#boatstrikes — Public Fediverse posts

Wednesday Reads: A Mixed Bag of News

Good Afternoon!!

There’s lots of news today, so this post will be a mixed bag with stories on the Iran war, Trump’s boat strikes, last night’s primaries, the CBS/60 Minutes controversy, and more.

Trump’s war on Iran is getting stupider by the day. For several weeks now, Trump has been saying that a deal to end the war was just days away. A short time ago, he told Netanyahu not to respond to strikes by Iran in Israel. Netanyahu quickly proceeded to bomb Iran anyway. Then a U.S. helicopter went down in the Strait of Hormuz, and Trump responded even though it’s not clear that the helicopter was deliberately shot down. It may have just collided with a Iranian drone.

BBC: US strikes Iran in response to downing of military helicopter.

The US says it has carried out a series of strikes on Iranian military and surveillance sites in response to the downing of an American helicopter in the Gulf.

Air defence systems, ground control stations and radar sites were targeted near the Strait of Hormuz, the US military Central Command (Centcom) said.

In response, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said it launched strikes on 21 targets at US bases in the region, one in Bahrain and the other in Jordan, while Kuwait’s army said it was also intercepting an attack.

Boeing AH-64 Apache

The US has described its strikes as “a proportional response” for the Apache helicopter downing on Monday, while the IRGC described the attacks as “vicious”.

US President Donald Trump had earlier accused Iran of shooting down the helicopter and said the US “must, of necessity” respond. The two crew members survived and were rescued by an American sea drone.

According to US officials, Iran used a drone to launch the attack on the helicopter. But it is not clear whether the Iranian drone had deliberately attacked, an unnamed US official told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner. The semi-official Mehr News Agency reported that Iran had not claimed responsibility for the downed aircraft.

So now the war is back on, after months of Trump promising the end was near. This morning, Trump threatened Iran with more attacks.

BBC: Trump and Iran trade new threats after strikes exchanged.

US President Donald Trump and Iran’s senior officials have traded new threats of further action, after the two sides exchanged strikes.

Trump said Tehran had taken “too long to negotiate a deal” and would now “have to pay the price”, without giving specific details. He said Iran had been “completely defeated” and was “all talk and no action”.

It came after Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi earlier warned his country would “leave no attack or threat unanswered”, saying that the US had suffered “defeats on the battlefield”.

The US said it struck Iranian sites on Tuesday in response to the downing of a US army helicopter in the Gulf. Iran then launched strikes at US bases in the region.

Iranian defence systems, ground control stations and radar sites were targeted near the Strait of Hormuz, the US military Central Command (Centcom) said.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said it launched strikes on 21 targets at US bases in the region, one in Bahrain and the other in Jordan, while Kuwait’s army said it was also intercepting an attack.

Writing on his social media platform Truth Social on Wednesday, Trump said: “Iran’s Military is a complete and total mess. Much of it, like their Navy and Air Force, doesn’t even exist anymore – They have been completely defeated.”

He added: “They’ve taken too long to negotiate a deal that would have been great for them, now they will have to pay the price!!!”

Trump’s comments were in contrast to Tuesday, when he told journalists the US and Iran were “in the final throes of what will be a very, very good deal”.

Also on Wednesday, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqai accused the US of “damaging this diplomatic process through the contradictory messages it sends, its repeated shifts in positions and demands, and, worst of all, through repeated violations of the ceasefire”.

I have to agree with Iran here. Trump behaves like a 6-year old child–issuing threats while claiming an agreement is close–and using posts on Truth Social to communicate threats that he probably hasn’t discussed with any of his military advisers. And where are the negotiators anyway? Jared Kushner was a the New York Knicks game on Monday night. All this because Trump cancelled Obama’s Iran agreement.

More military news: remember the boat strikes that Trump and Hegseth were so proud of? Nick Turse has a shocking story on those at The Intercept: Top Pentagon Official Admits Boat Strike May Have Killed Victims of Human Trafficking.

Nine months into the Trump administration’s deadly campaign against so-called drug boats, there is a pattern to the strikes. And a glaring anomaly.

The U.S. military has conducted more than 60 attacks, resulting in over 200 extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. In almost all the strikes, between one and four people lost their lives. In only one strike did the death toll of a single boat reach double digits: the first attack on September 2, 2025.

Since then, experts, lawmakers, and even military officials behind the scenes have been asking a simple but haunting question: Why was that boat packed with 11 people?

“Why would 11 people be on board a boat carrying drugs?” said a government source who attended a classified briefing where the large crew on the first boat attacked was discussed. “It’s a high risk for the cartels. That always stood out.”

One top military officer provided a plausible explanation, behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, The Intercept has learned. His admission raises even more questions about a strike that a high-ranking Pentagon official called a criminal attack on civilians and resulted in a firestorm in Congress last year.

In the briefing, the high-ranking officer on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff stated that some of the people killed by the U.S. military may have been the victims of human trafficking.

Read all the details at The Intercept.

Several states held primaries yesterday. The most watched ones were in Maine and California. In Maine, Graham Platner won the Democratic Senate primary and will face long-time Senator Susan Collins in November.

Sahil Kapur at NBC News: Maine voters set up a Senate showdown: Graham Platner versus Susan Collins.

It’s official: Republican Sen. Susan Collins will face Democrat Graham Platner this fall, NBC News projects, in what will be a marquee election in the fight for control of the Senate.

Collins and Platner both won their primaries Tuesday in a predictable result. Collins, first elected to the Senate in 1996, ran unopposed for renomination as she seeks a sixth six-year term.

And Platner, a veteran and oyster farmer running in his first political race, faced little Democratic competition as two-term Gov. Janet Mills suspended her campaign after she failed to gain traction. She still appeared on the primary ballot.

Graham Platner and Susan Collins

While the primary results were foreseeable, what happens next is anything but. The Senate election has already become a battleground over the future of the Democratic Party and what voters think is most important, as Platner faces numerous controversies about his past conduct.

And that’s before the real campaigning between the resilient incumbent and the brash outsider has even kicked off, though Platner started the general election with a series of stinging attacks on Collins at a victory speech in Blue Hill, Maine. The Democrat cast her as the “deciding vote” on Republican priorities including Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation

“Susan Collins may have started her career decades ago in Washington with good intentions, but she has become just as spineless and corrupt as the establishment she now serves,” Platner said. “She got elected promising to protect Roe versus Wade, only to turn around and put on a justice, but a justice of Supreme Court who overturned it. She lied to us.”

In a statement, Collins’ campaign said, “Mainers aren’t looking for bitter campaigns, grand promises, or angry speeches riddled with lies. They’re looking for results. They want affordable health care, safe communities, good-paying jobs, strong schools, and someone who will show up and do the work.”

In California, the race for governor is now set. Laurel Rosenhall at The New York Times: Hilton Beats Steyer to Win Second Spot in California Governor Race.

Steve Hilton, a Republican former Fox News host who was endorsed by President Trump, has secured the second spot in the November general election for California governor, The Associated Press determined on Tuesday. He will face Xavier Becerra, a Democrat who served in the Biden administration.

The candidates survived an unprecedented barrage of spending for a California governor’s race. Tom Steyer, a billionaire who ran as a progressive Democrat, devoted more than $216 million of his personal fortune toward his primary campaign, finishing third.

Under California rules, the top two finishers in the primary election, regardless of party, advance to the general election. There had been a chance that Mr. Steyer would face Mr. Becerra in an intraparty battle in November, but Tuesday’s outcome instead sets up a lopsided contest in a state where a Republican has not won the governor’s office in two decades.

The winner will replace Gov. Gavin Newsom, who cannot run again because of term limits and is considered a potential Democratic presidential candidate for 2028.

This sets up a likely win for Democrats, since California is one of the bluest states in the country.

Mr. Hilton’s top-two finish seems to run counter to Mr. Trump’s claims in recent days that California elections are “rigged” to benefit Democrats. Mr. Hilton said on Tuesday that he takes the concern seriously, but that he has had lawyers monitoring the voting process and they have not seen signs of fraud.

Xavier Becerra and Steve Hilton

The November matchup is one that Mr. Becerra and many Democrats had hoped for, knowing that Mr. Hilton was not just a Republican, but one endorsed by Mr. Trump, who remains deeply unpopular in California.

Days before the election, Mr. Becerra released an ad that highlighted the differences between him and Mr. Hilton, whom the ad called “Trump’s favorite.” While the ad ostensibly bolstered Mr. Becerra’s anti-Trump credentials, it also seemed designed to encourage Republicans to coalesce behind Mr. Hilton and give him enough support to finish second and prevent Mr. Steyer from reaching the general election.

In South Carolina, Trump foe Nancy Mace lost in the primary for governor. Alec Hernandez at Politico: Nancy Mace loses GOP primary for South Carolina governor.

Republican firebrand Rep. Nancy Mace lost her GOP primary for South Carolina governor, potentially ending her rollercoaster political career.

Mace failed to advance to a runoff Tuesday. She was considered a top contender in the race until a series of scandals cut into her in-state support and she bucked President Donald Trump to help release the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Trump’s preferred candidate, South Carolina Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, and Attorney General Alan Wilson advanced to a runoff June 23.

The Palmetto State primary was for months defined by Trump’s absence from the race, despite the six Republicans candidates vying for his attention and support. Trump only endorsed Evette in the final two weeks, touting her closeness with his ally and early backer, outgoing GOP Gov. Henry McMaster.

In an interview ahead of the primary, Mace acknowledged that she likely forfeited her chance at the president’s support after her role in releasing the Epstein files late last year. She nevertheless pushed ahead, even in the face of several million dollars of negative ads from her opponents.

It’s the latest victory for Trump on the heels of his success ousting Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Mace’s ally on the Epstein files, and Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), among other GOP defectors.

There’s more bad news on the economy. Steve Kopack and Allie Canal at NBC News: Inflation jumps to 4.2%, the highest since early 2023.

Inflation surged in May to the highest level since early 2023, as Iran war-related fuel costs worked their way through the broader economy.

Overall, the yearly inflation rate rose to 4.2% in May from a year ago, up 0.5% from April.

“Inflation remains the major economic pain point regardless of who has to absorb it,” said Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer at One Point BFG Wealth.

Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union said, “the frustration for many Americans is that so many of the basics are up in price right now — gas, food, electricity, and medical care are all clear pain points that are above 3% inflation.”

“This isn’t just ‘bad vibes’ about the economy,” she added.

Rising inflation comes as wage growth is falling.

For the second month in a row, inflation surpassed wage growth, which was tracking at 3.4% in the most recent jobs report. That pace has slowed since late last year, when average hourly earnings were growing consistently at nearly 4%.

On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced separately that real average weekly earnings decreased 0.2 % during May and 0.7% from a year ago.

That’s the biggest year-over-year decline in real earnings since February 2023, according to federal data.

“The index for energy rose 3.9 percent in May, after rising 3.8 percent in April and 10.9 percent in March,” BLS said. “The energy index accounted for over sixty percent” of the overall number’s rise, it added.

Core inflation, which excludes food and energy, rose 2.9%, as expected. From the month before, it rose just 0.2%.

The disparity between the core inflation figure and the overall 4.2% rate was due largely to the impact of energy costs. According to BLS, energy accounted for more than 60% of the total increase in prices over the month.

And what does Trump think about this?

Q: Are you concerned about the latest inflation numbers that came out this morning?TRUMP: No, I love it. I love the inflation. You know why? Because as soon as this war is over — do you know we've been taking out millions of barrels of oil? You know who doesn't know? Iran until right now.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-06-10T16:08:03.927Z

And on gas prices:

Trump on gas prices: "If you notice, the price is not very high relatively speaking"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-06-09T12:27:29.354Z

Here’s the latest on the war on press freedom. Very soon, CNN will join CBS under the control of billionaire David Ellison, and now we learn that Bari Weiss will be the new CNN boss. Raw Story: Bari Weiss on verge of major promotion for ‘fantastic job’ bosses think she’s doing at CBS.

Bari Weiss could be taking over the editorial leadership of another news network.

Paramount has begun preliminary conversations with several top media executives about a business-side counterpart to Weiss, the CBS News editor-in-chief, as the company awaits regulatory approval of its proposed merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, two sources familiar with the matter told Axios.

“The search implies that if Paramount Skydance’s deal with Warner Bros. Discovery goes through, Weiss would oversee all news editorial across both CBS News and CNN,” Axios reported. “Her potential counterpart would manage business operations across both companies.”

Bari Weiss

Among the candidates under consideration are NBCUniversal News Group chairman Cesar Conde, CNN Worldwide CEO Mark Thompson and former NBC News president Noah Oppenheim. Paramount had also weighed Ben Sherwood, CEO of the Daily Beast and former ABC News president, and David Rhodes, former CBS News president and current Sky News executive chairman, according to a source familiar with the search.

One candidate faces a procedural hurdle. Because Paramount is still awaiting regulatory clearance to acquire WBD, company executives are barred from holding conversations with any WBD personnel — which would include Thompson.

Currently, CBS News president Tom Cibrowski serves alongside Weiss, reporting to George Cheeks, chair of TV media at Paramount. Weiss reports directly to Paramount chairman and CEO David Ellison….

“The Paramount brass loves Bari Weiss,” the source said. “She has the full confidence of David Ellison, who believes Bari has done a fantastic job as editor-in-chief.”

On the 60 Minutes front, Ellison is promising “independence,” after the firing of most of the people who used to work there. Benjamin Mullin and Michael M. Grynbaum at The New York Times: Paramount C.E.O. Promises Editorial Independence for ‘60 Minutes,’ Lesley Stahl Says.

David Ellison, the chief executive of Paramount, promised to respect the editorial independence of “60 Minutes” in a call with Lesley Stahl, one of the show’s correspondents, she told The New York Times on Tuesday.

The call to Ms. Stahl, made on Sunday, was one of the first signs that Mr. Ellison was personally taking steps to calm the turmoil at the news network after the firing of the show’s leadership and several of its star correspondents. The overhaul, overseen by Bari Weiss, the network’s editor in chief, was met with a rebuke from Scott Pelley, a star correspondent at “60 Minutes” who has since been fired.

Ms. Stahl told the news program’s staff about Mr. Ellison’s call during a champagne toast she held at the “60 Minutes” offices in Midtown Manhattan on Monday in an attempt to shore up morale at the program.

She, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim, the remaining stars of the program, had agonized about whether to stay in the aftermath of the staff changes and Mr. Pelley’s firing. But in a letter to the show’s staff Friday, they concluded that they had to remain at the show because they didn’t “want to see ‘60 Minutes’ die.”

“My toast was, ‘to us,’ meaning the survivors,” Ms. Stahl said in a text message on Tuesday. “Maybe ‘us’ with a twinge of survivor’s guilt.”

Mr. Ellison’s takeover of Paramount last year raised questions about the kind of steward he would be for CBS News. Mr. Ellison has been friendly with President Trump as his company, Paramount, seeks federal sign-off on a $111 billion deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. He has said he wants CBS News to appeal to what he describes as the 70 percent of Americans who consider themselves center-right or center-left.

In an interview with The Times, Mr. Pelley also said that Ms. Weiss had put her “thumb on the scale” for Mr. Trump during the last season of “60 Minutes,” a charge the network has denied. That assertion echoed a complaint from Sharyn Alfonsi, another correspondent, who said Ms. Weiss’s editorial guidance on one of her stories was “political.”

Last week, scores of prominent journalists, including well-known veterans of CBS News, signed an open letter to Mr. Ellison, who took over Paramount’s CBS last year, asking him to commit to the show’s independence. He has not yet weighed in publicly.

I’ll believe it when I see it, especially if Bari Weiss is still running CBS.

Scott Pelley warns CBS News is “on fire”youtu.be/Az8KobdJ84g?…

— Scott MacFarlane (@macfarlanenews.bsky.social) 2026-06-08T21:03:12.469Z

Epstein is back in the news. The New York Times has a bit story by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan (gift article): Inside the White House Freakout Over the Epstein Files.

On July 17, 2025, at around 6 o’clock in the evening, President Trump’s top officials filed into the White House Situation Room — the secure bunker where classified and high-stakes national security matters are discussed and decided. This was where President Barack Obama, along with Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the president’s national security team, watched the raid that ended with the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011.

Now, however, Trump’s most senior advisers had gathered — without him — to figure out how to gain some measure of control over a very different kind of crisis threatening to engulf the presidency: the Epstein files.

Ten days earlier, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. had jointly released a memo that bluntly stated that their review had found no “client list” of powerful men for whom the notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein had allegedly procured underage girls and young women. Intended to put to rest years of speculation and end the pressure campaign to release the voluminous material in the department’s possession, the memo instead had the opposite effect, setting off a backlash that was notably loud among the MAGA base.

And it was about to get worse: The Wall Street Journal was preparing a damaging article about Trump’s relationship with Epstein. The president’s desperate attempts to kill the story had failed. His team now had to get everyone onto the same page about how to counter the growing swarm of attention. They needed a gesture of transparency to appease an increasingly angry base, but also a way to convey the message that the president was sympathetic to his supporters’ concerns. Which itself was a problem, because he clearly wasn’t.

Vice President JD Vance took a seat at the head of the table in the John F. Kennedy Conference Room of the Situation Room complex. “This is a huge problem,” he told the group. Arrayed around him were the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles; the White House counsel, David Warrington; the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt; the deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich; the communications director, Steven Cheung; the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche; the associate attorney general, Stanley Woodward Jr.; and the deputy chief of staff James Blair. Attorney General Pam Bondi and the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, joined on speakerphone.

The vice president appeared panicked to others in the room about the way the subject of Epstein was already dividing the MAGA coalition. Some senior officials had the impression that Vance had bought into the darkest theories about Epstein and a cabal of predators hidden within the country’s ruling class. Wiles would tell others that the vice president had proved himself to be a major conspiracy theorist. Another top official said later that Vance had been pounding on the Epstein issue since the release of the memo. He was privately pressing for the administration to release all the Epstein files, everything in the Justice Department’s possession, even encouraging a congressional investigation.

Vance had also floated to colleagues an extraordinary P.R. gambit — that the White House enlist Tucker Carlson to interview Epstein’s longtime girlfriend and co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, in prison. It might help the president if Maxwell was willing to state that Trump had not been part of any wrongdoing with Epstein.

Vance told the group he believed all the files should be released as soon as possible. He argued that Congress was going to force the release of the files eventually. It was already clear that a bipartisan coalition in favor of such action was forming on Capitol Hill, and the momentum was going in one direction. If the administration got out ahead of this and released everything voluntarily — including whatever material existed about the president — it would at least get credit for transparency. The alternative was to let the story drag on for months as information dripped out, each new revelation renewing the cycle of suspicion and fury. Better to rip the bandage off and move on.

That’s a taste of it. You can use the gift link to read the rest.

Those are the stories that caught my attention today. What’s on your mind?

Alt Text for Pete Hegseth’s November 1st Boat Strike Video

Like many of the boat strike videos posted to social media by Trump, Hegseth, and the White House, the video of the attack conducted in the Caribbean on November 1st was edited and heavily redacted before its release. Like the other videos, it masquerades as “unclassified” public disclosure, but it discloses almost nothing at all.

We are being asked to rely on the stories Hegseth and other administration figures tell when they post these videos on social media. These accounts have been a problem for me since I first started looking at these boat strike videos — not because I am an expert in military affairs, or South American drug trafficking, but because I can claim some expertise when it comes to the make-believe work of telling stories on video or film.

Moving through these videos shot by shot, and sometimes frame by frame, shows Hegseth to be, at best, an unreliable narrator. (The fancy term for this is proven liar, or, in American idiom, Fox News host.) So, since I’m on a slow New Jersey Transit train with some time on my hands, I thought I’d try a description of my own, and offer alt text for the November 1st video.

The first (low-res, highly pixelated. black and white) shot shows the point of view of the attacker, already in position over the boat. We can make out the wake of the boat, but the vessel itself, the purported target of the strike, is fully redacted. So is the EO/IR interface, and so are any location coordinates. The attacker can see things we can’t.

While it lasts a full six seconds and would seem intended to set the scene, situate the viewer, and show drug smugglers in flagrante delicto, this first shot does nothing of the sort. There is no approach or discovery, no reveal, no new intelligence; the decision to strike has already been taken.

In other words, any visual evidence arguing for the strike, any proof that these are, in fact, the bad guys, the “narcoterrorists,” is being withheld, or perhaps can’t be produced. (And even if these were the bad guys or, what’s more likely, a few desperate mules working for the bad guys,* intercepting the boat would make a lot more sense in terms of interdiction and carry the added benefit of not violating international law.) As Representative Adam Smith remarked after an Armed Services briefing, the Pentagon is “telling us is you need less evidence to kill somebody than you do to hold them.”

Then at 00:16:15, two munitions or pieces of ordnance fall from the sky and strike the redacted target. The blast radiates out from the center, but only for a single frame.

Everything goes white, for three frames. The redactions are the only features we can make out against the white.

In the (infrared) shot of the explosion that follows — the one that looks like a camera negative — the camera begins to move off the annihilated target. This shot runs nearly three seconds, from 00:06:17 to 00:09:20, revealing a black sea.

Then something curious happens. At 9 seconds (00:09:21, to be precise), the video returns to the blown-out, hot-white, three-frame post-strike moment shown at 00:06:14.

It’s a rewind of the narrative.

The final shot is a re-telling, an instant replay, a photo-realistic, searchlight-on-the-water view of the strike’s aftermath. It lasts seven seconds. Four seconds longer than the first telling. It’s repetition with a difference.

What’s the difference? In this second version, the camera moves off the annihilated target, as it does at 00:06-00:09, but then reveals that move to have been a mere feint. The camera drops back to show flames and columns of thick smoke rising from the sea.

At 00:14, we regain some orientation, with the reveal of the [N] or North marker. There are about a dozen redacted areas in these frames, but the extra four seconds make a distinct impression.

The impression is of report from a war zone, a helicopter pulling away from a sea strewn with burning wreckage. It’s an image deeply ingrained in the American psyche. The Ride of the Valkyries. But Wagner would be all out of proportion to what we’re seeing. It’s not just that the image is degraded. We might expect that from a war zone. It’s that we’re not in a war zone at all.

There is no threat of attack or counterattack. No enemy fleet. No other boats rushing to the aid of the vessel under attack. Instead, the world’s most powerful military, funded by $900 billion in taxpayer dollars, the erstwhile leader of the historic NATO alliance, is using state-of -the-art technology and sophisticated American firepower to target small, individual vessels off the South American coast and kill whomever happens to be on board.

“No country should go to war so that the leader’s inner circle can make Tiktoks,” quipped Tom Pepinsky this morning. But it looks as if that’s what’s about to happen. Hegseth’s conduct online — and off, if he’s ever offline — carries real risks, as military, legal, and policy experts are warning.

(On this point, I recommend reading Pepinsky’s article published today on East Asia Forum. And Elizabeth N. Saunders’ new piece on Venezuela that’s up today on Good Authority, where she observes that Hegseth is the embodiment of “incompetent risk.”)

It’s shabby and undisciplined conduct. It discredits the office of the Secretary of Defense, illustrating only the smallness of the man, his moral depravity, the dereliction of Southern Command and the international humiliation of the United States on his watch.

*As this 7 November 2025 AP report on the victims of the September strikes would seem to confirm.

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All the Boat Strike Videos, To Date, in Chronological Order

https://youtu.be/ahyptlMah7w

In my last couple of posts (here and here), I’ve been trying to look closely at some of the latest boat strike videos, call out some of their features, and discuss the information they offer as well as the information they withhold.

It might also be helpful to look at all the boat strike videos in a single chronological sequence. So, using the Associated Press timeline of the strikes, and the media downloader at xdownloader.org, I’ve assembled all the boat strike videos into a single sequence. The work here is quick and dirty: the videos are not gussied up (and are best watched in full screen mode); the only thing I’ve done is add a date before each video. I’ve tried to stick with the date of the strike; sometimes videos are posted a day later.

I put this sequence together for myself because I couldn’t find it elsewhere. I thought it might help me see patterns and make some new sense of these videos. I’m sharing it here on the chance others might find it useful.

I’ve seen a few TV news clips reporting the boat strikes that use the videos posted by Hegseth, Trump, and the White House as b-roll: videos from September are used to report a strike in late October, or the boat strike footage is assembled into a kind of montage, the strikes and locations conflated, one strike standing in for all of them, boats moving through the water, boats targeted, boats blown up, while the anchor introduces or interviews a guest. The strike videos themselves become part of the backdrop, or just background noise; the punditry gets foregrounded.

I get it. This approach allows people on TV to generalize about the strikes, which they should do. The strikes are illegal and immoral, degrading and corrupting; they bring the “war on terror” and its atrocities to our own hemisphere; they re-allocate forces and resources, altering the risk landscape; they are an international outrage. The strikes can be understood as part of a larger political project, a “primacist” project championed by Marco Rubio, which uses drug-trafficking as a pretext for belligerence.

The boat attack videos promote this project while serving other propagandistic functions as well. They tick the adolescent edgelord box that everyone in this administration seems desperate to tick, and which is apparently part of the warrior ethos Hegseth touts. They misrepresent lawlessness as law enforcement, as ICE does in its own videos promoting kidnapping and other abuses, and allow powerful people to boast of their own impunity. They masquerade as (“unclassified”) public disclosure, even as the administration stonewalls Congress and keeps the military lawyers out of the hearing room.

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How the Boat Strike Videos Dehumanize and Gamify Murder

The latest boat strike video shows US military attacks on four boats in the Eastern Pacific. The strikes killed 14 people and left one survivor, who is, according to Pete Hegseth, now in the hands of Mexican authorities.*

Edited together to show three strikes in different locations, these videos have many of the features called out in my first post on this topic: they are marked unclassified (all caps, in green letters set against a black matte or background); they are standard definition, low resolution, blurry and pixelated (the download from X is 568X320); features of the EO/IR interfaces and geolocation are redacted. On a strictly technical basis, they are information deficient — and deliberately so, I think it’s fair to say.

There is also a consistent pattern to the storytelling here. The videos go from black and white to color after each strike, at 00:07, 00:15, and 00:24. The target comes into focus through the black and white EO/IR interface, the strike is executed, then the videos cut abruptly to a more realistic color perspective on the burning vessels. The color frames offer a little more in the way of information, not about the boats, the people on them, or their cargo. They show us their obliteration.

In the first strike shown here, crew appear to be transferring cargo or gear of some kind from one boat to another when the boats are hit. Hegseth claims there were eight people aboard these two boats, but it’s hard to make out more than a few. In the second and third strikes shown here, the human figures are also hard to discern, but Hegseth claims there were four aboard the boat shown at 00:10-00:18, and three aboard the last boat shown, starting at 00:19.

It’s possible that crew members (in red) are visible fore and aft at 00:15, and one of them after the strike, at 00;17, but I am not at all confident about that. If I had to guess, I would say that the survivor in Mexican custody comes from this second strike. Notice that the boat continues to travel even after the strike, in the color frames from 00:15-00:17. Did the strike fail to neutralize this vessel? Any doubts are addressed by the black and white frames that follow at 00:17-00:18, which reduce the burning boat to a hot white flash on the water.

Just before the third strike, at around 00:21, a crew member appears to come partially into view.

In any case, the human figures aboard these boats are presented as objects of the strike, not as subjects in their own right or characters who are the focus of the story. Hegseth calls them “narcoterrorists”; for all intents and purposes they are what gamers might refer to as “mobs,” on-screen enemies to be tracked, targeted, and killed.

That may sound obvious, but I think it’s worth pointing out. It’s yet another way in which these boat strike videos are both information- and morally-deficient, a degraded and degrading spectacle. The aim is not to inform the public. It is to dehumanize the victims and gamify murder.

* Correction 29 October 2025: Mexican authorities now say that they did not manage to rescue this person.

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Some Notes on the Latest Boat Strike Video

This morning, I downloaded the latest of the boat strike videos that the Secretary of Defense is posting on Twitter. (That sentence alone is kind of mind blowing, but let’s leave that discussion for another day.) After watching it a few times, I am starting to put together some notes and seeing if I can have some conversations about the boat strike videos the administration has put out. I don’t know if there’s a larger project here. There might be.

From the outset I want to make it clear that I am not embarking on an exercise in conspiracy theory. I do not think these videos are “deepfakes or AI generated,” as Freddy Ñáñez, Venezuela’s Minister of Communication and Information, said back in September. These are official records of what the administration calls “lethal kinetic strikes”, and what experts in military and international law have repeatedly and correctly described as extrajudicial killing, i.e., murder. (I am partial to Gabor Rona’s framing of the question.)

Two things, however, can be true at the same time. This video can be authentic (as I believe it is) and the story it tells can be carefully controlled. It is. A significant amount of work has been done on this video in between the moment of the boat strike and the video’s release on Twitter.

The September 2nd boat strike video that Ñañez called a fake (due to motion artifacts and “lack of realistic detail”) is of much higher quality than the video put out by Hegseth last night. If anything, the September 2nd film suggests that the Pentagon has much higher quality video of these strikes than what the public is seeing with this latest video. (Same goes for this October 3rd video posted by the White House on X. Indeed, some of the earlier videos were 1080p. ) That point may be obvious, or come as no surprise, but it’s worth exploring a little.

Even allowing for the fact that this tenth boat strike video was shot at night, the low resolution of the video Hegseth posted is notable. The video is standard definition, 640X360, and only about 380KB. I am unsure whether the government deliberately reduced the sharpness of the picture, or if the dullness of the image is simply a consequence of its low resolution. It amounts to the same thing, and my attempts to increase the sharpness of the image were unsuccessful. We can have a conversation about whether generative AI could help or create more confusion here, but the larger point should not be lost. These videos are not just records of a military strike. They are also records of choices made by the administration before exporting and posting the video (itself a choice).

Those choices leave many important details obscured. Look, for instance, at the stern of the boat in this frame I exported. This is the frame just before the explosion. Where we expect to see a motor is a pixelated blur; the missile just above the deck is jagged and distorted. It also doesn’t help that the infrared sensors, at least as they are rendered in this low-res video, blow out all detail of who or what is on board.

The unclassified stamp was also created (in all caps, because part of the story here is about the administration’s social-media-driven ideas of transparency) and positioned at the top of the frame. Other elements of the picture have been redacted, using two gray rectangular blocks. A Project Ploughshares report on the sensor technology used in these attacks suggests that the slimmer rectangle just above the boat is most likely concealing

a light-blue scale bar used to measure the size and distance of visible objects, a trademark element of WESCAM’s MX-Series sensor interface. Its presence provided the first major clue linking Canadian-made technology to the…airstrikes.

The larger, square block on the left of the frame, port side, may be another redaction of the optical interface. It’s not entirely clear we are looking at a WESCAM interface here, and these redactions may be concealing features of another system.

The crosshairs over the target are hardly a feature unique to WESCAM. The [6M] marker next to the boat (indicating a Circular Error Probable of six meters?) is not a WESCAM feature called out in the Ploughshares report. The North [N] marker that appears around 00:15, after the explosion, indicating the direction north relative to the sensor’s position, is not a feature associated with WESCAM’s MX-Series, according to the Ploughshares report. It appears to be a feature of the optical system used in the “narcoterrorist” boat strike video the White House posted on 14 October.

The report concludes that the US military is using “more than one type of EO/IR [electro-optical/infrared] system,” and it’s not apparent which system is in play here, in this video of the tenth boat strike. Be that as it may, it’s in the use of these EO/IR systems where AI (sensing, modeling, targeting) comes into play.

Finally, consider the shape of the story this video tells. I will give Ñañez this much: it is cartoonish, deliberately so. (Nanez called the September 2nd video an “animación simplificada.”) The story begins with the target already in focus, the unsuspecting (or fleeing? or trapped?) boat below leaving a shadowy wake on the vignetted water. Three frames show the missile in its descent, then everything goes black. From the blackness emerge oily clouds of black smoke and debris. Only then does the redaction fall away and the [N] marker allows us briefly to orient ourselves. (The boat appears to have been traveling roughly east.) Most telling, in my view, is that the video ends before we see the real aftermath of the explosion — wreckage, or survivors (improbable as that may seem, it’s already happened!). We don’t know what happens once the smoke clears. Nor are we meant to care, I’ll venture.

Obviously, Congress should be demanding to know the full story, and should be asking for all raw footage of these attacks, unredacted and at original resolution. But unless and until Congress acts, we are left to rely on the story the administration is telling.* These notes are a first pass at understanding how the published boat strike videos tell that story, and I hope I’ve managed to set out a few markers for further discussion. More material will be forthcoming, no doubt. I would appreciate tips, suggestions, technical insights, and corrections.

*Update, 11 Nov 2025: Maybe not. The New York Times is now suing for these videos under the Freedom of Information Act.

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