0
0
Virtually all news outlets worldwide reporting on the Pentagon’s targeted killings of sailors in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean specify that at present, there has been no evidence presented to back up claims that the sailors are in fact drug traffickers.
That’s because the Pentagon doesn’t have any, officials told House Democrats in a closed-door briefing yesterday.
Nor, in their own words, do they know so much as the identifies or origin of those they’re executing: nor, in their own words, do they need to.
“[The department officials] said that they do not need to positively identify individuals on these vessels to do the strikes, they just need to prove a connection to smuggling,” said Rep. Sara Jacobs (D – CA). “When we tried to get more information, we did not get satisfactory answers”.
Though overdose deaths from the opioid painkiller fentanyl are often cited by President Trump and his highest ranking officials as justification for summary executions of unidentified nationals in international waters, the Pentagon officials linked the 61 people killed in the over 16 boat bombings to cocaine smuggling, not that they provided evidence for that either. Rep. Jacobs again.
“They argued that cocaine is a facilitating drug of fentanyl, but that was not a satisfactory answer for most of us”.
This was reported first by POLITICO, which wrote Senate Republicans shut out their Democrat colleagues unexpectedly from a Wednesday briefing on the strikes, engaging them. In the lower chamber, GOP lawmakers argued that yesterday’s “informal” briefing wasn’t intended as a broad-based explanation but merely to address certain concerns held by the Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee.
Apparently next week there will be a thorough briefing in which, one supposes, evidence or justification of some kind would be presented.
“Am I leaving satisfied? Absolutely not. And the last word that I gave to the admiral was, ‘I hope you recognize the constitutional peril that you are in and the peril you are putting our troops in,’” Seth Moulton (D – MA) told reporters after the briefing, according to CNN.
A vote on the War Powers Resolution will come to the floor of the Senate next week, sponsored by a bipartisan team of Tim Kaine (D – VA), Rand Paul (R – KY), and Adam Schiff (D – CA), to end Trump’s ongoing regime change preparations for Venezuela, for which he has amassed 8 warships, 1 submarine, 1 aircraft carrier strike group, 10 F-35s, some 10,000 deployed marines and sailors, and an infamous Special Forces helicopter team in the waters off the coast of the South American country. WaL
We Humbly Ask For Your Support—Follow the link here to see all the ways, monetary and non-monetary.
PICTURED ABOVE: Two of the boats targeted in the Eastern Pacific Ocean on Oct. 28th. PC: Screenshot, War Department.
