By Nathaniel "Beltway" Steele
The U.S. military struck another boat in the Caribbean Sea it says was smuggling drugs, killing four people aboard, the Pentagon confirmed Saturday.
The strike is not an isolated action. It is the latest entry in a campaign that has now killed at least 231 people in 69 strikes across Latin American waters since the Trump administration began targeting what officials call "narcoterrorists" roughly a year ago, according to CBS News.
What the public has not been given, in this case or in the strikes before it, is much in the way of verification. The Pentagon has offered a body count and a label — drug-smuggling boat — but not names, nationalities, evidence presented to a court, or an accounting of who, if anyone, was found unarmed or innocent. Sixty-nine strikes is a lot of boats to have sunk without a single public trial.
That is the trouble with a war fought by press release. The administration has framed these as counter-narcotics operations, but they carry the hallmarks of a shadow military campaign: extrajudicial killings, conducted at sea, far from cameras and courts, justified after the fact rather than authorized before it. Congress has not declared war on cartels. No public legal memo has been released explaining the authority under which the military can kill suspected smugglers on sight rather than interdict and prosecute them, the traditional coast guard approach.
At 231 dead and counting, the scale alone demands scrutiny this newspaper has not seen applied. Who reviews these strikes? What evidence justifies each one? The administration has not said, and reporters have not yet forced an answer.
Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.
— Compiled from reporting by ABC News and CBS News.
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