President Trump considers ground attack on cartels after Caribbean ship attack
President Donald Trump has said a ground attack on drug cartels is possible after a boat crash in the Caribbean that left multiple people dead.
WASHINGTON – The Trump administration’s deadly attack on a boat off the coast of South America and release of multiple survivors to their home countries is raising questions about who the United States killed and what evidence the vessel was transporting drugs.
Trump administration officials said the airstrike was part of a larger counter-drug operation. Pentagon Secretary Pete Hegseth and other officials said that U.S. intelligence has determined that the boat was carrying drugs and that its passengers were parties to illegal drug trafficking into the United States.
But to date, the Department of Defense has not provided any evidence. Amid concerns from some lawmakers that these attacks were illegal, Trump administration officials have chosen to withhold details and are clutching a memo justifying military action.
Some say the answers to what officials know and how they know it lie there, but that information is still inaccessible to all but Republican Senate insiders.
“The big misconception here is that, in some ways, we don’t know exactly who we’re attacking and why,” Hegseth told reporters on Oct. 31.
“We know how to map networks and hunt our nation’s enemies, and that’s what’s happening in this case.”
After the administration briefed House members on Oct. 30 about the strike, Rep. Sarah Jacobs, a Democrat from California, said there was not enough information to know whether the deadly strike was justified. She told USA TODAY that Trump officials “promised” to send a memo to her and other lawmakers but did not follow up.
The military needed to demonstrate “links to a designated terrorist organization or associated organization” before the attack, but “that could be interpreted very broadly”.
The ship was badly damaged after the attack, and there was no evidence that it was carrying drugs.
Return of survivors raises concerns
At least 61 people have been killed in the two months since the offshore attacks began. Three people survived, two of whom returned to their home countries of Colombia and Ecuador.
Ecuadorian authorities have released a man who survived U.S. detention and detention, saying authorities did not have enough evidence to convict him.
Returned survivors raised new legal issues. If the US had enough evidence to attack their boat, why wasn’t that evidence enough to try them in US courts?
In the two months since the first U.S. airstrike killed 11 people on a ship in the Caribbean, lawmakers in Washington have asked the Trump administration for more information about the strike and a legal justification for it.
Many of the ships targeted were from Venezuela, and the attack appears to be linked to a campaign led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to oust the country’s leftist President Nicolas Maduro from power. President Donald Trump has repeatedly said the next attack could be on the ground, but denied an October 31 Wall Street Journal report that the United States was compiling a list of actionable targets in Venezuela.
The legal memo justifying the military strike was reportedly written by the Justice Department, not the Pentagon. Jack Landman Goldsmith, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in an explanatory article that taking that approach is what the CIA calls a “golden shield” internally. The document protects officials working under it from future criminal prosecution, he wrote.
Jacobs and other Congressional Democrats said they were informed at the last minute that the military lawyer they had scheduled to meet with on Oct. 30 would not show up.
“The Pentagon has removed the lawyers who legally justify these strikes from the conference without notice,” Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton, representing Massachusetts, told X.
A day earlier, the administration shared a legal memo with some Republican senators, an unprecedented move that angered Democrats. Both sides of the Hill political aisle have historically been described as a unified group.
Democratic Sen. Mark Warner told reporters at the Capitol on Oct. 30 that he had “no idea” why the legal basis would be classified. “If you have a valid legal opinion, wouldn’t you want to share it with all members?”
Also, the airstrikes did not target the central nodes of networks bringing drugs into the United States. Most illicit shipments of fentanyl, one of the deadliest causes of drug overdoses in the United States, enter the United States by land from Mexico.
Cybele Mayes-Osterman covers national security and world affairs for USA TODAY. Contact her by email: cmayesosterman@usatoday.com or by cell phone/signal at 505-702-6900.
