U.S. boat attacks raise questions in Congress

Cybele Mayes-Osterman

USA TODAY

WASHINGTON – The Trump administration’s deadly strikes on boats off the coasts of South America – and the release of multiple survivors back to their home countries – have raised questions about who the United States killed and what evidence it had that the vessels were transporting drugs.

Trump administration officials say the strikes are part of a sweeping counternarcotics operation. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and other officials have said U.S. intelligence determined that the boats carried drugs and passengers on them were parties to criminal trafficking of illegal substances to the United States.

To date, however, the Pentagon has provided no evidence. As concerns boil over from some lawmakers that the strikes are illegal, Trump administration officials have opted to withhold details, holding a memo justifying the military action close to the vest.

The answers to what officials know and how they know it are available, as some have indicated, but the information is not yet accessible to anyone other than Republican Senate insiders.

'One thing that’s been highly misconstrued here is that in some way we don’t know precisely who we’re striking and why,' Hegseth told reporters Oct.31.

After the administration briefed members of the House on the strikes Oct.30, Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-California, said she didn’t have enough information to know whether the deadly strikes were justifiable. Trump officials 'promised' they would send the memo to her and other lawmakers but did not follow up, Jacobs told USA TODAY.

The military needed to show a 'connection to a designated terrorist organization or affiliate' before an attack, 'but that can be very broadly interpreted,' she said.

The boats are so wrecked after the strikes that no evidence they carried drugs has been preserved, she said.

At least 61 people have been killed in the two months since the offshore attacks began. Three people have survived them, and two of them were returned to their home countries – Colombia and Ecuador.

Ecuadorian officials released the man who survived the strike from custody, saying authorities did not have enough evidence to convict him of a crime.

The repatriated survivors raised a new legal question: If the United States had enough evidence to attack their boat, why wasn’t that evidence sufficient to try them in an American court?

In the two months since the first U.S. strike killed 11 people on a vessel in the Caribbean, lawmakers in Washington have been pressuring the Trump administration for more information about the strikes and the legal justification for them.

President Donald Trump has said repeatedly that the next strikes could be on land – although he denied a Wall Street Journal report on Oct.31 that the United States had a ready-to-go list of targets in Venezuela.

The strikes also have not targeted the central nodes of the networks that bring drugs into the United States.