Pentagon Official: Trump Boat Strike Was a Criminal Attack on Civilians

Pentagon Official: Trump Boat Strike Was a Criminal Attack on
Civilians

A current DoD official and many military legal experts say the U.S.
attack on a boat in the Caribbean near Venezuela broke international
law.

Nick Turse, September 5 2025, 1:04 p.m.

<https://theintercept.com/2025/09/05/pentagon-official-trump-boat-strike-was-a-criminal-attack-on-civilians/>

The lethal strike on a boat in the Caribbean on Tuesday was a criminal
attack on civilians, according to a high-ranking Pentagon official who
spoke to the Intercept on the condition of anonymity. 

The Trump administration paved the way for the attack, he said, by
firing the top legal authorities of the Army and the Air Force earlier
this year.

“The U.S. is now directly targeting civilians. Drug traffickers may be
criminals but they aren’t combatants,” the Department of Defense
official 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 rubber stamp complicit in this crime.”

President Donald Trump claimed that the attack was aimed “against
positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists,” in a
TruthSocial post. He continued: “TDA is a designated Foreign Terrorist
Organization, operating under the control of [Venezuelan President]
Nicolas Maduro, responsible for mass murder, drug trafficking, sex
trafficking, and acts of violence and terror across the United States
and Western Hemisphere.” 

Trump accompanied the post with a video of a four-engine speedboat
cutting through the water with numerous people on board. An explosion
then destroys the boat. Trump said the attack killed 11 people. It was
unclear whether they were given a chance to surrender before the
United States killed them.

After days of silence, the White House issued a statement late
Thursday claiming the attack was lawful. White House deputy press
secretary Anna Kelly said it was “taken in defense of vital U.S.
national interests and in the collective self-defense of other nations
who have long suffered due to the narcotics trafficking and violent
cartel activities of such organizations.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth offered his own justification for the
strike the same day. “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, speaking on the condition of anonymity,
said that Hegseth’s justification – which one called “completely
unserious” – took shape after the attack. 

Experts said Hegseth’s rationale was flimsy, if not farcical. “Tren de
Aragua being designated as a foreign terrorist organization is a
purely domestic law enforcement designation. It offers no authority
for the military to use deadly force,” said Todd Huntley, who was an
active-duty judge advocate for more than 23 years, serving as a legal
advisor to Special Operations forces engaged in counterterrorism
missions around the world. “Under international law, there’s no way
this even gets close to being a legitimate use of force.”

Other legal experts have agreed with Huntley, now the director of the
National Security Law Program at the Georgetown University Law Center.
Members of Congress have echoed the assessment.

“Congress has not declared war on Venezuela, or Tren de Aragua, and
the mere designation of a group as a terrorist organization does not
give any President carte blanche to ignore Congress’s clear
Constitutional authority on matters of war and peace,” said Rep. Ilhan
Omar, D-Minn, in a statement. “There is no conceivable legal
justification for this use of force. Unless compelling evidence
emerges that they were acting in self-defense, that makes the strike a
clear violation of international law.”

Hegseth said the attack would be followed by others. “It won’t stop
with just this strike,” he told Fox News on Wednesday. “Anyone else
trafficking in those waters who we know is a designated
narco-terrorist will face the same fate.”

Diosdado Cabello, the Venezuelan Minister of Interior, Justice and
Peace called the Tuesday attack “an illegal massacre in international
waters” and said the United States had “violated international law.”

Under international law, there’s no way this even gets close to being
a legitimate use of force.

Brian Finucane, who worked for a decade in the Office of the Legal
Adviser at the Department of State, where he advised the U.S.
government on counterterrorism and other military matters, also noted
that designating a group as a foreign terrorist organization does not,
by itself, provide authority for the use of military force.

“Nonetheless, such FTO designations are widely and mistakenly
perceived as authorizing such action within the executive branch,” he
wrote in a legal analysis published this week. “Thus, designation of
Tren de Aragua and a number of other Latin American criminal entities
as FTOs in February foreshadowed this week’s attack in the Caribbean,
despite providing no actual legal authority for it.”

U.S. attacks around the world – from Libya to Somalia – during the war
on terror have been justified under strained interpretations of the
2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force. But despite the
Trump administration labeling cartels “narcoterrorists,” experts say
there is no plausible argument that the AUMF can apply to Tren de
Aragua.

“We knew exactly who was in that boat,” Hegseth told Fox News on
Wednesday. The Pentagon has frequently claimed to have killed
terrorists when it has instead killed innocents. A 2023 investigation
by The Intercept, for example, determined that an April 2018 drone
attack in Somalia killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians,
including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter
Mariam Shilow Muse. At the time, the military announced it had killed
“five terrorists” and that “no civilians were killed in this
airstrike.” 

Several experts and government officials speculated that the boat the
U.S. struck on Tuesday may not even have been smuggling drugs due to
what they said was an unusually large number of people on board the
vessel.

Experts and government officials were incredulous that a judge
advocate signed off on the strike, variously speculating that any
lawyer involved must have been ignored, pressured or simply
capitulated to the will of the president. 

Hegseth fired the Air Force’s and Army’s top judge advocates general
(JAGs) in February to avoid “roadblocks to orders that are given by a
commander in chief.” The next month he commissioned his personal
lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, as a Navy JAG and empowered him to help
overhaul the JAG corps, reportedly pursuing changes that would
encourage lawyers to approve more aggressive tactics and take a more
lenient approach to those who violate the law of war. Parlatore’s
prior claim to fame was successfully defending Eddie Gallagher, a Navy
SEAL accused of first-degree murder in the death of a captured ISIS
fighter as well as the attempted murder of civilians in Iraq.
Distinguished former JAGs and members of Congress have repeatedly
spoken out about Hegseth’s efforts to undermine the independence of
military legal counsel and subvert military justice.

In February, Trump designated Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, MS-13 in El
Salvador, and six cartels based in Mexico as foreign terrorist
organizations. More recently, the Trump administration added the
Venezuelan Cartel de los Soles, or Cartel of the Suns, to a list of
specially designated global terrorist groups, alleging that it is
headed by Maduro and high-ranking officials in his administration. In
July, Trump also signed a secret directive ordering the Pentagon to
use military force against some Latin American drug cartels he has
labeled terrorist organizations.

Venezuelan officials believe Trump may be renewing long-running
efforts, which failed during his first term, to topple Maduro’s
government. Maduro and several close allies were indicted in a New
York federal court in 2020, during the first Trump presidency, on
federal charges of narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine.
Last month, the U.S. doubled its reward for information leading to
Maduro’s arrest to $50 million.

Speaking on Fox News, Hegseth did not rule out regime change by the
U.S. in Venezuela. “That’s a presidential-level decision and we’re
prepared with every asset that the American military has,” he said.

Two armed Venezuelan F-16 fighter jets flew over the U.S. Navy
guided-missile destroyer Jason Dunham in the southern Caribbean Sea in
a show of force on Thursday.  The Pentagon called it a “highly
provocative move” that was “designed to interfere with our
counter-narco-terror operations” and issued a threat.

“The cartel running Venezuela is strongly advised not to pursue any
further effort to obstruct, deter or interfere with counternarcotics
and counterterrorism operations carried out by the U.S. military,”
read the statement released on X Thursday night.

Hegseth declined to say what type of weapons were used in the Tuesday
strike but referenced “assets that we have in the region” include a
“MEU” or Marine Expeditionary Unit “which holds 2,200 combat infantry
Marines and has plenty of its own organic assets.” He added: “So we’ve
got assets in the air, assets in the water, assets on ships, because
this is a deadly serious mission for us.”

The Intercept previously reported that U.S. Marines and sailors from
the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit recently deployed to southern
Puerto Rico. The 22nd MEU did not reply to repeated requests for
comment about whether they were involved in the Tuesday attack.

All told, around 4,500 U.S. personnel, seven U.S. warships and one
nuclear-powered attack submarine are either in the Caribbean or are
expected to arrive there soon. 

Read it all here:
<https://theintercept.com/2025/09/05/pentagon-official-trump-boat-strike-was-a-criminal-attack-on-civilians/>



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