Deceptiveness

Batya Ungar-Sargon maintains that she once was a liberal and now is a conservative. A podcaster who unfortunately has an hour-long show on weekends on CNN's NewsNight With Abby Phillip, she addressed the controversy over the military's air strike on a boat in the Caribbean. She says in the video below

But I'm saying the whole point here is, is it still a legitimate target or not? If they can get on that debris and call for the rest of the narco-terrorists to show up and save them, it's still a legitimate military target..... If the radio is still working on the boat, then it's still a legitimate military target.

Seen and heard in context, Ungar-Sargon clearly means "the radio was still working ton the boat and therefore it's still a legitimate military target." 

 

NYT: "The military would attempt to rescue survivors who appeared to be helpless, shipwrecked and out of what the administration considered a fight. But it would try again to kill them if they took what the United States deemed to be a hostile action, like communicating with… pic.twitter.com/87gAeeP4id

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) December 4, 2025

In its reporting, the New York Times reporters she cites named as their sources "Pentagon officials," "U.S. officials," several U.S. officials," and, most often, "officials." 

By contrast, Ungar-Sargon was confident, if not certain, notwithstanding presumably realizing that Admiral Frank M. Bradley, who commanded the operation, and General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were due to testify before a House of Representatives Committee the following day. Oops:

The two men killed as they floated holding onto their capsized boat in a secondary strike against a suspected drug vessel in early September did not appear to have radio or other communications devices, the top military official overseeing the strike told lawmakers on Thursday, according to three sources with direct knowledge of his congressional briefings.

As far back as September, defense officials have been quietly pushing back on criticism that killing the two survivors amounted to a war crime by arguing, in part, that they were legitimate targets because they appeared to be radioing for help or backup — reinforcements that, if they had received it, could have theoretically allowed them to continue to traffic the drugs aboard their sinking ship.

Defense officials made that claim in at least one briefing in September for congressional staff, according to a source familiar with the session, and several media outlets cited officials repeating that justification in the last week.

But Thursday, Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley acknowledged that the two survivors of the military’s initial strike were in no position to make a distress call in his briefings to lawmakers. Bradley was in charge of Joint Special Operations Command at the time of the strike and was the top military officer directing the attack.

So Ungar-Sargon, at least at this point, appears to have been wrong about her loud and confident implication that the last two individuals murdered by missile were trying to get their comrades to come rescue them. Worse yet, arguably, was the "narco-terrorism" or "narco-terrorists" phrase the right is bandying about. 

Even if all the individuals were involved in terrorism, they were not terrorists. They would have been distributing drugs not for political gain, but for profit. And the victims were not innocent bystanders but, depending on where the drugs were headed, foolish customers or profit-oriented drug salesmen themselves.

Republicans have figured out that invoking "terrorism" or "terrorist" is popular justifies almost anything with a huge segment of the public. Additionally, the news media is reluctant to question the designation.  In the odd case in which that doesn't work, claiming we are at "war" often carries the day. Much of politics is a battle of messages and thus far Democrats are losing this one.

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