America's Talking - Hegseth, Pentagon stand by explanation of second boat strike

Episode Date: December 6, 2025

(The Center Square) – After a story was published last week claiming that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth ordered a second strike on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat to kill those remaining, both Hegseth and the Pentagon reiterated their defense of the War Department’s actions as completely legal. Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson told reporters Tuesday that the U.S. has performed 21 strikes on drug boats in the Western Hemisphere, killing “82 narco-terrorists.” Wilson repeatedly described the boats as narco-terrorist vessels at the Pentagon's first press briefing under this administration, underscoring that the terrorist designation allows the Trump administration to respond more forcefully while remaining within the law. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Good afternoon and welcome to America's Talking. My name is Morgan Sweeney, and I am one of the Washington, D.C. reporters for the Center Square. Joining me today is Brett Rowland, who is also a reporter with the national team. Welcome, Brett. Thanks so much for having me. We are going to be talking about some of the latest controversy over the Venezuelan drug boat strikes, which started back a couple months ago now, and there have been over 20 of them. But this week, Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, came under fire because of what happened with one of them.

Brett, can you tell us a little bit about that? Yes. So there's still not a ton of details here, but we do know some more things that we've learned this week. So we know that on September 2nd, there was a boat strike, and we had already reported on that. That strike had two survivors, and the military followed up with additional strikes. This is the first boat we know of that had survivors that were the subject of additional strikes. An earlier boat strike had on a semi-submersible suspected drug boat. There were two people who were taken into custody and later returned to their countries of origins.

I think we were to Ecuador and Colombia. So we've seen how they've handled survivors in the past, and this time seems to be different. Now, we know that Admiral Brady plans to tell Congress today that he believed that those two people in the water or two people on the damaged boat still posed a threat because they plan to continue the drug run. So that's sort of the latest here. There's a lot of background here. This has been going out for months. As you mentioned, there's been more than, I think, more than a 20 strikes. I think 82 people have died in these strikes.

And it's a major shift in policy for the administration, especially from the last one. And really from how America has handled these suspected drug vessels for years. In the past, it was always like interdiction. So the boat would be stopped and drugs would be seized. People would be arrested. They weren't just destroyed in military strike as as Trump has chosen to do. And Congress is, it's clear that Congress is getting more concerned about this. And I think we saw a little bit of that earlier this week, which you reported on.

And I think that we'll continue to see more as details about this September 2nd strike and how these survivors were. treated in what was known by who and when becomes more clear. And how has the administration justified these strikes sort of from the get-go? So Trump has been really clear about this. He sees each one of these drugs strikes, strikes on suspected drug boats as saving American lives. He, the number he quotes is 25,000 American lives per boat. That doesn't quite match up with official CDC figures for overdose deaths. I think it's some analysts and critics have also said, you know, it's hard to say that somebody who's, you know, trafficking illegal drugs is directly intentionally trying to attack America or American residents, although other people see it differently.

So how this ends up, we don't know. Some of the scholars I've talked to on this in the past have said that even if the allegations of smuggling were true, this strikes would still be difficult to. justify the UN Human Rights Commission and a number of other human rights groups have condemned the attacks. So have the President of Columbia and some other leaders in that area, including Venezuela, saying that these are not legal and that they're essentially just bombing poor people who are trying to make a living. Now, how much we know about that is not clear. and the Pentagon hasn't released a lot of information about what's been found on the boat. But we do know that Dominican authorities, after one of the strikes, did recover cocaine from one of these boats.

So the suggestion is that there's cocaine smuggling, and both Pete Hagseth and Donald Trump have said that these boats are smuggling drugs. They say that they have intelligence that details this before they make the strikes, and they're traveling known smuggling routes, and specifically known narco-terrorism routes and that's how they're referring to these attacks so far. And you said that there have been other instances where after a strike,

there have been survivors and they've handled them differently with this September strike. It appears that there was the initial strike and then there were these two people left and then they did another strike and they were killed. why is that really controversial?

So I guess the argument would be that if they were just, if they were like, you know, just floating in the water, they would no longer be considered enemy combatants or no longer have any chance to hurt Americans. But if they were trying to continue with the mission, trying to continue to get the drugs to their destination, we know that the vessel was damaged after the first strike, but not completely sunk, and the vote was eventually sunk.

But again, the Pentagon has released few details. There's multiple media reports out there, but still no firm answers from the Pentagon here. And are there other things that Trump has said indicating that the U.S. may even go further in pursuing what he calls narco-terrorists? Yes. So Trump has indicated that, one, he's shown no signs that he's going to change course with these drug boat strikes or suspected drugboats. strikes. So there's no indication from anyone in the Trump administration that they're going to change policy here. And Trump has also said that he would consider land attacks. But we have yet to see that. We know the main smuggling corridors are through Mexico. And that those haven't been, certainly there's been a crackdown at the border, but there haven't been any

military strikes that have been reported in along the Mexican border. Well, it'll be interesting to see how this all develops. It's a little bit scary, too. I'm sure. Now, Hagst did say the other day that there's fewer boats in the water, but the strikes keep occurring, so we'll have to see what happens next. Well, thank you, Brett, for sharing all of that. And you can follow this story and more information at thecenter square.com.