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On a crystal blue sea, multiple explosive assaults from the sky have blown small boats to pieces, almost always ending the lives of those on board.
Only twice, to our knowledge, have survivors been identified as the smoke cleared. On September 2, 2025, two survivors were identified clinging to the wreckage of the boat when another strike was ordered that summarily ended the lives of those survivors.
And on the 17th of October, around 1430, or 2:30 PM, the smoke cleared from a strike and two survivors were identified. This time, those individuals were retrieved from the wreckage and brought on board the USS Iwo Jima.
What transpired after those individuals were brought on board proves that we are in an entirely new paradigm within the US military, one in which video and photographic material is deleted, US military servicemembers are asked to defy standing protocol and code, and human beings disappear from record as they are summarily and without trial returned to what is purported to be their native countries.
The hotly debated U.S. attacks on alleged narcotics trafficking boats have proven to be a series of grave missteps of this administration that have dominated news cycles for weeks. With breaking news of every additional strike, public opinion gets louder and demands for accountability are breaking through to Congress.
This week, a closed-door meeting of the Armed Services Committee reviewed even more evidence related to this “mission”, some of which goes beyond the explosive review of video footage of one of those strikes.
‘Extra-judicial’ seems an appropriate summation, and countless experts have weighed in to clarify the finer points of military and international law, murky as it may sometimes seem.
Nick Paro, a former US Army Sergeant trained as a Human Intelligence Collector with advanced training in Interrogation & Analysis Techniques, compiled a thorough outline of the military and international law that governs the treatments of combatants of all classifications in a piece entitled “Wounded and Unknown: Treatment and Release Procedures for “Unprivileged Belligerents”.
Nick Paro explains, “The DoD Manual treats Unprivileged Belligerents [UBs] as liable to capture and detention, but insists they receive humane treatment. Notably, when there is doubt about status at capture, the Manual requires granting POW protections until a competent tribunal decides otherwise (emphasis his). Operationally, this boils down to the core components of: units must document captures, units must provide medical care, and units must initiate status‑determination procedures while safeguarding force protection. Practical Implication: These operational steps provide an easily understood and repeatable process for properly handling in-processing, medical care, and detainment procedures of any captured person.”
The precise choice to designate these individuals as “Unprivileged Belligerents” is no mistake.
UBs have provided a grey loophole in established international law that enables the US to deny the full protections provided in the Geneva Convention for Prisoners of War or Civilians.
Essentially, the US is attesting that every one of the victims of these strikes was, and is, to be considered an Unprivileged Belligerent. Retired Brigadier General of the Canadian Army Kenneth Watkin is a foremost expert on Combatants in International Conflicts, particularly the classification of Unprivileged Belligerents.
In 2003, for the International Humanitarian Law Research Initiative at Harvard University, Brig. General Watkin explains: “Exclusion of a group from combatant status is perhaps most easily applied in respect of terrorist organizations that by definition do not respect the fundamental distinction between combatants and civilians in their actions and sometimes overtly reject any requirement to do so.”
He clarifies: “A decision to exclude a group from combatant and therefore POW status should not be based on an assessment of the “justness” of that group’s cause. The application of “just war” thinking to combatant status is fraught with difficulty….It is a fundamental principle of international humanitarian law that the treatment of captured personnel is based on their meeting appropriate objective criteria and not the “justness” of the cause they serve.”
Drawing to the point, Watkin concludes, “It has been noted that the decision to exclude a group from attaining combatant status should not be taken lightly. Such a determination may undermine the inherent incentive for the denied group to comply with international humanitarian law and might be perceived to be inconsistent with the humanitarian purpose of international humanitarian law.”
The importance of the designation “Unprivileged Belligerence”
On October 17, 2025, the two individuals who survived a boat strike were brought on board the USS Iwo Jima and began to be processed in accordance with standing military and international humanitarian law, including the capture of photo and video documentation.
According to a confidential document shared with us by an anonymous source, there was an immediate disagreement to even begin the photo and video documentation of the detainee processing. Shipboard personnel insisted on documenting, referring to standing policy on detainee onboarding procedure. The Marines who brought the detainees on board pushed back, citing the word of the Commodore that video and photography were prohibited.
The Public Affairs Officer prevailed and documentation ensued, both photo and video.
But less than two hours later, the order came down for that footage to be deleted. All of it.
Our anonymous source states that after much deliberation and conferring with JAG, the order was confirmed: delete all video and photographic documentation of the detainees. The shipboard personnel recorded their objections via a written statement after following through with the order.
In summation: two detainees were brought on board a US Navy vessel, one in apparent medical distress having survived an explosive boat strike. Shipboard personnel followed standing protocol and code to capture video and photo documentation of the onboarding of these individuals, and then were given the dubious order to delete that footage.
The reason given was this: those individuals had been classified as “Unprivileged Belligerents” and therefore deemed not worthy of the basic protections of photo and video footage of their treatment while in the care of the United States Navy and Marine Corps.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has claimed that the act of driving and manning a boat with drugs navigating anywhere remotely in the direction of north, towards the United States, is an act of hostility at such a level it demands “ultimate lethality”, making the individuals on those boats “combatants” rather than civilians. Although he has produced no evidence to Congress to justify these actions or the classification of these individuals, much less requesting and gaining approval for acts of hostility upon those individuals, he has then proceeded with lethal strikes on civilians in open international waters. If the evidence were as overwhelming as DoD claims, following established legislative, legal, and military protocol would not present a problem and would have been followed by SECDEF. His refusal to follow established protocols, code, and international law, as well as essentially redefining what constitutes “hostile action”, places our entire military in an extraordinarily compromised position.
The Utrecht Law Review states: “ If an individual (or category of individuals) qualifies as a prisoner of war, he, she is (or they are) by implication presumed to possess combatant status. In the event the qualifications for prisoner of war status are not met, the automatic presumption will be that the individual concerned is a civilian. …However, if a civilian or other non-combatant engages in belligerent acts or participates directly in hostilities, he or she commits an offence and by implication becomes what is often referred to in the literature as an unlawful combatant. Should any doubt arise concerning the status of an individual and the treatment he or she is entitled to, the relevant provisions of the international humanitarian law instruments relating to prisoner of war status and treatment make it unequivocally clear that the individual(s) concerned is (are) entitled to the protections afforded by those instruments until such time as the status thereof has been determined by a competent tribunal.”
No evidence currently exists of any such competent tribunal being conducted in the frenzy of activity between the time the survivors were identified and pulled from the wreckage of the boat to their being onboarded the USS Iwo Jima. In fact, Marines and Sailors could not even agree on whether or not to engage in the standard protocol for onboarding detainees of obtaining video footage of said activity.
Brig. Gen. Watkin writes in 2003, “In respect of “unprivileged belligerents”: … it is possible to envisage a day when the law will be so re-tailored as to place all belligerents, however garbed, in a protected status.”
In 2025, it appears that the United States Secretary of Defense is determined, as with many other projects he’s undertaken, to regress our military to a barbaric status, where we shoot first and ask questions later, don’t bother to provide evidence or due process to those we deem to be hostile combatants, and engage in lethal warfare against said individuals without offering them even the most basic standard humanitarian protections of the Geneva Convention.
The American public deserves and demands transparency when our flag flies on vessels launching missiles onto civilians at sea.
Video and photographic evidence would go a great distance to alleviating many US citizens’ concerns over the treatment of these individuals, however the SECDEF wants to categorize them.
The deletion of said video and photographic footage sends red flags flying throughout the ranks of active duty military, veterans such as myself, and the citizenry whose faith in this administration has fallen to record lows.
Birg. Gen. Watkins has penned a much more recent article in conjunction with Geoffrey Corn and summarizes the legality of the recent boat strikes as such, “While not discounting the harmful or deadly effect of illegal narcotics, chemical substances, even when illegally introduced into the United States, do not amount to an armed attack the way flying commercial airliners into skyscrapers packed with civilians did. It is its use as a weapon to conduct an attack — meaning an intentional act of violence — that matters. And that intent and corresponding attack is absent in this situation.”
Defining the nature of the conflict is key to defining the nature of the individuals involved; asserting the position that the United States is under imminent and dire threat of hostile assault allows this administration to assert the position that the individuals participating in that assault are combatants, and as we are not in a Congressionally-sanctioned conflict with them, the administration believes they can quite conveniently categorize them as “Unprivileged Belligerents” who are due absolutely no humanitarian protections under the Geneva Convention.
This US Navy veteran begs to differ. Transparency is the antidote to corruption. Transparency is the vehicle to accountability.
Remove transparency, and the foundation of an unbiased, apolitical standing armed forces crumbles beneath our feet, and we are left with a rogue military serving men and agendas instead of the citizenry as a whole. And that is the most ominous threat imaginable.

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