The Intercept: Pentagon Official: Trump Boat Strike Was a Criminal Attack on Civilians
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 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.”
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....