The White House cannot “satisfy the evidentiary burden” to prosecute those they have been killing, one lawmaker said.
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.
