THE FOOTAGE THAT VANISHED: Inside the Navy’s Quiet Deletion of October 17’s Survivor Evidence

Two men survived a U.S. military strike. They were hauled aboard an American warship alive. Then the Navy ordered every photo and every second of video documenting them to be erased.

The first sign that something had gone wrong inside the Navy was not the strike itself. It was the silence that followed it. In military operations, silence is rarely the absence of noise. It is usually the presence of a decision. On October 17, after a suspected narcotics vessel was destroyed at sea, two men were pulled from the water and brought aboar…