An unnamed Pentagon official told The Intercept on Sept. 5 that Trump’s Sept. 2 strike on the alleged narcotrafficking boat was a criminal attack on civilians. “The U.S. is now directly targeting civilians. Drug traffickers may be criminals but they aren’t combatants,” the Department of Defense official, described as “high ranking,” 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 rubberstamp complicit in this crime,” the official added, referring to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s firing of the Judge Advocate Generals (JAGs) of the Army, Navy and Air Force last February, shortly after he took office.
U.S. officials also slammed the “justification” offered by Hegseth on the day of the strike. “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, also not named, said that Hegseth’s justification—which one called “completely unserious”—took shape after the attack.
