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

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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#belligerence #boatStrikes #corruption #EOIR #gamification #humanRights #lawlessness #primacist #Propaganda #risk #war #WarOnTerror #westernHemisphere