US President Donald Trump on Tuesday reneged on his earlier statement that he would have “no problem” with releasing the video of the September 2 murder of 11 unarmed civilians in the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Venezuela. In a bald-faced lie, he declared, “I didn’t say that.”

Trump now says he has left the decision with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, declaring, “Whatever Hegseth wants to do is OK with me.”

Hegseth, however, risks being caught in multiple lies by the release of further details about the strikes. Last week he said, “I did not personally see survivors” after the first strike and has asserted that “I didn’t stick around” to view the second strike—of which both claims are highly dubious, and the first of which is likely to be proven false by the release of the video.

Trump hurled insults at the reporter who asked about his earlier pledge, calling her “fake news,” “obnoxious” and “terrible” for asking him about his earlier statement that “whatever they have, we’d certainly release no problem.”

Trump’s comments came after NBC confirmed earlier reporting by the Washington Post that Hegseth had given an explicit verbal order to kill everyone on board the boat, claiming that they were on a list of terrorism suspects. Hegseth “ordered the US military on September 2 to kill all 11 people” on board the boat, NBC wrote.

Last week, the New York Times reported that the full video, shown to two congressional committees in closed-door hearings, shows that “two survivors of the US military’s first boat strike on Sept. 2 climbed atop the overturned hull and waved to something overhead.” The people who saw the video told the Times the “most logical explanation was that the two survivors had seen the American aircraft above them and started signaling for a rescue.”

The Pentagon’s law of war manual declares that soldiers have a duty to refuse to carry out “clearly illegal” orders, such as killing shipwrecked sailors. “Orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal,” the manual declares.

The Geneva Conventions states that “persons … who are at sea and who are wounded, sick or shipwrecked … shall not be murdered or exterminated.”

The September 2 strike was the first of a series of murders carried out off the coast of Venezuela. Since then, the White House has ordered 22 lethal military strikes against civilians on boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing 87 people.

In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union demanded the release of documents related to the strike. “The public deserves to know how our government is justifying the cold-blooded murder of civilians as lawful and why it believes it can hand out get-out-of-jail-free cards to people committing these crimes,” said ACLU attorney Jeffrey Stein.

“The Trump administration is displacing the fundamental mandates of international law with the phony wartime rhetoric of a basic autocrat,” Baher Azmy, a spokesperson for the Center for Constitutional Rights, one of the plaintiffs, said in a statement.

The lawsuit asserts that the US military may not “summarily kill civilians who are merely suspected of smuggling drugs.”

In an interview on CNN’s State of the Union, Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth noted that “everything that they have done has been illegal. It’s illegal under international law. It’s illegal under the Geneva Convention. And it certainly is even illegal under domestic law.” She added, “It was essentially murder with that double-tap strike.”

Despite such statements, the Democrats have done nothing to seriously oppose Trump’s killing spree in the Pacific.

Lawmakers have included a provision in the massive military spending bill, National Defense Authorization Act, which is expected to shortly pass the House of Representatives and thence proceed to the Senate, that would reduce the travel budget for Hegseth by 25 percent unless the full video is released. This is an absurd farce. Even if this token measure passes, Hegseth could easily appropriate the money necessary to cover any shortfalls.

This is intended as a cover for the total inaction by the Democratic Party as the Trump administration carries out murder on the high seas day after day and prepares to launch a major new war against Venezuela.

These preparations are far-advanced and accelerating. In an interview with Politico on Tuesday, Trump said of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, “His days are numbered.” When asked if he would “rule out an American ground invasion,” Trump replied, “I don’t want to.”

The Trump administration has surged military assets off the coast of Venezuela, approved covert military actions inside the country in October and last month pledged to begin ground attacks “very soon.”

On Tuesday, two US fighter jets, launched from the USS Gerald R. Ford stationed off the coast of Venezuela, circled the Gulf of Venezuela and came within 20 nautical miles of Venezuelan territory. The move follows similar overflights by nuclear-capable B-52 and B-1 bombers.

In a report Tuesday, CNN asserted that “the Trump administration is working on day-after plans in the event Maduro is ousted from power,” pointing to how far-reaching the US plans for regime change are. It declared, “Publicly, officials have said that the goal of the military buildup in the Caribbean and the drug boat strikes is to drive down the flow of drugs into the US, but the internal planning is a clear signal of Trump’s consideration of forcing out Maduro.”

Last week, the Trump administration published a new National Defense Strategy that places central emphasis on US domination of Latin America as a supply base in the conflict with China and other states.

The document declares: “We want to ensure that the Western Hemisphere … remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains; and we want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations. In other words, we will assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine.”

The document makes clear that the Trump administration is seeking to reduce Latin America to colonial slavery through war, regime change, economic strangulation and other destabilization operations. The criminality of Trump’s murders on the high seas is just a foretaste of the vast crimes that this administration is hoping to unleash on the people of Latin America.