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Department of Defense (DOD) officials told Democratic lawmakers in a brief on the U.S. military’s strikes against boats off the coast of northern South America that the military is not identifying the occupants of the boats before they bomb them.
The Trump administration has targeted more than a dozen boats, mostly in the Caribbean Sea but some in the Pacific Ocean, killing at least 61 people total. While the administration has tried to justify the killings by claiming the occupants of the boats were drug traffickers, many of the victims’ families have indicated they were fishermen and not part of any organized crime.
Critics have said that, even if the administration is correct in its assessment, the attacks on the vessels amount to extrajudicial killings.
On Thursday, Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-California) told CNN that the Pentagon briefed her and other lawmakers on the attacks, informing them that the administration does not “need to positively identify individuals on the vessel to do the strikes.”
The administration attacked the boats — rather than detaining and then prosecuting the people they claimed were drug traffickers — “because they could not satisfy the evidentiary burden” to successfully prosecute them, Jacobs elaborated.
Jacobs — who serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the House Armed Services Committee, including the subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations and the Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces — indicated that some information was still being withheld by the Trump administration, with Pentagon officials stating they would not go into their legal justifications for killing people on the boats until their lawyers were present.
“There’s nothing that we heard in there that changes my assessment that this is completely illegal, that it is unlawful and even if Congress authorized it, it would still be illegal because there are extrajudicial killings where we have no evidence,” she added.
Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colorado), who was also part of the briefing, came to the same conclusion.
“I’m walking away without an understanding of how and why they’re making an assessment that the use of legal force is adequate here,” he said.
Senate Republicans have reportedly received a more comprehensive briefing on the matter, with Democrats being blocked from being able to take part — a highly unusual situation, as matters of military intelligence and operations typically involve informing members of both political parties.
“Shutting Democrats out of a briefing on U.S. military strikes and withholding the legal justification for those strikes from half the Senate is indefensible and dangerous,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Virginia) said.
Warner added:
Decisions about the use of American military force are not campaign strategy sessions, and they are not the private property of one political party. For any administration to treat them that way erodes our national security and flies in the face of Congress’s constitutional obligation to oversee matters of war and peace.
Several human rights groups condemned the United States’s actions as war crimes.
“A systematic attack on civilians is a crime against humanity under international law,” said Ben Saul, the UN Special Rapporteur for the protection of human rights while countering terrorism. “When will other governments speak out?”
“In the last two months, the U.S. military’s Southern Command has gone on a murder spree by following the Trump administration’s illegal orders,” said Daphne Eviatar, Amnesty International’s director for human rights and security. “The administration has not even named its victims, nor provided evidence of their alleged crimes. But even if they did, intentionally killing people accused of committing crimes who pose no imminent threat to life is murder, full stop.”
The Trump administration’s illegal killings may be part of a broader strategy to antagonize Venezuela, with the goal of eventual regime change, an outcome Trump has repeatedly expressed a desire for.
“In addition to its increasing numbers of murders of alleged drug smugglers at sea, the Trump administration is positioning tremendous military firepower for what appears to be an imminent attack on Venezuela, ” Marjorie Cohn, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, wrote in a column for Truthout earlier this week.
Cohn urged concerned residents in the U.S. to speak out against the strikes.
“We must mobilize a powerful antiwar movement to demand that the U.S. government stop the illegal boat murders and stay out of Venezuela,” Cohn said.
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