do, however, is just go around the world dropping bombs on ships and on people without any evidence of any wrongdoing, without any trial and without any evidence that they are posing a threat to anybody. Let’s — yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me go back to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaking at the Reagan National Defense Forum at the Reagan Library in California.

DEFENSE SECRETARY PETE HEGSETH: The days in which these narcoterrorists, designated terror organizations, operate freely in our hemisphere are over. These narcoterrorists are the al-Qaeda of our hemisphere, and we are hunting them with the same sophistication and precision that we hunted al-Qaeda. We are tracking them. We are killing them. And we will keep killing them, so long as they are poisoning our people with narcotics so lethal that they’re tantamount to chemical weapons.

AMY GOODMAN: Reed Brody?

REED BRODY: Look, right now, as we speak, the former president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, is facing trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague for doing exactly what President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have done: killing suspected drug dealers without due process.

What we are doing here is murder on the high seas. If these were — you know, if these crimes were being committed in the territorial waters of a country that was a party to the International Criminal Court, the prosecutor could actually bring charges against Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth and all the people down the chain of command for extrajudicial — not for war crimes, because it’s not a war, but for murder, for extrajudicial executions.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let me ask you, this happening at the same time last week that President Trump pardoned and released Juan Orlando Hernández. Now, Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, was found guilty in a U.S. court. His brother had been found guilty a few years before, his brother sentenced to life in prison, Juan Orlando Hernández sentenced to something like 45, 46 years in prison in a U.S. jail for trafficking cocaine into the United States, using all the levers of the power of the state as president, the military, the police, in facilitating cocaine coming into this country. And quoted in the trial were those who said he said, “We are going to stuff cocaine up the noses of those gringos.”

REED BRODY: Yeah, I mean, look, these strikes are crimes within an illegal operation in the service of what is really a hoax — I mean, if President Trump was concerned about drugs. I mean, Venezuela accounts for a very small portion of drugs coming into the United States. I mean, most of the fentanyl and other drugs come in on land routes through Mexico, etc. I mean, this is no more a war on drugs than, you know, sending National Guard into Democratic cities is about fighting crime or, you know, attacking free speech on campuses is about protecting from antisemitism. They’re just making this stuff up, and basically they’re forcing the debate into, you know, their own terms.

AMY GOODMAN: So, finally, is the U.S., is Trump trying to trigger a Venezuelan Gulf of Tonkin, an excuse for the U.S. to invade Venezuela, the country with the largest oil reserves in the world?

REED BRODY: Look, I’ve got no truck for Nicolás Maduro. I mean, this is a man who, you know, who stole elections, who crushes dissent and everything. But what it does appear to be is all of this is a pretext. It’s we’re bullying. This is a psychological operation. I don’t know that Trump and the MAGA base will actually go in guns a-blazing to Venezuela, but I think that this is not about drugs. I think this is about bullying and intimidating the Venezuelan government.

AMY GOODMAN: Reed Brody, thanks so much for being with us, war crimes prosecutor, member of the International Commission of Jurists, author of the book To Catch a Dictator: The Pursuit and Trial of Hissène Habré. To see our interview on that book, go to democracynow.org.

Next up, we go to Tucson, Arizona, where ICE agents pepper-sprayed a newly sworn-in congressmember, Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva, as local residents protested yet another ICE raid. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: The Down Hill Strugglers performing “When First Unto This Country” at the Brooklyn Folk Festival in November.