Pentagon concedes Trump admin. doesn’t know who it’s killed in boat strikes

[Thiệu Ngô]

Who has the U.S. killed in recent boat strikes? It’s a problem that we don’t know. It’s an even bigger problem that the administration doesn’t know, either.

By Steve Benen

According to the Trump administration’s latest tally, the president has ordered 14 deadly military strikes targeting civilian boats in international waters over the last couple of months. If the administration’s statistics are accurate, at least 61 people have been killed in these operations.

Who are these people? It’s a problem that the public doesn’t know. It’s a bigger problem that apparently the Defense Department doesn’t know, either. The New York Times reported on the latest briefing members of Congress received on the boat strikes:

Representative Sara Jacobs, Democrat of California, said the Pentagon officials conceded that the administration did not know the identities of all of the individuals who were killed in the strikes. ‘They said that they do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessel to do the strikes,’ she said.

House Speaker Mike Johnson told Fox News this week that he’s seen “exquisite intelligence” about the military operations. It’s not exquisite enough, however, to include the names of the civilians the U.S. has killed through legally dubious missile strikes.

The Times’ report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC, added, “Ms. Jacobs said Pentagon officials said they needed to prove only that the targeted people were connected to designated terrorist organizations, even if the connection is ‘as much as three hops away from a known member’ of a designated terrorist organization.”

So if you have a connection to someone who has a connection to someone whom the Trump administration considers to be part of a terrorist organization, then you should steer clear of boats and international waters for a while to avoid getting killed.

Meanwhile, a growing number of congressional Democrats have spent the week ringing alarms about the fact that the administration has failed to share any legal arguments to justify the missions or intelligence related to the operations. As NBC News reported, lawmakers from both parties criticized the administration after Democrats were not invited to a briefing on Wednesday.

A day later, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters that the partisan briefing was a “new low” for the administration and “corrosive to our democracy.”

One might imagine that if the president’s policy were legal and had merit, there wouldn’t be any need for secrecy.