The Pentagon announced on Thursday that the US military had conducted another deadly strike on a boat suspected of carrying illegal narcotics, killing four men in the eastern Pacific, as questions mount over the legality of the attacks.
Video of the new strike was posted on social media by the US southern command, based in Florida, with a statement saying that, at the direction of Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, “Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel in international waters operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization”.
“Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting along a known narco-trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed,” the statement added.
The footage showed a large explosion suddenly overtaking a small boat as it moved through the water, followed by an image of a vessel in flames and dark smoke streaming overhead.
It is the 22nd strike the US military has carried out against boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, bringing the death toll of the campaign to at least 87 people since September, when the strikes began.
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The first publicly announced strike in nearly three weeks, it comes as the Pentagon and the White House have struggled to answer questions about the legal basis for the campaign to kill suspected drug smugglers. US lawmakers have promised to investigate the first such attack, in September, in which two survivors clinging to wreckage were killed in a follow-on strike.
Hegseth has faced increasing scrutiny over that strike following a report from the Washington Post that the defense secretary had verbally directed the military to “kill them all”. On Thursday, a Democratic lawmaker introduced articles of impeachment against Hegseth, pointing to the boat strike and a report that found he broke rules by sharing information on Slack about another military attack, but such an effort is unlikely to succeed.
The US admiral who commanded the 2 September attack told lawmakers on Thursday that there was no such order to kill everyone onboard the vessel. Still, Jim Himes, a Democratic congressman from Connecticut, described the footage of the strike, which reportedly showed two survivors clinging to the wreckage, as “one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service”.
“You have two individuals in clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel,” Himes said.
Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas, disagreed, saying the footage showed “two survivors trying to flip a boat loaded with drugs, bound for the United States, back over so they could stay in the fight” and that nearby “narco-terrorists” may have been coming to rescue them.
Ryan Goodman, a New York University law professor and former Pentagon lawyer, scoffed at Cotton’s interpretation. “I’d love to know how Senator Cotton … was able to detect these shipwrecked people were trying to ‘stay in the fight’ versus clinging to dear life in an effort to survive,” Goodman wrote on Bluesky.
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“Even if you buy all the legal falsehoods (that this is an ‘armed conflict’, that drugs are war-sustaining objects), the two shipwrecked were in no way, shape or form engaged in ‘active combat activities’ (the actual legal test),” Goodman added.
The administration has argued the US is at war with drug traffickers and that such strikes are legal under the rules of war, but most legal experts reject that rationale.
“Even if we buy into their framing that the individuals on these vessels are combatants, it would still be unlawful to kill them if they are hors de combat, which means they’re incapacitated,” Rebecca Ingber, a professor at Cardozo law school and a former legal adviser to the state department, told the Guardian this week.
“It is manifestly unlawful to kill someone who’s been shipwrecked.”
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