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“Total Whitewash”: New Pentagon Report Claims U.S. Killed No Civilians in Boat Strikes

Government officials told The Intercept the War Department’s latest civilian casualty report was “sickening” and a “joke.”

The War Department delivered its unreleased annual report on civilian casualties to members of Congress on Tuesday, two government officials told The Intercept — one of whom called the report “a fucking joke.” The report found that U.S. attacks likely killed or wounded hundreds of civilians.

The other official deemed the report, which covers allegations of civilian harm stemming from military attacks in Iran, Somalia, Yemen, and the campaign of boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, a “total whitewash.” It’s the latest in a series of recent Pentagon reports that have called attention to U.S. failures to prevent, mitigate, or adequately track civilian harm after self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth gutted civilian harm mitigation and response or CHMR programs.

Shockingly, the Pentagon’s review of its 2025 attacks found that no civilians were killed in the Trump administration’s campaign of boat strikes, according to the officials, despite the fact that the U.S. killed more than 120 civilians last year in attacks that experts call extrajudicial killings or outright murder. The Trump administration has asserted repeatedly and without evidence that the boat strike victims, who now number more than 220, were “narcoterrorists.” In a classified briefing last fall, a high-ranking officer on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff said that some of the people killed in the initial September 2, 2025, attack may have been the victims of human trafficking, according to an Intercept investigation.

“They have absolutely no credibility,” the second official told The Intercept about the boat strike claims, adding that the report was “sickening.”

Top Pentagon Official Admits Boat Strike May Have Killed Victims of Human Trafficking

Known as the 1057 report, this year’s accounting of civilian casualties reflects a backlog of incidents from the Trump administration’s strikes against Yemen’s Houthi government in the spring of 2025. The report found that U.S. attacks killed 153 civilians and wounded almost 250 during the campaign of air and naval strikes, codenamed Operation Rough Rider. The second official called these “lowball numbers.” At least 238 civilians were killed and 467 injured, according to the Yemen Data Project.

One attack killed 68 people, the second official said. That attack on an immigrant detention center in Yemen killed and injured dozens of Ethiopian civilians and no combatants and was detailed in a report by Amnesty International shared with The Intercept last year. At the time, U.S. Central Command said it was still “assessing all reports of civilian harm resulting........

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