 |
| SecWar/X |
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday announced another deadly US strike on a boat he said was trafficking narcotics in the Caribbean Sea.
The attack Thursday killed three people aboard the vessel, Hegseth said, bringing the death toll from the Trump administration’s campaign in South American waters up to at least 69 people in at least 17 strikes.
Hegseth posted a 20-second video of the strike on social media and wrote, “As we’ve said before, vessel strikes on narco-terrorists will continue until their … poisoning of the American people stops.”
He claimed the vessel was “operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization.”
President Donald Trump has justified the strikes by saying the United States is in “armed conflict” with drug cartels and claiming the boats are operated by foreign terror organizations.
The administration has not provided evidence or more details.
Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio briefed a small group of congressional leaders Wednesday on the growing military campaign, providing one of the first high-level glimpses into the legal rationale and strategy behind the strikes.
Republicans emerged either staying silent or expressing confidence in the campaign. --->READ MORE HERE
The deadly US military strikes against alleged drug-carrying vessels in international waters mark a quantum leap and an aggressive escalation in US counternarcotics policy, in which drug trafficking is treated as a national security threat equivalent to terrorism.
The initial strikes, which began in early September, targeted vessels that had departed Venezuela and Colombia’s Caribbean coasts. The operation has since expanded to the eastern Pacific.
The administration of US President Donald Trump has claimed that the targeted boats were linked to criminal groups it has designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations but has provided no solid evidence for those assertions. US lawmakers, foreign officials, and independent experts have raised questions about the legality and efficacy of the strikes, while the administration has insisted it rests on sound legal and strategic footing.
Officials, including Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, have also made statements that contradict research by InSight Crime. They connected the first vessel struck by US missiles on September 2 to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, but in-depth investigation into the gang found no evidence that it is a transnational drug trafficking network. President Trump and others have also connected the missile strike to the deadly opioid crisis in the United States and stated that some of the boats that were struck were carrying fentanyl. But our research shows that fentanyl is almost exclusively produced in Mexico, not South America.
In order to better understand this important evolution in anti-organized crime tactics, we created this timeline of how the strikes are unfolding.
Most of the information used to lay out the strikes was provided by the US government, and in many instances could not be corroborated.
This is a timeline of how the strikes unfolded --->READ MORE HERE
If you like what you see, please "Like" and/or Follow us on FACEBOOK here, GETTR here, and TWITTER here.
No comments:
Post a Comment