The attack comes a week after the Trump administration was sued by the families of two men killed in an earlier strike.<\/b>
\nJust over a week after the families of two Trinidadian men sued the Trump administration over the boat bombings that killed their relatives, the US Department of Defense killed two more people in the eastern Pacific Ocean, bringing the total death toll to at least 128 in the White House\u2019s operation that it claims is targeting drug traffickers.
The US Southern Command said in a social media post that at the direction of Cmdr. Gen. Francis L. Donovan, \u201cJoint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by designated terrorist organizations.\u201d
As with the other dozens of strikes the Pentagon has carried out in the Pacific and the Caribbean Sea since September, Southern Command did not provide evidence for its claim that \u201cnarco-terrorists\u201d were killed in the attack or that the vessel was traveling \u201calong known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations.\u201d
The White House has persistently claimed that the boat strikes are aimed at stopping drug cartels based in Venezuela from sending drugs to the US, but international and domestic intelligence agencies have not identified Venezuela as a major player in the trafficking of illicit substances \u2014 particularly not of fentanyl, the leading cause of overdoses in the US.
President Donald Trump has claimed the US is in an \u201carmed conflict\u201d with drug cartels. Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle have unsuccessfully sought to pass war powers resolutions to stop the administration from attacking vessels and targets in Venezuela.
Dozens of strikes preceded the Trump administration\u2019s invasion of Venezuela and abduction of President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, whom the White House has accused of being directly involved with drug trafficking. Since attacking Venezuela, though, administration officials have all but admitted their goal in the South American country is to take control of its oil supply.
The killings of nearly 130 people in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have been denounced as extrajudicial \u201cmurders\u201d by numerous legal experts, and a top military lawyer at the Pentagon warned officials in August, weeks before the operations began, that carrying out the strikes could expose military top brass as well as rank-and-file service members to legal liability.
In the case of at least one bombing in September, the official who oversaw the strike told Congress that the boat was found to have been headed to Suriname, not the United States. One vessel had turned back toward Venezuela, away from the US, when it was struck.
The strike on Thursday was announced soon after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed that \u201csome top cartel drug-traffickers\u2026 have decided to cease all narcotics operations INDEFINITELY due to recent (highly effective) kinetic strikes in the Caribbean.\u201d Hegseth did not provide evidence for the claim.
Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America emphasized on Thursday that after killing more than 127 people in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, the administration has nothing to show for the operation but \u201ca collection of gruesome videos\u201d of the bombings.
\u201cThe amount of cocaine found at the US land border keeps increasing,\u201d he said, citing Customs and Border Protection statistics.<\/p>\n