The US has bombed another alleged drug-running boat in the waters of Latin America, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said on Saturday.
Hegseth said the vessel was targeted in the Caribbean and, as usual, he provided no evidence to back up his claims about what the boat was carrying. He said the bombing killed three “narco-terrorists,” a term the Trump administration is using to justify extra-judicial executions at sea for an alleged crime that doesn’t receive the death penalty in the US.
The attack brings the total number of boats the US has bombed since September 2 to 16, and the total number of people killed in the campaign to 64, according to numbers released by the Trump administration. Nine boats have been hit in the Caribbean, and seven were targeted in the Eastern Pacific.
While the Trump administration has claimed the boats that have been targeted were attempting to bring drugs to the US, a US official has told Drop Site News that many of the vessels that have been struck “do not even have the requisite gasoline or motor capacity to reach US waters.”
Trump officials have also framed the bombing campaign as a response to fentanyl-related deaths in the US, but the US official speaking to Drop Site also noted that little to no of the fentanyl in the US comes from Venezuela, where most of the boats targeted in the Caribbean have come from.
The latest US strike on a boat comes amid growing criticism of the military campaign in Congress over the lack of transparency and information. The Pentagon admitted to Democratic lawmakers in a briefing that it doesn’t know the identity of the people it has been killing. Hegseth has also included the bombing campaign in a list of topics military officials aren’t allowed to discuss with Congress without first receiving authorization from the War Department.
