Claim: Representations made about things happening in real-time allow us to evaluate the general candor of lawmakers. Issues are worth covering for their own sake but also because they provide a test of the basic business of public service: assessing information, making high-stakes decisions based on that information and presenting both accurately to the public so that people can understand actions being taken in their name and for which they granted the authority.

Senator Tom Cotton told reporters he saw video of two survivors of the first strike "trying to flip a boat — loaded with drugs, bound for the United States — back over, so they could stay in the fight". [^1]

There has obviously been strong debate about a) whether they were “in the fight,” as that language is traditionally understood, and whether a boat that can be struck can plausibly be characterized as “in the fight,” (other than by the Black Knight “It’s just a flesh wound.”), or whether they were trying to flip the boat or cling to it for survival. Today CNN reports on another area of inquiry: whether the drugs were headed for the US. Senator Cotton specifically invoked "bound for the United States" as part of his urgency argument for why the second strike on survivors was justified.

In the hearing Cotton attended and from which he drew those conclusions,

The alleged drug traffickers killed by the US military in a strike on September 2 were heading to link up with another, larger vessel that was bound for Suriname — a small South American country east of Venezuela – the admiral who oversaw the operation told lawmakers on Thursday, according to two sources with direct knowledge of his remarks.

According to intelligence collected by US forces, the struck boat planned to “rendezvous” with the second vessel and transfer drugs to it, Adm. Frank Bradley said during the briefings, but the military was unable to locate the second vessel. Bradley argued there was still a possibility the drug shipment could have ultimately made its way from Suriname to the US, the sources said, telling lawmakers that justified striking the smaller boat even if it wasn’t directly heading to US shores at the time it was hit.

US drug enforcement officials say that trafficking routes via Suriname are primarily destined for European markets. US-bound drug trafficking routes have been concentrated on the Pacific Ocean in recent years.

Bradley's actual testimony creates two problems for Cotton's framing. First, the "bound for the United States" claim appears to have been, at best, a significant simplification of a much more attenuated chain (boat → rendezvous vessel → Suriname → possibly eventually US via European routes). Second, Bradley himself acknowledged they couldn't even locate the second vessel, which undercuts the immediacy argument even further.

[^1] The "in the fight" language: Cotton is borrowing combat terminology to characterize people who, by his own description, are trying to flip or cling to a boat—survivors of a strike, not combatants actively engaged in hostilities. It's the kind of language elasticity that can make almost any subsequent action seem justified.