The lethal strike on a boat in the Caribbean on Tuesday was a criminal attack on civilians, according to a high-ranking Pentagon official who spoke to the Intercept on the condition of anonymity.
The Trump administration paved the way for the attack, he said, by firing the top legal authorities of the Army and the Air Force earlier this year.
“The U.S. is now directly targeting civilians. Drug traffickers may be criminals but they aren’t combatants,” the Department of Defense official said. “When Trump fired the military’s top lawyers the rest saw the writing on the wall, and instead of being a critical firebreak they are now a rubber stamp complicit in this crime.”
President Donald Trump claimed that the attack was aimed “against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists,” in a TruthSocial post. He continued: “TDA is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, operating under the control of [Venezuelan President] Nicolas Maduro, responsible for mass murder, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence and terror across the United States and Western Hemisphere.”
Trump accompanied the post with a video of a four-engine speedboat cutting through the water with numerous people on board. An explosion then destroys the boat. Trump said the attack killed 11 people. It was unclear whether they were given a chance to surrender before the United States killed them.
After days of silence, the White House issued a statement late Thursday claiming the attack was lawful. White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said it was “taken in defense of vital U.S. national interests and in the collective self-defense of other nations who have long suffered due to the narcotics trafficking and violent cartel activities of such organizations.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth offered his own justification for the strike the same day. “Every boatload of any form of drug that poisons the American people is an imminent threat. And at the DoD our job is to defeat imminent threats,” he told a group of journalists. “A foreign terrorist organization poisoning your people with drugs coming from a drug cartel is no different than Al Qaeda, and they will be treated as such as they were in international waters.”
Two U.S. government officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that Hegseth’s justification – which one called “completely unserious” – took shape after the attack.
Experts said Hegseth’s rationale was flimsy, if not farcical. “Tren de Aragua being designated as a foreign terrorist organization is a purely domestic law enforcement designation. It offers no authority for the military to use deadly force,” said Todd Huntley, who was an active-duty judge advocate for more than 23 years, serving as a legal advisor to Special Operations forces engaged in counterterrorism missions around the world. “Under international law, there’s no way this even gets close to being a legitimate use of force.”
Other legal experts have agreed with Huntley, now the director of the National Security Law Program at the Georgetown University Law Center. Members of Congress have echoed the assessment.
“Congress has not declared war on Venezuela, or Tren de Aragua, and the mere designation of a group as a terrorist organization does not give any President carte blanche to ignore Congress’s clear Constitutional authority on matters of war and peace,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn, in a statement. “There is no conceivable legal justification for this use of force. Unless compelling evidence emerges that they were acting in self-defense, that makes the strike a clear violation of international law.”
Hegseth said the attack would be followed by others. “It won’t stop with just this strike,” he told Fox News on Wednesday. “Anyone else trafficking in those waters who we know is a designated narco-terrorist will face the same fate.”
Diosdado Cabello, the Venezuelan Minister of Interior, Justice and Peace called the Tuesday attack “an illegal massacre in international waters” and said the United States had “violated international law.”
Under international law, there’s no way this even gets close to being a legitimate use of force.
Brian Finucane, who worked for a decade in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the Department of State, where he advised the U.S. government on counterterrorism and other military matters, also noted that designating a group as a foreign terrorist organization does not, by itself, provide authority for the use of military force.
“Nonetheless, such FTO designations are widely and mistakenly perceived as authorizing such action within the executive branch,” he wrote in a legal analysis published this week. “Thus, designation of Tren de Aragua and a number of other Latin American criminal entities as FTOs in February foreshadowed this week’s attack in the Caribbean, despite providing no actual legal authority for it.”
U.S. attacks around the world – from Libya to Somalia – during the war on terror have been justified under strained interpretations of the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force. But despite the Trump administration labeling cartels “narcoterrorists,” experts say there is no plausible argument that the AUMF can apply to Tren de Aragua.
“We knew exactly who was in that boat,” Hegseth told Fox News on Wednesday. The Pentagon has frequently claimed to have killed terrorists when it has instead killed innocents. A 2023 investigation by The Intercept, for example, determined that an April 2018 drone attack in Somalia killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse. At the time, the military announced it had killed “five terrorists” and that “no civilians were killed in this airstrike.”
Several experts and government officials speculated that the boat the U.S. struck on Tuesday may not even have been smuggling drugs due to what they said was an unusually large number of people on board the vessel.
Experts and government officials were incredulous that a judge advocate signed off on the strike, variously speculating that any lawyer involved must have been ignored, pressured or simply capitulated to the will of the president.
Hegseth fired the Air Force’s and Army’s top judge advocates general (JAGs) in February to avoid “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.” The next month he commissioned his personal lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, as a Navy JAG and empowered him to help overhaul the JAG corps, reportedly pursuing changes that would encourage lawyers to approve more aggressive tactics and take a more lenient approach to those who violate the law of war. Parlatore’s prior claim to fame was successfully defending Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL accused of first-degree murder in the death of a captured ISIS fighter as well as the attempted murder of civilians in Iraq. Distinguished former JAGs and members of Congress have repeatedly spoken out about Hegseth’s efforts to undermine the independence of military legal counsel and subvert military justice.
In February, Trump designated Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, MS-13 in El Salvador, and six cartels based in Mexico as foreign terrorist organizations. More recently, the Trump administration added the Venezuelan Cartel de los Soles, or Cartel of the Suns, to a list of specially designated global terrorist groups, alleging that it is headed by Maduro and high-ranking officials in his administration. In July, Trump also signed a secret directive ordering the Pentagon to use military force against some Latin American drug cartels he has labeled terrorist organizations.
Venezuelan officials believe Trump may be renewing long-running efforts, which failed during his first term, to topple Maduro’s government. Maduro and several close allies were indicted in a New York federal court in 2020, during the first Trump presidency, on federal charges of narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine. Last month, the U.S. doubled its reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest to $50 million.
Speaking on Fox News, Hegseth did not rule out regime change by the U.S. in Venezuela. “That’s a presidential-level decision and we’re prepared with every asset that the American military has,” he said.
Two armed Venezuelan F-16 fighter jets flew over the U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer Jason Dunham in the southern Caribbean Sea in a show of force on Thursday. The Pentagon called it a “highly provocative move” that was “designed to interfere with our counter-narco-terror operations” and issued a threat.
“The cartel running Venezuela is strongly advised not to pursue any further effort to obstruct, deter or interfere with counternarcotics and counterterrorism operations carried out by the U.S. military,” read the statement released on X Thursday night.
Hegseth declined to say what type of weapons were used in the Tuesday strike but referenced “assets that we have in the region” include a “MEU” or Marine Expeditionary Unit “which holds 2,200 combat infantry Marines and has plenty of its own organic assets.” He added: “So we’ve got assets in the air, assets in the water, assets on ships, because this is a deadly serious mission for us.”
The Intercept previously reported that U.S. Marines and sailors from the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit recently deployed to southern Puerto Rico. The 22nd MEU did not reply to repeated requests for comment about whether they were involved in the Tuesday attack.
All told, around 4,500 U.S. personnel, seven U.S. warships and one nuclear-powered attack submarine are either in the Caribbean or are expected to arrive there soon.
Several government officials suggested to The Intercept that Rear Adm. Milton “Jamie” Sands III, head of Naval Special Warfare Command, was fired by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth late last month due to the admiral’s concerns about impending attacks on civilian vessels in international waters.
Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson pushed back on the officials’ claims. “No, that’s not accurate,” she replied by email. Sands did not respond to requests by The Intercept for an interview prior to publication.
Tuesday’s strike, as carried out, fell under the authority of U.S. Southern Command. Sands oversaw the Navy’s SEAL teams, so would not have been in the operational chain of command for the Tuesday strike, and would not have had authority to approve or reject the planned operation.
Last month, more than 30 humanitarian, public interest, immigrant rights, faith-based, veterans’ advocacy, and drug policy reform groups called on Congress to oppose the use of military force against drug cartels in Latin America by the Trump administration.
Melding two failed American wars — the war on drugs and the war on terror — would “put people at risk of violence and destabilize hemispheric relations while hindering, not helping, efforts to protect communities from drug trafficking and other crime,” according to the organizations, which include Alianza Americas, Center for Civilians in Conflict, Drug Policy Alliance, Public Citizen, and Win Without War.
“The U.S. posture towards the eradication of drugs has caused immeasurable damage across our hemisphere. It has led to massive forced displacement, environmental devastation, violence, and human rights violations. What it has not done is any damage whatsoever to narcotrafficking or to the cartels. It has been a dramatic, profound failure at every level,” said Omar. “Trump and Rubio’s apparent solution, to make it even more militarized, is doomed to fail. Worse, it risks spiraling into the exact type of endless, pointless conflict that Trump supposedly opposes.”
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