Footage seen by US senators shows two unarmed, shirtless men struggling to stay afloat before they were killed, sources say

Footage seen by US senators shows two unarmed, shirtless men struggling to stay afloat before they were killed, sources say

Two men who survived a US airstrike on a suspected drug smuggling boat in the Caribbean clung to the wreckage for an hour before they were killed in a second attack, according a video of the episode shown to senators in Washington.

The men were shirtless, unarmed and carried no visible radio or other communications equipment. They also appeared to have no idea what had just hit them, or that the US military was weighing whether to finish them off, two sources familiar with the recording told Reuters.

The pair desperately tried to turn a severed section of the hull upright before they died. “The video follows them for about an hour as they tried to flip the boat back over. They couldn’t do it,” one source said.

The video of the attack on 2 September was seen by senators behind closed doors on Thursday amid growing concern that the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, and other officials who ordered the attack may have committed a war crime.

  • gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world
    1·
    23 hours ago

    Huh, I hadn’t thought of that implication but I see what you mean. I guess it’s always been kind of misleading though, because it’s not about the delay between strikes, it’s about shooting a target that’s already been neutralized to try to kill survivors.

    Seems like the specific phrase might have orginated from a 2003 order the army gave to troops in Iraq (arc), which would explain the minimizing language (while we’re on the subject - blowing someone up with a missile isn’t exactly a “tap,” either), but then groups like Amnesty International ran with it to talk about how the Bush and Obama and Trump administrations would all drone strike targets a second time to kill medical responders.

    • evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world
      2·
      20 hours ago

      Yeah, as far as I know, the real origin of the term is for shooting targets (or people), so you are literally double tapping the trigger. That way, if the first round doesn’t hit (or doesn’t kill), the second will.

      The uncertainty piece is key, though. If they fired a missile and werent sure if it hit by the time they launched the second, they could accurately call that a double-tap. That’s what hegseth seems to be trying to push, especially with his reference to “fog of war”.

      The moment you know the first shot destroyed the target, it ceases to be a double-tap.

      I just don’t like how they are trying to absolve themselves through language they know will be misinterpreted, and then the media just parrots it with no issue.

      P.s., to be clear, whether it is a double tap doesn’t change much to me because the first missile was already a war crime.

    • geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml
      21·
      19 hours ago

      Not killing just survivors, a double tap is about killing the people who try to rescue the wounded. It is using the wounded as a trap to lure out anyone willing to help them and kill them too.

      • BigPotato@lemmy.world
        12·
        18 hours ago

        I would like a source on that.

        To be crass, you double tap an enemy who is wounded as you’re advancing past them so you don’t need to waste time or resources securing or treating them.

        If you’re far enough away that they’re wounded and their buddy is rushing over, well, they should’ve done the first rule of care under fire - return fire. Not my fault if they forgot to call time out. That’s not a double tap.