GOING OVERBOARD

Pentagon Pete Unleashes Another Deadly Boat Strike as Outrage Boils Over

It marks the second strike in the Pacific Ocean in as many days.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that his department has carried out a second deadly strike in the Pacific Ocean, killing three people he described as “terrorists.”

In a post made to X less than eight hours after his previous post announcing the Trump administration’s first strike on a vessel in the Pacific, Hegseth wrote, “Today, at the direction of President Trump, the Department of War carried out yet another lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization (DTO). Yet again, the now-deceased terrorists were engaged in narco-trafficking in the Eastern Pacific.”

Hegseth claimed that the vessel was “known by our intelligence” to be involved in smuggling narcotics, and that three “male narco-terrorists” who were aboard at the time were killed in the strike.

The Pentagon has declined to share intelligence proving that any of the people it has killed in its numerous boat strikes were involved in trafficking drugs.

At present, nobody killed in the Trump administration’s strikes has been independently confirmed to have been involved in drug smuggling. At least one victim’s family has claimed their relative was a fisherman not involved in drug trafficking. The Daily Beast has contacted the Pentagon for comment.

Hegseth had previously announced the administration’s first strike on a vessel in the Pacific earlier on Wednesday that used identical language to the later post, confirming that two people were killed. Five people in total have been killed in strikes in the Pacific this week.

The two strikes in the Pacific add to the Trump administration’s growing death toll during its war on purported drug smuggling in international waters. As a result of at least six strikes conducted since early September, 29 people have died.

Backlash against the strikes is growing, with both the military’s own lawyers and Republicans expressing concern over the legality of the attacks. Sen. Rand Paul, who was snubbed by Trump after refusing to vote along party lines to end the government shutdown, condemned the strikes in a Tuesday interview with Piers Morgan.

“We can’t just kill indiscriminately because we are not at war. It’s summary execution! Everyone gets a trial because sometimes, the system gets it wrong. Even the worst of the worst in our country get due process. The bottom line is that execution without process is not justice, and blowing up foreign ships is a recipe for chaos,” the senator wrote on X.

Navy Adm. Alvin Holsey, who had been overseeing Trump’s crackdown on “narco-terrorists,” announced earlier this week that he will be leaving his post in December, two years before his term is due to end. A source told Reuters that Holsey and Hegseth had clashed over the strikes conducted in the Caribbean.

Sanho Tree, global drug policy expert at the Institute for Policy Studies, told the Daily Beast that “Trump trying to apply this new military doctrine against an enemy who is quite literally incapable of surrender is, by its very definition, a forever war.”

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Catherine BourisReporter

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