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At least one of the U.S. military’s strikes in the Caribbean last month targeted a boat carrying Colombian nationals, new reporting reveals, potentially signalling that President Donald Trump’s military actions in the region have a wider scope than has been previously reported.
CNN reports that the strike on September 19, the third of the five publicly announced strikes in the Caribbean, targeted a vessel that left from Colombia. The publication cited two people who had been briefed on the matter by the Pentagon.
The Pentagon was reportedly unable to assess the identities of the individuals on the boat before the strike, but deemed them to be affiliated with Colombian terrorist groups. The White House has labelled victims of the Pentagon’s Caribbean strikes as terrorists, but has not provided any evidence of their claims, senators have said.
At the time of the strike, Colombian President Gustavo Petro had raised the possibility that it killed Colombian citizens.
“If the boat was sunk in the Dominican Republic, then it is possible that they were Colombians. This means that officials from the US and the Dominican Republic would be guilty of the murder of Colombian citizens,” he said.
Later, on October 8, Petro — the country’s first-ever leftist president — said that the government had evidence that another strike, on October 3, killed Colombians.
“A new war front has opened up: the Caribbean. Indications show that the last boat bombed was Colombian with Colombian citizens inside it. I hope their families come forward to report it,” Petro said in a post on social media.
“There is no war against smuggling; there is a war for oil and it must be stopped by the world. The aggression is against all of Latin America and the Caribbean,” he went on.
The White House denied this claim at the time. CNN reported that sources said the October 3 strike did not target Colombians.
“The United States looks forward to President Petro publicly retracting his baseless and reprehensible statement so that we can return to a productive dialogue on building a strong, prosperous future for the people of United States and Colombia,” the White House said.
The U.S. has not publicly identified any of the 27 people killed in strikes.
Experts have said that the strikes are illegal under international law. On Wednesday, Amnesty International USA condemned the U.S.’s latest attack, on Tuesday, that killed six people as “murder — plain and simple.”
If the attack did indeed target Colombians, it could indicate a wider scope to the U.S.’s aggression than previously reported. The Pentagon has already covertly authorized the CIA to carry out lethal operations within Venezuela and in the Caribbean, reports have found.
The Trump administration has reportedly been working off a legal opinion created by the Justice Department to target people in the region. It includes an expansive list of cartels that goes beyond what has been publicly designated as terrorist groups, and gives the administration wide-reaching power to target them.
“If the [Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel’s] opinion authorizing strikes on cartels is as broad as it seems, it would mean DOJ has interpreted the president to have such extraordinary powers that he alone can decide to prosecute a war far broader than what Congress authorized after the attacks on 9/11,” Sarah Harrison, former associate general counsel for the Defense Department and analyst for the Crisis Group, told CNN.
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