WASHINGTON-A Venezuelan boat that the US army destroyed in the Caribbean last week had changed its course and seemed to have turned before the beginning of the attack, because people on board apparently spotted a military aircraft that followed them, according to US authorities familiar with the subject.
The army repeatedly hit the vessel before it sank, the authorities added, who spoke on anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue. The government said the boat was carrying drugs.
The revelations bring new details about an operation that represented a surprising change in relation to traditional drug interception efforts, intensifying the use of the Armed Forces by President Donald Trump for matters normally dealt with by law enforcement. Legal experts contested O Army’s legality under Trump’s orders, attacking and killing drug trafficking suspects as if they were combatants in a war.
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Trump announced the attack last week, saying that he occurred in international waters and killed 11 people who, according to him, were carrying drugs “on their way to the United States” and were part of a Venezuelan gang, Aragua’s Tren. He had no evidence to support these statements, but said, “We have recordings of them talking.”
Although the White House has not provided a detailed legal justification, it presented the contours of an unprecedented argument: the use of lethal military force would be allowed by armed conflict laws to defend the country from drugs, as 100,000 Americans die annually from overdose. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said people suspected of trafficking drugs to the US represent “an immediate threat.” Trump, in a letter to Congress, justified the attack as a matter of self -defense.
Many legal experts, including former high-ranking military, have rejected the idea that Trump has legitimate authority to treat drug trafficking as a legal equivalent to an imminent armed attack against the US. Even if this premise was accepted, they added, if the boat had already retreated, it would further weaken what they already considered a fragile self -defense argument.
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“If anyone is backwards, where is the ‘impending threat’ then?” Said the counter-mirror Donald J. Guter, former Judge of the Navy from 2000 to 2002. “Where is ‘self-defense’? They are gone, if they ever existed-what I think did not exist.”
Rear Admiral James E. McPherson, Judge General of the Navy from 2004 to 2006 and then served in the first Trump administration in prominent military positions, he agreed.
“I would like to know if they would be able to present any legal basis for what they did,” he said, adding, “If, in fact, you can formulate a nice argument that these people were about to attack the US by introducing cocaine or whatever, if they retreated, then that threat disappeared.”
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The White House did not directly answer questions about the maneuvers of the boat or the nature of the attack, repeating only the position of the government. Trump “acted according to the laws of armed conflict to protect our country” from “evil narcoterrorist trying to poison our homeland,” said Anna Kelly, White House spokesman.
Sean Parnell, chief spokesman for the Pentagon, said: “This attack has sent a clear message: If you traffic drugs toward our backs, the US armed forces will use all tools at our disposal to stop it immediately.”
The US coastal guard, sometimes with the help of the Navy, often intercepted suspected drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean Sea, seeks illicit loads and – if suspicions are confirmed – arrests occupants for trial.
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Trump has long wanted to adopt much harsher measures against drug trafficking, including the death penalty for traffickers. In his first term, President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines praised for doing an “unbelievable work on the drug problem” in the country, where the government approved the summary execution of suspects of trafficking. Duterte now faces accusations of crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court for his drug war.
Upon returning to office, Trump ordered his administration to begin to label several Latin American gangs and cartels as terrorist organizations, breaking with the tradition of limiting this designation to violent groups motivated by ideology rather than illicit profit. Legally, this designation allows sanctions such as freezing assets, but does not authorize the use of military force against them.
In July, Trump signed a guideline still secretly instructing the Pentagon to use military force against some of the criminal groups his team had appointed as terrorist organizations. The attack on the boat last week seems to signal the initial phase of operations arising from this guideline.
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By announcing the attack, Trump posted on social networks a 29 -second video edited with several excerpts of air surveillance. It showed a speedboat cutting the water, with several people on board, before an explosion.
But informed authorities about the attack said the video does not show the whole story. It does not show the boat changing direction after the occupants apparently be frightened by an aircraft above them, nor does it show the army by performing repeated attacks against the vessel even after disabled it, the authorities said.
Trump’s advisers boasted that the operation is only the beginning of a war against suspects in drug trafficking. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters last week: “We detonate a drug boat, and there are 11 narcoterrorists at the bottom of the ocean, and when other people try to do that, they will have the same fate.”
The legal controversy increases with uncertainty about which standards, if exist, Trump’s team has established for the strength of intelligence information about who and what is in a boat so that the US armed forces summarily kill all on board. Trump joked last week that not only traffickers, but also fishermen, can now think twice before going to the sea in the area.
“I think anyone who saw this is going to say, ‘I’ll let it go,” Trump said. “I don’t even know about the fishermen. They can say, ‘I won’t get into the boat. I won’t risk it.’
An open question is where the boat was going. Rubio initially said to reporters last week that he was probably heading for Trinidad and Tobago or another Caribbean country, but government officials later characterized the destination as the United States.
Another issue is what he was carrying. Some expressed doubts that a vessel of that size needed a crew of 11 people. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, who called “despicable and foolish” to glorify the death of people accused of crimes without judgment, argued that if there were drugs, it was more likely to be cocaine than fentanyl – the most responsible drug.
On Tuesday, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the highest-level Democrat on the Senate armed services committee, told CNN that the government did not have any proof that the boat was taking drugs to the US.
“If there is a suspicious civil boat of anything, especially in international waters, you have to try to stop it,” he said, describing what the standard engagement rules would be. “You only act, in fact, if you are attacked.”
The legal issue is whether Trump can simply choose to reject this approach and transfer the problem of drug trafficking from law application rules to the most severe framework of war rules, especially when Congress did not authorize any conflict armed with gangs and cartels such as Aragua’s Tren.
Geoffrey Corn, a retired military lawyer who was the army’s main advisor to issues of war law, said he believed the order of Trump and Hegseth was not justified as an act of self -defense. He expressed concern about the fact that what considered a seemingly illegal order was transmitted by the Military Chain and executed.
The apparent return of the boat before the attack began, he said, reinforced this trial.
“I think it’s a terrible precedent,” he said. “We crossed a line here.”
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