Alex Horton

Yeah, thanks for having me, Terry.

The strike was the first one that the Pentagon undertook in its mission directed from the White House to stop drug trafficking and drug traffickers from bringing their drugs into the United States.

So there was this entire apparatus that was surged into the Caribbean.

There's warships, there's aircraft carriers.

And, you know, what you describe is, you know, a buildup for this pressure campaign.

But at the same time, there was a parallel mission to go after drug traffickers, particularly in speedboats and in semi-submersibles.

You know, really the business and the last few miles to get to their distribution point.

So, you know, what we know from our reporting now is this first mission and some of the ones that followed were not undertaken by these forces that were in the region.

This wasn't a matter of fighter jets and destroyers.

It was an elite team of special operators from SEAL Team 6.

This is the same unit that went on the mission to kill Osama bin Laden.

These are the ones you call for the most high stakes missions that can be done.

Yeah.

So on September 2nd, they observed a boat that they grew increasingly confident had drugs.

And once they reached a certain level of confidence that this boat was carrying drugs, Secretary Hegseth, who was overseeing the operation that day, he is what's known as the target engagement authority.

What he says goes on to strike a target, and he authorized the strike to be taken.

So once that decision was made to strike the boat, Admiral Frank Bradley, who was at the time the Joint Special Operations Commander, authorized a missile to hit that boat.

The commanders had watched it for some time burn, and they felt pretty good that everyone aboard was killed.

They were watching a live drone surveillance video of it.

But once the smoke cleared, they saw there were two survivors.