By Ben Meiselas
I just spoke with Congressman Jim Himes, Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, about what he learned this morning when he was briefed on and watched video of the September military boat strike that many legal experts are calling murder and/or a war crime.
I hope you find this insider perspective into this consequential issue valuable, and it’s part of what we try to bring you every single day on the Meidas+ Substack.
Let me back up for one moment.
What has unfolded this week is among the most chilling developments yet of this Trump regime. The White House, already under intense scrutiny for the deadly boat strikes off the coast of Venezuela, has now made a catastrophic admission. And it came directly from the podium of the Department of Defense.
Kingsley Wilson, Trump’s newly installed Pentagon press secretary, stepped to the microphone and declared that the boat strikes, including the follow-on strike that killed the survivors, were “presidentially directed.” Her exact words were, “The Secretary has been very clear in every statement that we’ve released about these strikes that they are presidentially directed…At the end of the day, the Secretary and the President and the ones directing these strikes.”
That’s a confession.
And it happened in a briefing room that no longer resembles anything close to a functioning democracy. The administration removed the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, the AP and every other major news outlet because they refused to let the Pentagon edit their reporting. In their place were a collection of far-right influencers who filmed themselves drinking beer inside the Pentagon press room. Laura Loomer boasted, “The Washington Post used to occupy this desk. Now it’s mine.” Another declared, “Your office belongs to me now.”
It would be absurd if it were not such a threat to our democracy.
When I spoke with Rep. Jim Himes, his reaction was immediate and unequivocal.
His statement this morning laid out the gravity of the situation: “What I saw in that room is one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service,” he said. “You have two individuals in clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, who are killed by the United States.”
These were men floating on debris in open water. They were unarmed, unable to flee and visibly dying. Himes explained that even if one accepted the administration’s false premise that this was a war, the laws of armed conflict are explicit. “There is an extremely specific prohibition against killing individuals who have been removed from the fight,” he said. “This is the example that is given as unacceptable. And that is the killing of somebody who is shipwrecked.”
Yet Trump officials and their allies are scrambling to justify the unjustifiable. Sen. Markwayne Mullin suggested the men might have “run away.” Rep. Van Orden dismissed the deaths entirely and said, “The average Americans do not care about these narco terrorists at all.” The White House has begun pushing a new narrative that the second strike was necessary to “destroy drugs” on the vessel.
But the law is not ambiguous. Nor is the video.
When I pressed Himes on how such an operation could occur without a specific kill order, he pointed to the culture that Trump and Hegseth have created, one that treats legal and ethical constraints as mere obstacles to find ways around. He noted Hegseth’s own writing, which argues for “a lot less lawyers and a lot more lethal,” and pointed to reporting that top commanders were told to follow orders “regardless of your view if they’re legal or not.”
“Culture and context really matter,” Himes said. “Very few people can withstand the kind of pressure that a Secretary of Defense and a President who basically don’t care one iota about ethics or the law” can exert.
The consequences extend far beyond these killings. Himes warned that the administration’s foreign policy has eroded the moral and strategic standing of the United States. He described Trump’s so-called peace plan for Ukraine, drafted in part by a Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, a Florida real estate investor, as “basically a surrender document” shaped with Russian interests in mind. He noted that the administration’s hostility to democratic alliances has created a vacuum that adversaries are eager to exploit.
But he kept returning to the video.
“If the world saw the video that I saw today,” Himes told me, “the United States would lose a great deal of the moral standing that it continues to have.”
That is why this administration is fighting to keep it hidden. Why they replaced real journalists with propagandists. Why they are insisting their actions were lawful even though their own manuals say otherwise.
The truth is simple. Two shipwrecked human beings posed no threat to anyone. They were killed anyway. And now the Trump administration has admitted that the strikes occurred under presidential direction.
Accountability will not come from within the executive branch. But as Himes told uys, there are still public servants determined to expose the truth. In my mind, it is up to all of us to continue to keep up the pressure and ensure that this reality is not buried, because what happened on that video is not merely a policy failure. It is a moral failure of the highest order.
So let’s continue to expose the truth. Let’s remain relentless. Thank you for your support of the Meidas+ Substack and for staying engaged.
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