NEWS PRESENTER:
00:00:00
All right, Breaking News. As we promise on this broadcast, when we see it, you see it. And this comes from Secretary of War, as he calls himself, on X. This is what he's saying. "Earlier this morning, on President Trump's orders, I directed a lethal kinetic strike on a narco trafficking vessel affiliated with designated terror organizations in the USS SOUTHCOM area of responsibility." He says four male narco terrorists aboard the vessel were killed in the strike, and no US forces were harmed in the operation. He goes on to say the strike was conducted, like we've seen before, in international waters just off the coast of Venezuela while the vessel was transporting what he says is substantial amounts of narcotics headed to America, as Mr. Hegseth says, to poison our people. He also went on to say, "Our intelligence, without a doubt, confirmed that this vessel was trafficking narcotics. The people on board were narco terrorists, and they were operating on a narco trafficking transit route." These strikes, he says, will continue until the attacks on the American people are over. Once again, the Trump administration showing video here. Let's go ahead and scroll up a little bit. This is that unclassified video that Pete Hegseth just put out. Now, let's frame this and give it some context, some understanding. This strike comes less than a day after it was revealed that President Donald Trump, reports the Associated Press, declared drug cartels to be what he calls unlawful combatants and declared that the United States is now in what the US and the Trump administration consider an armed conflict with them. That declaration was in a memo obtained by our peers over at the Associated Press. So those are the words. And then as we scroll up just one more time, this is the attack that Pete Hegseth said happened out there in the waters off of Venezuela. We wanted to get that on the record in that Breaking News.
