Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “does not know” who the military is killing in strikes against “drug boats” off the coast of Venezuela, a report has alleged.
People familiar with classified briefings tell The New York Times that the military has abandoned its typical approach of targeting confirmed adversaries and is instead blowing up vessels without knowing “precisely” who it is hitting.
The strikes are not total shots in the dark, the Times sources noted. It reports that the “military knows that someone on the boats has a connection to a drug cartel, and it has some level of confidence that drugs are on the vessels.”
However, critics like Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, say the strikes are eliminating, at best, low-level members of a drug cartel.
And at worst, those killed are fishermen caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Traditionally, our counternarcotics efforts have always been targeted at the head of the snake,” Himes told the Times. “This is obviously the opposite of that. Now we’re going after the tail… We’re going after some, you know, poor ex-fishermen who took $300 to run a load of cocaine to Trinidad.”
Himes believes blowback for the strikes, which President Donald Trump has proudly shared clips of since they began in September, will outweigh any positive effect they may have in slowing the narcotics trade.
“They’re the street-corner hustlers,” Himes said of those killed. “And if the United States is sending the signal that life doesn’t matter, that’s coming back to us, that is absolutely coming back to us.”
Reached for comment, the Pentagon told the Daily Beast it can “confirm” that those killed are all “narco-terrorists.”
“We have consistently said that our intelligence did indeed confirm that the individuals involved in these drug operations were narco-terrorists, and we stand by that assessment,” said Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell in an email.
Supporters of the initiative noted that killing unconfirmed targets is not entirely new for the Pentagon. Strikes against suspected—but not confirmed—terrorists were common during the Obama administration; they became known as “signature strikes” because they were based on behavior that appeared terror-related.
The strikes off the Venezuelan coast have killed at least 80 people, none of whom are believed to be high-level cartel members.
The Times writes of the situation, “Lessons of the long war against terrorism appear to have been cast aside as the Trump administration.”
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