During Monday’s broadcast of “The Last Word” on MS NOW, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) expressed concerns over the U.S. being on the “wrong side” if it was responsible for killing survivors in a subsequent strike on a suspected drug vessel in the Caribbean last September.

Host Lawrence O’Donnell posed a thought-provoking question, asking, “How should we interpret this situation? Can a war crime occur outside the context of war? What do we call such acts when no formal conflict exists?”

Senator Whitehouse replied, “In common terms, that would be considered murder.”

O’Donnell pressed further, querying, “Is this what you perceive here?”

Whitehouse admitted, “I don’t have enough details to reach a definitive legal conclusion, but it’s deeply troubling. You have individuals whose boat has been destroyed. Regardless of their actions, it culminated in an explosion, and now there are survivors in the water. Even in wartime, a principled nation would attempt to rescue those survivors and treat them as prisoners of war. In this scenario, if I might use a Hollywood analogy, when villains are depicted gunning down survivors in the water, they are the antagonists, not the Americans. We find ourselves on the wrong, wrong side if we’re targeting survivors instead of initiating a rescue.”

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