Trump Administration Live Updates: Strike on Alleged Drug Boat off Colombia Expands U.S. Campaign to Pacific Ocean
"Where Things Stand
Boat strike: The U.S. military hit another vessel that the Trump administration claimed was carrying drugs from South America, a U.S. official said Wednesday. It was the first American strike on a vessel in the Pacific Ocean, expanding the military campaign beyond the Caribbean Sea. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters, said the attack late Tuesday on a vessel off the coast of Colombia killed two or three people. Read more ›
NATO meeting: President Trump and Mark Rutte, the NATO secretary general, were set to meet Wednesday in Washington to discuss support for Ukraine. The White House reversed itself on Tuesday, saying that Mr. Trump no longer planned to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia soon after Russian officials made it clear that they had no intention of making a deal to end the war. Read more ›
Gaza truce: After meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance said that visits to Israel by top American officials were intended to oversee the fragile cease-fire deal in Gaza and not to babysit the truce. Read more ›
The U.S. military attacked another vessel that the Trump administration claimed was carrying drugs, but for the first time struck a boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean off the coast of Colombia rather than in the Caribbean Sea, a U.S. official said on Wednesday.
The strike, on late Tuesday, killed two or three people on the boat, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.
This was the eighth known strike that U.S. Special Operations forces have conducted since Sept. 2, when the military, on President Trump’s orders, began killing people aboard boats believed to be smuggling drugs as if they were enemy combatants in a war rather than criminal suspects.
The administration has previously acknowledged seven strikes, which it said have killed 32 people. It has not yet announced the latest strike, which was earlier reported by CBS News.
The Trump administration has said that each of the attacks were in international waters and that the passengers were members of drug cartels that the State Department had designated terrorist organizations.
The administration has also said intelligence backs its accusations of the passengers’ identities and what they were doing, but it has not offered evidence.
U.S. officials on Wednesday did not immediately identify the group it accused of carrying drugs in the boat it struck off the Colombian coast.
A broad range of outside legal specialists in laws governing the use of armed force have said the campaign is illegal because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even criminal suspects — who are not directly participating in hostilities.
The White House has said the strikes are legal as a matter of self-defense and because Mr. Trump has “determined” that the country is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels that his team has deemed to be terrorists. It has not publicly offered a legal theory that explains how to bridge the gap between trafficking an illicit product and organized armed attacks.
The administration has pointed to the fact that around 100,000 Americans die from drug overdoses each year. But the surge in overdoses has been driven by fentanyl, which comes from Mexico.
South America is a source of cocaine. Much of the world’s supply of that drug is produced by three countries there — especially Colombia, which has coastlines in both the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
The majority of the cocaine smuggled into the United States moves through the Pacific, not the Caribbean, U.S. data shows. But the Trump administration has focused its rhetoric on Venezuela and its president, Nicolás Maduro, who was indicted on drug trafficking charges in the United States in 2020 and whom the Trump team calls a cartel leader.
Mr. Trump has authorized C.I.A. operations in Venezuela, and the administration is weighing land strikes as some of his aides push to oust Mr. Maduro. Venezuela has a coastline only on the Caribbean, and Mr. Trump described initial boat strikes as having killed Venezuelans and members of a Venezuelan gang.
But the strikes are causing larger turmoil in the region. President Gustavo Petro of Colombia has said two strikes, one on Sept. 15 and one on Oct. 3, had killed Colombians and accused the United States of murder. Relatives of a 26-year-old from Trinidad and Tobago said he and a neighbor were killed in an Oct. 14 attack.
Citizens of Colombia and yet another country, Ecuador, were survived an Oct. 16 strike on a semi-submersible vessel, which Mr. Trump later said killed two people. The Navy rescued two survivors and the administration repatriated them, with Mr. Trump saying both would be detained and prosecuted.
However, prosecutors in Ecuador declined to charge that man, and instead released him.
In the seventh strike, the military killed three men accused of smuggling drugs for a Marxist insurgent group in Colombia known as the E.L.N., which the State Department designated as terrorists in 1997.
Mark Rutte, the secretary general of NATO, said that he had total confidence in President Trump and brushed off questions about the White House’s reversal of plans for a meeting between Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
“He’s the only one who can get this done,” Rutte said of Trump, speaking to reporters after meeting with a bipartisan group of senators on Capitol Hill. Rutte said that his visit was to offer whatever support NATO could supply to back the president’s “clear vision on bringing this war to a durable and lasting end.”
Mark Rutte, the NATO secretary general, said his visit to Washington should not be interpreted as a signal of concern after a meeting between President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky ended with no progress toward a cease-fire in Ukraine. Rutte characterized the meeting with Zelensky as successful and said that he initiated a plan to meet with Trump after the hostage release and cease-fire was brokered in Gaza.
“I was texting with the president after an enormous success in Gaza,” Rutte recounted, “and we said, ‘Hey, let’s have a meeting in Washington to discuss how we now can deliver his vision of peace in Ukraine.’”
The head of NATO was set to meet with President Trump at the White House on Wednesday to discuss the war in Ukraine, a day after the American leader put off direct talks with his Russian counterpart.
Mark Rutte, the secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, will discuss the alliance’s support for Ukraine as well as White House efforts to promote a cease-fire, according to Allison Hart, the NATO spokeswoman.
Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, held the Senate floor overnight and was still speaking this morning, protesting what he decried as President Trump’s move toward authoritarianism. He began his extended floor speech at 6:23 p.m. Tuesday. “We are in the most perilous moment for our Constitution, the biggest threat to our republic, since the civil war,” he said. His office said he intended to speak as long as he is able “to bring attention to how Trump is ripping up the Constitution and eroding our democratic institutions.”
Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, last spring gave a 25-hour speech in protest of Trump policies, breaking the Senate’s record for longest speech that had been set by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, the southern segregationist, in 1957. In 2017, Merkley gave a 15-hour speech protesting Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
Vice President JD Vance said on Wednesday that a flurry of recent visits to Israel by top American officials was intended to oversee the fragile cease-fire deal in Gaza and not to “monitor a toddler,” as he and the Israeli prime minister insisted they were allies collaborating closely.
“We don’t want a vassal state, and that’s not what Israel is,” Mr. Vance said. “We don’t want a client state, and that’s not what Israel is. We want a partnership.”
A person drove a vehicle into a security gate outside the White House on Tuesday night, the Secret Service said. A man was arrested and there was no threat to President Trump, who was in the complex, according to the agency.
The person drove the vehicle into a barrier at the corner of 17th and E Streets at about 10:30 p.m. Eastern, the Secret Service said. The car was a 2010 Acura TSX with Maryland license plates, according to public records.
Prosecutors in Ecuador have decided not to charge a man who survived a U.S. military attack in the Caribbean Sea last week and have already released him, according to an Ecuadorean official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.
The outcome came despite the Trump administration’s stance that people suspected of smuggling drugs from South America are “terrorists” who pose such a severe danger to the United States that it is lawful for the American military to summarily kill them as if they were soldiers in a war. In announcing that he was repatriating the man, Mr. Trump declared on Saturday that he would face “detention and prosecution.”
No comments:
Post a Comment