U.S. Air Force Col. Cedric Leighton (Ret.) on CNN on December 16, 2025 (Image: Screengrab via CNN / YouTube)
While Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has released numerous videos of boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea, he refuses to release video of the controversial September 2, 2025 strike. One career military officer thinks there's a simple reason Americans still haven't seen the video.
During a Tuesday segment on CNN, hosts Brianna Keilar and Boris Sanchez played video of Hegseth explaining why he wasn't going to release the video that supposedly shows a missile striking a boat, before a separate strike killed two survivors clinging to the wreckage of the vessel. While some lawmakers have seen the video, other members of Congress remain in the dark despite multiple committees investigating the incident.
U.S. Air Force Colonel Cedric Leighton (Ret.) told Keilar and Sanchez that the video is likely damning confirmation of previous reporting about the strike, and argued that public opinion would turn sharply against President Donald Trump's administration if Americans saw the full video.
"What it looks like to me is that there's something that they don't want to show us," Leighton said. "I know that on the Democratic side, they kind of have the same viewpoint that what they're looking at is an action that may very well at least be questionable, if not outright illegal. And they don't want to show it. They don't want to give proof that they committed an illegal act."
Leighton acknowledged that the strike may also show "something that is classified or that is operationally sensitive," but followed that up by pointing out that the administration has released numerous videos of other boat strikes in recent months. He noted that the September 2 video likely "would not reveal anything different from what we've seen before."
The strike in question was overseen by Admiral Frank M. Bradley, who carried out the strike with Judge Advocate General Corps (JAG) officers present in accordance with Pentagon policy. Democrats in Congress have called for those JAG officers to be subpoenaed and testify about the advice they gave Bradley when he carried out the strike. Leighton observed that even if a JAG officer advises a commanding officer to not carry out a specific action, those commanders are not bound to follow that advice.
"If you don't know what the JAGs actually said and get their side of the story, then it's going to be really hard to determine what kind of advice, what kind of specific advice the admiral received," he said. "Now, the admiral will obviously be able to say, this is the advice that I got. This is how I acted in response to that advice. But experienced commanders know that you get advice from JAG officers, but you don't always have to follow it."
"Sometimes you have to make sure that you are actually following the law in spite of what they tell you, and they can get you in trouble if you have somebody who is inexperienced or you have somebody that is not looking at all aspects of the law," he added. "So sometimes you have to be your own JAG, basically."
Watch the segment below:
