The December 24 drone strike hit a dock that U.S. officials believe was used by members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang. No people were on the dock at the time of the attack and no one was killed, according to the official. The details of the strike, which were first reported by CNN, offer a clearer picture of an attack first disclosed by President Donald Trump in a series of vague statements over several days.

“Now we’re going after the land,” Trump said during a Christmas Eve phone call to troops aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford, which is deployed to the Caribbean Sea as part of the campaign against Maduro. “They have a big plant or a big facility where the ships come from,” Trump then told John Catsimatidis, a billionaire and Trump donor who owns New York’s WABC radio station, on Friday. “Two nights ago, we knocked that out. We hit them very hard.”

On Monday, Trump provided more detail, explaining that the United States had “hit” an “implementation area” in Venezuela. “There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs,” Trump told reporters at his residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. “That’s where they implement, and that is no longer around.”

Trump has publicly acknowledged he authorized CIA operations in Venezuela. Asked if the CIA had carried out the Christmas Eve attack, Trump said: “I don’t want to say that.”

The government official, who spoke with The Intercept on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified information, said they had been briefed on the CIA’s role in the attack.

A spokesperson writing from a CIA email and identified only as Ryan declined to comment on the Christmas Eve strike in an email to The Intercept.

“Days after it took place, the U.S. public is finally learning about a CIA airstrike on foreign soil for which there is no legal justification or congressional authorization. This is the lawless Trump administration in action,” Win Without War policy director Sam Ratner told The Intercept. “The only way forward is for Congress to stop Trump’s illegal strikes and hold those in the administration who have so flagrantly broken the law to account.”

The CIA regularly conducted drone strikes during the early years of the war on terror, beginning in Yemen in 2002 and in Pakistan in 2004. During the Obama administration, the U.S. military largely took over such attacks, and since then, the armed forces have conducted the overwhelming majority of drone strikes. Heavily armed MQ-9 Reaper drones have recently been spotted in the region as part of a ramp-up of U.S. forces.

The CIA also has a long tradition of fanning violence, fomenting regime change, and conducting acts of sabotage in Latin America. A 2023 analysis of the effects of CIA-sponsored regime change in five Latin American countries found the interventions caused “large declines in democracy scores, rule of law, freedom of speech, and civil liberties.”

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The United States has been attacking boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific since September, killing at least 107 civilians in 30 attacks. Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, have said the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

The Intercept was the first outlet to report that the U.S. military killed survivors of the September 2 boat attack in a follow-up strike. That attack, Trump wrote at the time, killed “Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists.” Most boat attacks since have targeted members or affiliates of unspecified “designated terrorist organizations,” but the CIA dock attack specifically aimed to weaken the Venezuelan gang, according to the U.S. official.

The Trump administration has made outlandish claims about Tren de Aragua throughout 2025. Earlier this year, the administration claimed the gang had invaded the United States, which it cited as justification to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to fast-track deportation of people the government says belong to the gang. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals eventually blocked the government from using the wartime law. “We conclude that the findings do not support that an invasion or a predatory incursion has occurred,” wrote Judge Leslie Southwick.

In September, Trump claimed that U.S. troops engaged in combat with members of Tren de Aragua on the streets of Washington, D.C., during the summer or early fall — an apparent fiction that the White House press office refuses to address.

While the Trump administration claims that Tren de Aragua is acting as “a de facto arm of” Maduro’s government, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence determined earlier this year that the “Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.”

The U.S. also maintains that Tren de Aragua is both engaging in irregular warfare against and in a non-international armed conflict with the United States. These are, however, mutually exclusive designations which cannot occur simultaneously.

The Trump administration also claims that another criminal organization, Cártel de los Soles, is “headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking Venezuelan individuals,” despite little evidence that such a group exists. Maduro denies that he heads a cartel.

The Trump administration’s current campaign against Maduro is an extension of long-running efforts to topple the Venezuelan president which failed during Trump’s first term. Maduro and close allies were indicted in a New York federal court in 2020 on federal charges of narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine. Earlier this year, the U.S. doubled its reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest to $50 million.

Trump told Politico this month that Maduro’s “days are numbered.” When asked if he might order an invasion of Venezuela, Trump replied, “I wouldn’t say that one way or the other.”

Experts say that regime change in Venezuela would be complex and problematic. A 2023 study by the RAND Corporation warned that “overt military intervention in Venezuela is likely to become messy very quickly and is likely to become protracted.”

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The U.S. intervened to oust governments in Latin America a total of at least 41 times — about once every 28 months from 1898 to 1994 — including 17 cases of direct intervention by the U.S. armed forces, intelligence agencies, or locals employed by U.S. government agencies, according to ReVista, the Harvard Review of Latin America. Washington attempted at least 18 covert regime changes in the region during the Cold War alone, Foreign Affairs noted earlier this year, which included deposing nine governments that fell to military rulers in the 1960s, about one every 13 months.

In 1954, the U.S. helped overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected government, ushering in a military junta that jailed political opponents, igniting an almost two-decade long civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. In 1973, a U.S.-backed coup in Chile, led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, ousted and led to the death of Salvador Allende, that country’s democratically elected president. A brutal, 17-year dictatorship marked by state torture, enforced disappearances, and killing followed, leaving a toll of more than 40,000 victims. In 1961, the U.S. also backed the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and fomented a coup in the Dominican Republic, which sparked years of unrest and U.S. election meddling. This, in turn, led to a 1965 invasion of the island nation by U.S. Marines. The U.S. also supported coups in Brazil in 1964, Bolivia in 1971, and funded the Contra rebels in Nicaragua throughout the 1980s. None of these interventions produced a stable, pro-American democracy and often, instead, installed authoritarian regimes that set off cycles of violence.

A 2025 study of all U.S.-led coups d’état and regime change operations from 1893 to 2011 found that that “while short-term strategic objectives were occasionally achieved, the majority of interventions resulted in regional instability, anti-American sentiment, and failed democratic transitions.” Earlier investigations have shown that foreign regime change schemes either fail to reduce or actually increase the likelihood of military disputes between interveners and targets; result in more human rights violations and declines in democracy; lead to a greater likelihood of civil war; and increase the chances of igniting an international armed conflict.

Even regime-change schemes that appeared successful at the time often sets off long-term blowback. The 1953 ouster of Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh fueled anti-American sentiment that contributed to the 1979 revolution and set in motion decades of turmoil and conflict. America’s “mission accomplished” moment, just after the 2003 invasion of Iraq to remove autocrat Saddam Hussein from power devolved into a endless spiral of violence and suffering. That conflict — which eventually spilled into neighboring Syria — has killed more than half a million people directly, and three or four times that number due to indirect causes such as displacement, a lack of potable water, health care, and preventable diseases, according to calculations by Brown University’s Costs of War Project. The costs to U.S. taxpayers are expected to exceed $2.89 trillion by 2050.

The post CIA Was Behind Venezuela Drone Strike, Source Says appeared first on The Intercept.

“They have a big plant or a big facility where the ships come from,” Trump told John Catsimatidis, a billionaire and Trump donor who owns New York’s WABC radio station, on Friday, seeming to reference a facility involved in the drug trade or boat building. “Two nights ago, we knocked that out. We hit them very hard.”

Trump initially did not provide further details about the supposed attack on the “big plant,” which if true would be the first known U.S. attack on Venezuelan soil.

On Monday, Trump said that the United States had “hit” an “implementation area” in Venezuela. “There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago, Florida, residence. “That’s where they implement, and that is no longer around.”

It was not clear what target was hit nor which U.S. government agencies were involved. Asked if the CIA had carried out the attack, Trump said: “I don’t want to say that. I know exactly who it was but I don’t want to say who it was.”

Trump has publicly acknowledged he authorized CIA operations in Venezuela.

“We don’t have any guidance for you,” CIA spokesperson Lauren Camp told The Intercept.

During a Christmas Eve phone call to troops aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford, which is deployed to the Caribbean Sea as part of the campaign against Maduro, Trump seemed to reference the strike. “I’m tremendously grateful for the work that you’re doing to stop drug trafficking in our region,” he said. “Now we’re going after the land. The land is actually easier.”

One U.S. official who spoke with The Intercept on the condition of anonymity confirmed that the target was a “facility,” but would not disclose its location or if it was actually attacked by the U.S., much less destroyed. The official cast some doubt on Trump’s initial public statement. “That announcement was misleading,” said the official without providing any clarification.

There has been no public report of an attack from the Venezuelan government.

The Pentagon did not reply to repeated requests for comment on the strike. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt did not respond to a request for comment on the U.S. official’s contention that Trump’s claim was “misleading.”

If a strike did occur on December 24, it was the night before Trump attacked Nigeria. The president will have made war in Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, and the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean in 2025, despite claiming to be a “peacemaker.”

The United States has been attacking boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific since September. U.S. forces have conducted almost 30 attacks that have killed more than 100 civilians.

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Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies arrested suspected drug smugglers.

During the summer, Trump signed a secret directive ordering the Pentagon to use military force against certain Latin American drug cartels. In August, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth signed an execute order, or EXORD, directing Special Operations forces to sink suspected drug smuggling boats, destroy their cargo, and kill their crews, according to government officials.

“Every time I knock out a boat, we save 25,000 American lives,” Trump claimed to Catsimatidis. The statement is untrue. Between May 2024 and April 2025, some 77,000 people died in the U.S. from drug overdoses. If Trump’s claim were accurate, the 30 attacks would have saved almost 10 times the number of lives lost to overdoses in the U.S. in a single year.

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles recently indicated that the boat strikes are specifically aimed at toppling Maduro. “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” Wiles said.

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Upon entering office a second time, Trump renewed 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 on federal charges of narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine. Earlier this year, the U.S. doubled its reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest to $50 million. (Meanwhile, Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the right-wing former president of Honduras who had been convicted of drug trafficking.)

Trump told Politico that Maduro’s “days are numbered.” When asked if he might order an invasion of Venezuela, Trump replied, “I wouldn’t say that one way or the other.”

Since the summer, the Pentagon has built up a force of more than 15,000 troops in the Caribbean and the largest naval flotilla in the region since the Cold War. That contingent now includes 5,000 sailors aboard the Ford, the Navy’s newest and most powerful aircraft carrier, which has more than 75 attack, surveillance, and support aircraft.

Military contracting documents revealed by The Intercept show that the War Department has plans to feed a massive military presence in the Caribbean until almost to the end of Trump’s term in office — suggesting the recent influx of American troops to the region won’t end anytime soon.

In recent weeks, the War Department had specifically surged into the region air assets necessary for a sustained campaign of combat operations over hostile territory including F-35 fighters, EA-18G Growler electronic attack jets, KC-135 aerial refuelers, KC-46 tankers, HC-130J combat search and rescue planes, and HH-60W search and rescue helicopters.

“Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before,” Trump confusingly announced on his Truth Social platform earlier this month, without explaining how a naval armada can surround a country that is not an island. “I am ordering A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela.” The White House did not respond to a request for clarification.

The White House has ordered U.S. military forces to focus almost exclusively on enforcing a “quarantine” of Venezuelan oil for at least the next two months, a U.S. official told Reuters last week.

One former U.S. official with continued ties to the defense establishment speculated that the U.S. might be involved in a sabotage campaign in Venezuela, referencing past U.S. efforts in Latin America, specifically plans and operations to overthrow Fidel Castro before and after the CIA’s disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. He specifically mentioned the covert campaign of bombing Cuban sugar mills and burning cane fields, among other acts of sabotage.

The full extent of U.S. covert warfare in Cuba may never be known, but in the wake of the Bay of Pigs debacle, the Pentagon also began preparing top-secret plans. In the spring of 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff offered up a document titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba.” The top-secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to conduct false-flag operations to justify a U.S. invasion. These proposals included staging assassinations of Cubans living in the U.S.; developing a fake “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area … and even in Washington”; a plot to “sink a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated)”; faking a Cuban air attack on a civilian jetliner filled with “college students”; and even staging a modern “Remember the Maine” incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters — and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage.

Update: December 29, 2025, 2:59 p.m. ET
This article was updated to include more recent comments from President Donald Trump, and a response from a CIA spokesperson.

The post Did Trump Just Confess to Attacking Venezuela? appeared first on The Intercept.

The review of Kelly’s comments has since blossomed into a full-scale inquiry. “Retired Captain Kelly is currently under investigation for serious allegations of misconduct,” a War Department spokesperson told me.

Kelly issued a statement after Hegseth’s office announced it was escalating its case. “It wasn’t enough for Donald Trump to say I should be hanged, which prompted death threats against me and my family. It wasn’t enough for Pete Hegseth to announce a sham investigation on social media. Now they are threatening everything I fought for and served for over 25 years in the U.S. Navy, all because I repeated something every service member is taught,” said Kelly. “It should send a shiver down the spine of every patriotic American that this President and Secretary of Defense would so corruptly abuse their power to come after me or anyone this way.”

That Hegseth is targeting a sitting senator is all but unheard of. But what most surprised me was his apparent willingness to recall a former member of the military for punishment. I was shocked because, for two decades, the Pentagon has failed to respond to questions about the potential recall of veterans accused of heinous illegality by Army investigators.

In the mid-2000s, I provided the Pentagon with the names of dozens of former service members implicated in crimes against civilians and prisoners during the Vietnam War: massacres, murders, assaults, and other atrocities. The Defense Department never recalled any to active duty. Years later, a defense official laughed when I asked if anyone even looked at the spreadsheet of names that I provided. In the wake of Hegseth’s threats against Kelly, I again asked his office if they want that list.

While working for the Los Angeles Times, I helped expose 320 atrocities that were substantiated by Army investigators, including seven mass killings from the 1960s and 1970s, in which at least 137 civilians died. This tally does not include the 1968 My Lai massacre during which U.S. troops slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese civilians. The records chronicled 78 other attacks on noncombatants in which at least 57 were killed, 56 wounded, and 15 sexually assaulted; and 141 instances in which U.S. troops tortured civilian detainees or prisoners of war.

Murder, torture, rape, abuse, forced displacement, home burnings, specious arrests, and imprisonment without due process were a daily fact of life throughout the years of the American war in Vietnam. But the great majority of atrocities by U.S. troops never came to light — and almost never resulted in criminal investigations, much less courts-martial. These records — compiled in the early 1970s by a secret Pentagon task force known as the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group — represent some of the exceedingly rare instances that resulted in official inquiries.

Army criminal investigators determined that evidence against more than 200 soldiers accused of harming Vietnamese civilians or prisoners was strong enough to warrant charges, according to the records. These “founded” cases were referred to the soldiers’ superior officers for action. Ultimately, 57 of them were court-martialed, and just 23 were convicted.

Fourteen soldiers received prison sentences ranging from six months to 20 years, but most won significant reductions on appeal. The stiffest sentence went to a military intelligence interrogator convicted of committing indecent acts against a 13-year-old girl held in detention. He served seven months of a 20-year term, according to the files. Many substantiated cases were closed with a letter of reprimand, a fine, or, in more than half the cases, no action at all.

In the early 2000s, many veterans who had escaped justice were still alive, including members of Company B of the 1st Battalion, 35th Infantry, 4th Infantry Division. That unit committed a litany of atrocities, culminating in a massacre in a tiny hamlet in South Vietnam.

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On February 8, 1968, a medic, Jamie Henry, sat down to rest in a Vietnamese home, where he was joined by a radioman. On the radio, he heard 3rd Platoon leader Lt. Johnny Mack Carter report to Capt. Donald Reh that he had rounded up 19 civilians. Carter wanted to know what should be done with them. As Henry later told an army investigator: “The Captain asked him if he remembered the Op Order [Operation Order] that had come down from higher [command] that morning which was to kill anything that moves. The Captain repeated the order. He said that higher said to kill anything that moves.”

Hoping to intervene, Henry headed for Reh’s position. As he neared it, though, the young medic saw members of the unit drag a naked teenage girl out of a house and throw her into the throng of civilians, who had been gathered together in a group. Then, Henry said, four or five men around the civilians “opened fire and shot them. There was a lot of flesh and blood going around because the velocity of an M-16 at that close range does a lot of damage.”

Henry repeatedly reported the massacre, at peril to himself, and spent years attempting to expose the atrocities. Army investigators looked into the allegations for more than three years before closing the case and burying the files. They determined that evidence supported murder charges in five incidents against nine “subjects,” including Carter. Investigators concluded that there was not enough evidence to charge Reh with murder, because of conflicting accounts “as to the actual language” he used in giving the orders. But Reh could be charged with dereliction of duty for failing to investigate the killings, the report said. The military did not court-martial any members of the unit — either in the 1970s or the 2000s. Some are still alive today and could, theoretically, face some modicum of justice.

Hegseth has been on the hot seat since major media outlets picked up on The Intercept’s reporting of a double-tap strike that executed survivors of an attack on a supposed drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean in September. Military legal experts, lawmakers, and confidential sources within the government who spoke with The Intercept say Hegseth’s actions could result in the entire chain of command being investigated for a war crime or outright murder.

Hegseth said Kelly’s “conduct brings discredit upon the armed forces and will be addressed appropriately.” I asked Hegseth’s office if the crimes detailed in the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group’s files also brought “discredit upon the armed forces.” A spokesperson acknowledged that and other questions but offered no answers.

“Nick, we received your earlier message and haven’t forgotten about you,” she said last month. “Our response time is going to be delayed due to the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.” That response has, weeks later, still yet to arrive.

Hegseth has previously derided “academic rules of engagement which have been tying the hands of our warfighters for too long,” and, during President Donald Trump’s first term — before he became the Pentagon chief — successfully lobbied for pardons on behalf of soldiers convicted of crimes against noncombatants.

“This just shows their total distain for the rule of law,” Todd Huntley, who was an active-duty judge advocate for more than 23 years, serving as a legal adviser to Special Operations forces, said of Hegseth and Trump. “They view the law as a political tool to support their positions and help them get what they want.”

Hegseth took his post focusing on lethality at all costs, while gutting programs designed to protect civilians and firing the Air Force’s and Army’s top judge advocates general, or JAGs, in February to avoid “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.” Military operations under Hegseth have since killed civilians from Yemen to the Caribbean Sea.

The Former JAGs Working Group — an organization made up of former and retired military judge advocates which was founded in February — issued a statement condemning Hegseth’s order and the execution of it “to constitute war crimes, murder, or both.” The group also called out the war secretary for targeting Kelly. “The administration’s retaliation against Senator Kelly violates military law. We are confident the unlawful influence reflected in the press reports will ultimately disqualify all convening authorities except possibly the president himself from actually referring any case to a court-martial,” they wrote in a statement provided to The Intercept.

Huntley said the War Department wasn’t following its typical investigative process in its case against Kelly.

“There was no way that was unlawful. It doesn’t even come close to undermining good order and discipline of the military,” said Huntley. “Under normal circumstances, an investigating officer would be appointed. They’d look into it and then the report would come back, it would be reviewed by a JAG, and it would say there was nothing unlawful, no charges warranted. But these aren’t normal times.”

Huntley also noted that Kelly’s video was likely to sow confusion among low-ranking enlisted personnel and officers concerning determinations about whether an order is lawful.

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Huntley clarified that the Pentagon doesn’t have to bring Kelly back to active duty to charge him under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. “All that’s required is that you get permission of the service secretary. In this case, I’m guessing that Hegseth himself could probably give permission to do that,” he explained. When I asked why the War Department would have announced that it might recall Kelly despite not needing to do so, Huntley had a simple assessment: “Because they don’t know what the law is.”

Hegseth’s office and Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson failed to reply to repeated questions about the Vietnam-era personnel who might still be sanctioned for their crimes against Vietnamese civilians, as well as questions about the jeopardy troops today might be in for following Hegseth’s orders.

A Pentagon spokesperson also seemed to foreclose the release of additional information concerning the War Department’s persecution of Kelly. “Further official comments will be limited to preserve the integrity of the proceedings,” she said.

The post My Quest to Make the Pentagon Care About the Crimes It Covered Up appeared first on The Intercept.

“Tonight, at my direction as Commander in Chief, the United States launched a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria, who have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians, at levels not seen for many years, and even Centuries!” Trump wrote Thursday on Truth Social.

Africa Command conducted the strikes in northwest Nigeria’s Sokoto State, according to the War Department. “The command’s initial assessment is that multiple ISIS terrorists were killed in the ISIS camps,” a Pentagon spokesperson told The Intercept.

Trump has spent the first year of his second term touting his efforts to end conflicts and claiming to be a “peacemaker” even as he has recently made war in Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean in 2025.

“I have previously warned these Terrorists that if they did not stop the slaughtering of Christians, there would be hell to pay, and tonight, there was,” wrote Trump. “The Department of War executed numerous perfect strikes, as only the United States is capable of doing.”

Over two terms, the Trump administration has repeatedly killed noncombatants, from Somalia to Yemen. Most recently, the Trump administration has been killing civilians in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean. The military has carried out 29 known attacks at sea since September, killing at least 105 civilians whom it claims are narco-terrorists.

The War Department did not reply to questions about the numbers of enemy forces and civilians killed in the Christmas attack in Nigeria. “Specific details about the operation will not be released in order to ensure operational security,” said the Pentagon spokesperson.

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In November, Trump ordered the Defense Department to prepare for a military intervention in Nigeria to protect Christians from attack by Islamic militants. War Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed Thursday’s strikes in a post on social media, writing that the U.S. was “Grateful for Nigerian government support & cooperation.”

“U.S. Africa Command is working with Nigerian and regional partners to increase counterterrorism cooperation efforts related to on-going violence and threats against innocent lives,” said Gen. Dagvin Anderson, the chief of U.S. Africa Command.

The U.S. military has a long relationship with Nigeria and has played a role in airstrikes that have killed civilians. Between 2000 and 2022, the U.S. provided, facilitated, or approved more than $2 billion in security aid — including weapons and equipment sales — to Nigeria, according to a report by Brown University’s Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies and the Center for International Policy’s Security Assistance Monitor, a Washington think tank. This includes the delivery of 12 Super Tucano warplanes as part of a $593 million package, approved by the State Department in 2017, that also included bombs and rockets.

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Over that same period, hundreds of Nigerian airstrikes killed thousands of Nigerians. A 2017 attack on a displaced persons camp in Rann, Nigeria, killed more than 160 civilians, many of them children. A subsequent Intercept investigation revealed that the attack was referred to as an instance of “U.S.-Nigerian operations” in a formerly secret U.S. military document.

The post War on Christmas: Trump Announces Wave of Airstrikes Targeting ISIS Militants in Nigeria appeared first on The Intercept.

Minutes ticked by. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. As the men bobbed along, drifting with the current, for some 45 minutes, Adm. Frank Bradley — then the head of Joint Special Operations Command — sought guidance from his top legal adviser. At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on September 2, he turned to Col. Cara Hamaguchi, the staff judge advocate at the secretive JSOC, The Intercept has learned.

Could the U.S. military legally attack them again?

How exactly she responded is not known. But Bradley, according to a lawmaker who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a classified briefing, said that the JSOC staff judge advocate deemed a follow-up strike lawful. In the briefing, Bradley said no one in the room voiced objections before the survivors were killed, according to the lawmaker.

Five people familiar with briefings given by Bradley, including the lawmaker who viewed the video, said that, logically, the survivors must have been waving at the U.S. aircraft flying above them. All interpreted the actions of the men as signaling for help, rescue, or surrender.

“Obviously, we don’t know what they were saying or thinking,” one of the sources said, “but any reasonable person would assume that they saw the aircraft and were signaling either: don’t shoot or help us.”

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Raising both hands is a universal sign of surrender for isolated members of armed forces. Under international law, those who surrender — like those who are shipwrecked – are considered hors de combat, the French term for those out of combat, and may not be attacked. The Pentagon’s Law of War Manual is explicit in this regard. “Persons who have been incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack,” reads the guide.

But that’s not how Bradley — now the chief of Special Operations Command, or SOCOM — saw it. Bradley declined to comment to The Intercept, but a U.S. official familiar with his thinking said he did not perceive their waving to be a “two-arm surrender.”

Some 45 minutes after the men had been plunged into the water, a second missile screamed down from the sky on Bradley’s order. Two more missiles followed in rapid succession, sinking the remnants of the boat.

Nothing remained of the men.

Special Operations Command refused to make Hamaguchi available for an interview and declined to answer questions about Hamaguchi’s legal guidance or Bradley’s statements to the member of Congress.

“We are not going to comment on what Admiral Bradley told law makers in a classified hearing. He did inform them that during the strike he sought advice from his lawyer and then made a decision,” Col. Allie Weiskopf, the director of public affairs at Special Operations Command, told The Intercept. Multiple military officials attempted to dissuade The Intercept from naming Hamaguchi in this article, citing safety concerns.

Four former judge advocates — better known in the military as JAGs, as they are lawyers within the judge advocate general’s corps — blasted the supposed defense that the survivors’ waving hands did not constitute a two-arm surrender. Two used the word “ridiculous” to describe it.

“Waving is a way to attract attention. There was no need to kill them,” said Eugene Fidell, who served as a judge advocate in the Coast Guard and is now a senior research scholar at Yale Law School focused on military justice. “We don’t kill people who are doing this. We should have saved them. None of it makes any sense.”

The lawmaker who watched the video footage of the attack expressed skepticism about the U.S. official’s claim. “My impression is that these were two shipwrecked individuals,” they said after viewing the video. “I do think at least one of them used two arms.”

The Intercept was the first outlet to report that the U.S. military killed survivors of the September 2 boat strike in a follow-up attack. Since then, questions have swirled around the exact roles of President Donald Trump, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and Bradley in the operation, and how they arrived at the conclusion that their monthslong campaign of killings in the Caribbean and Pacific is lawful. Military and legal experts have said the strikes are tantamount to murder. But until now, less attention has been paid to the legal guidance Bradley sought.

The legal underpinnings for the campaign of extrajudicial killings that have so far taken the lives of at least 105 civilians began taking shape over the summer, when Trump signed a secret directive ordering the Pentagon to use military force against certain Latin American drug cartels.

A classified opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel claims that narcotics on supposed drug boats are lawful military targets because their cargo generates revenue for cartels whom the Trump administration claims are in a “non-international armed conflict” with the United States. Government officials told The Intercept that the memo was not actually signed by Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser until days after the September 2 attacks. Attached to that secret memo is a similarly secret list of designated terrorist organizations, or DTOs, and an annex containing pertinent findings from the U.S. intelligence community.

In August, Hegseth, the “target engagement authority,” signed an execute order, or EXORD, directing Special Operations forces to sink suspected drug smuggling boats, destroy their cargo, and kill their crews, according to government officials. Pentagon briefers have told U.S. officials that they do not need to positively identify all of those killed in strikes and only need to show a connection to a DTO or affiliate. Those sources say the affiliate label is “quite broad” and some of those killed may have only a tenuous link to a drug smuggling cartel.

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Hegseth gave the go-ahead order to Bradley, who presided over the September 2 mission from the JSOC joint operations center at Fort Bragg, according to four government sources. Present with him was Hamaguchi and other JSOC personnel, including his top deputies, and specialists in intelligence, targeting, and munitions. “I wish everybody could be in the room watching our professionals … Adm. Mitch Bradley and others at JSOC. … The deliberative process, the detail, the rigorous, the intel, the legal … that make sure that every one of those drug boats is tied to a designated terrorist organization,” said Hegseth later.

Before the initial strike, Bradley consulted with Hamaguchi, then gave the order to elite SEAL Team 6 operators to attack the four-engine speedboat, according to government sources. Some 45 minutes after that strike, Bradley issued the order for the follow-up attacks after again consulting with Hamaguchi.

Hamaguchi has been present in the JSOC war room for all the boat strikes, unless she delegated to a deputy, according to a SOCOM official. Most of the campaign has been conducted since Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga took command of JSOC in September.

During a recent briefing, Bradley explained that the JSOC staff judge advocate specifically said that the second strike on September 2 was lawful, according to the lawmaker. Bradley said that after initial debate, there was no dissent in the room before the follow-up strike that killed the survivors, that member of Congress told The Intercept.

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Trump posted edited footage of that strike on his Truth Social account on September 2. He wrote that the attack was conducted “on my Orders.” After the killings sparked a congressional firestorm, however, Trump and Hegseth distanced themselves from the attack on the survivors. “I wouldn’t have wanted that. Not a second strike,” said the president. The war secretary claimed that he “did not personally see survivors” amid the fire and smoke and had left the room before the second attack was ordered.

Bradley apparently has no reservations about having ordered the attacks. “He’s happy to take responsibility for those decisions,” a SOCOM official told The Intercept.

Hamaguchi, a former communications officer who served in the Army for nine years before she became a judge advocate, is well known within the small group of lawyers who advise special operations units. She was publicly identified as JSOC’s staff judge advocate in materials published by the U.S. Naval War College earlier this year.

Hamaguchi boasts an impeccable reputation according to seven former colleagues, who praised her as “sharp,” “smart,” and “a good person and attorney.” Only two years into her career as an attorney and days after being promoted to major, Hamaguchi found herself providing legal advice concerning a 16-count homicide in Afghanistan. Back in the U.S., she acted as a prosecutor at the sentencing proceedings of Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales. A military jury handed Bales the stiffest sentence possible for his massacre: life in prison without parole.

Most former colleagues of Hamaguchi who spoke with The Intercept expressed surprise or dismay at the prospect of her playing a role in the boat strikes.

It’s possible Hamaguchi voiced some objection or wrote a memorandum delineating her concerns about the September 2 attacks or subsequent strikes. “Without hearing directly from the JAG, it’s impossible to know to a certainty what she said or did,” said Todd Huntley, a former Navy judge advocate who served as a legal adviser on Joint Special Operations task forces conducting drone strikes in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and called Hamaguchi “fantastic, very smart, experienced and professional.”

JAGs are expected to speak up when they have legal concerns. But Huntley said that if someone repeatedly disputed the legal underpinnings of a monthslong campaign, they would not remain in that post long. “When the relationship between a commander and his JAG has broken down to the point where the commander no longer trusts or listens to the JAG’s advice, that JAG would typically be reassigned to a different unit or role within the command. Such a situation might arise if the JAG is seen as always saying ‘no’ to the commander,” he told The Intercept.

Former colleagues also told The Intercept that Hamaguchi is scheduled to retire when her JSOC tour ends in 2026 — but stressed her departure was not premature.

“I would be completely shocked if she thought these strikes were lawful,” said one former Defense Department colleague. “I’m sure she knows this is illegal. She knows that you can’t summarily execute criminal suspects in peacetime and can’t summarily execute criminal suspects during war. Any JAG worth their salt knows this.”

That colleague and four others said specifically that they were saddened to hear Hamaguchi was involved in attacks that all said were extrajudicial killings. Another former colleague said Hamaguchi had previously exhibited a “strong moral compass.” That person added: “I can’t tell you how sad this makes me.”

Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., the chair of the House Armed Services Committee, apparently called for a briefing by the judge advocate present with Bradley during the strike. “I want the lawyer there, too,” Rogers said earlier this month. Rogers’s office did not respond to questions by The Intercept about whether a briefing with Hamaguchi ever occurred.

Six other lawmakers or congressional staff said they were unaware of any briefings by Hamaguchi. Most did not know her by name.

Lawmakers are growing frustrated with what they describe as the War Department’s consistent failure to disclose key information about the attacks. “For months, in multiple briefings, the Department omitted the fact that there were two survivors in the initial September 2^nd strike,” said Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, last week. “We learned the circumstances of the strike from press reports.”

Reed called for the committee to be provided EXORDs; unedited video of all boat strikes; and all audio, transcripts, and chat logs of communications between commanders, aircraft, and others involved in the September 2 strike, among other pertinent information.

Since the execution of the men on September 2, the U.S. has appeared to refrain from killing survivors of subsequent boat strikes. Following an October 16 attack on a semisubmersible in the Caribbean Sea that killed two civilians, two other men were rescued by the U.S. and quickly repatriated to Colombia and Ecuador, respectively. Following three attacks on October 27 that killed 15 people aboard four separate boats, a survivor of a strike was spotted clinging to wreckage, and the U.S. alerted the Mexican Navy. Search teams did not find the man, and he is presumed dead.

“This tells you all you need to know,” said one government official briefed on the strikes. “They didn’t kill the later survivors because they know it was wrong. The first strike was obviously bad. They know it was not just immoral, it was illegal.”

The post U.S. Military Killed Boat Strike Survivors for Not Surrendering Correctly appeared first on The Intercept.

Gen. Gregory Guillot of U.S. Northern Command, a four-star general who takes his orders from War Secretary Pete Hegseth, made clear his position in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week. When asked about his willingness to attack DTOs within U.S. borders by Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., he replied: “If I had questions, I would elevate that to the chairman and the secretary. … And if I had no concerns and I was confident in the lawful order, I would definitely execute that order.”

Guillot’s openness about the potential for unprecedented military action within U.S. borders comes as the White House, Pentagon, and Justice Department continue to refuse to rule out summary executions of Americans on Trump’s secret enemies list, after weeks of requests for clarifications from The Intercept.

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The military has carried out 25 known attacks in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September, killing at least 95 civilians whom it claims are narco-terrorists affiliated with DTOs. The most recent strikes, three on Monday in the Pacific Ocean against “vessels operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations,” killed a total of eight people, according to U.S. Southern Command.

The questionable legal justification for these attacks makes Guillot’s response all the more concerning, said Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Brennan Center’s liberty and national security program.

“The problem with General Guillot’s answer is that it elides the concerns that have already been raised about the lawfulness of conducting military attacks against drug trafficking operations,” Goitein told The Intercept.

When The Intercept asked if Guillot would be willing to refuse orders if, after elevating his concerns to the chair and the secretary, he was still not confident in the legality of the orders, Teresa C. Meadows, the U.S. Northern Command Media and Plans chief, replied: “NORTHCOM does not designate terrorist organizations.”

“That is one of the concerns with the administration asserting that the President essentially has a license to kill outside the law based on his own say so,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is a specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war. “That prerogative might be wielded elsewhere — including inside the United States.”

“After the military has conducted 95 summary executions of civilians in the Caribbean at the direction of Trump and Hegseth, it is not sufficient anymore for commanders to say to lawmakers that they will run any legal concerns up the chain — at the top of which are those who would be giving the order,” said Sarah Harrison, who previously served as associate general counsel at the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel, International Affairs. “Rather, to make clear they will uphold the rule of law, they should be definitive in saying that they will disobey patently unlawful orders, which include the scenario Senator Reed laid out for Gen. Guillot.”

Trump told reporters last week that terrestrial strikes are imminent. “Now we’re starting by land, and by land is a lot easier, and that’s going to start happening,” he said. “It’s land strikes on horrible people.”

When asked if the land strikes would be limited to the administration’s regime-change project for Venezuela, Trump offered a much broader threat. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be in Venezuela,” he said. The White House did not respond to a request for clarification if such attacks would occur in the United States.

Guillot attended an address in September by Trump and Hegseth at which the president told the NORTHCOM chief and hundreds of other generals and admirals that the United States was involved in a “war from within” and that a “major part” in it would be played by “some of the people in this room.” Guillot pleaded ignorance when questioned about who he might be ordered to attack. “I do not have any indications of an enemy within,” he said last week.

NORTHCOM, which provides command and control of “homeland defense” and manages military activity in North America, has overseen troop deployments in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon, that federal judges have ruled were illegal because Trump administration claims of rampant civil unrest were found to be overblown or fictional. Trump has even falsely claimed, for example, that members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua have engaged in hand-to-hand combat with U.S. troops on the streets of D.C. The White House has, for weeks, failed to address this falsehood.

“The founders designed our government to be a system of checks and balances. Defendants, however, make clear that the only check they want is a blank one,” U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer wrote in a 35-page opinion last week, ordering Trump to end the Los Angeles troop deployment. “It defies the record — and common sense — to conclude that risks stemming from protests — in August, October, or even present day — could not have been sufficiently managed without resorting to the National Guard.”

“Within the context of the Federal Protection Mission, forces under the command and control of NORTHCOM protect federal property and federal personnel as they enforce federal law,” said Meadows, despite the statement having little to do with questions posed by The Intercept.

The Pentagon refused to say if DTOs are operating in America, directing The Intercept to the White House and Justice Department.

The Justice Department pointed The Intercept to comments made on Monday by Bill Essayli, who leads the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, as he announced the weekend arrests of members of what he called “a far-left, anti-government, domestic terror cell,” known as the Turtle Island Liberation Front, for allegedly planning a series of bomb attacks across Southern California on New Year’s Eve.

“This investigation was initiated in part due to the September 2025 executive order signed by President Trump to root out left-wing domestic terror organizations in our country, such as Antifa and other radical groups,” he explained, referencing National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, under which Trump instructed his administration to target U.S. progressive groups and their donors as well as political activists who profess undefined anti-American, anti-fascist, or anti-Christian sentiments.

NSPM-7 also directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to compile a list “of any such groups or entities” to be designated as “domestic terrorist organization[s]” and Bondi has ordered the FBI to “compile a list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism,” according to a December 4 Justice Department memo, “Implementing National Security Presidential Memorandum-7: Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” which the Justice Department shared with The Intercept. Essayli also referenced that memo, stating that it mobilized “federal law enforcement to prioritize and counter domestic terrorism and political violence investigations.” He added, “As a result of those directives, we built this case.”

Justice Department spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre did not respond to repeated requests for clarification about whether the Turtle Island Liberation Front and a supposed more militant faction known as the Order of the Black Lotus were on either the domestic or designated terrorist lists.

Senior White House adviser Stephen Miller issued an ominous pronouncement about the administration’s crackdown on dissent in America on Monday. “Following the issuance of NSPM-7 vast government resources have been unleashed to find and dismantle the violent fifth column of domestic terrorists clandestinely operating inside the United States,” he wrote on X.

The post U.S. Military Willing to Attack “Designated Terrorist Organizations” Within America, General Says appeared first on The Intercept.

Are Americans that the federal government deems to be members of domestic terrorist organizations subject to extrajudicial killings like those it claims are members of designated terrorist organizations? The White House, Justice Department, and Department of War have, for more than a month, failed to answer this question.

Lawmakers and other government officials tell The Intercept that the pregnant silence by the Trump administration has become especially worrisome as the death toll mounts from attacks on alleged members of “designated terrorist organizations” in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, and as Trump himself makes ever more unhinged threats to imprison or execute his political adversaries.

In early September, The Intercept revealed that elite Special Operators killed the shipwrecked victims of a September 2 attack on a suspected drug smuggling boat. They have since struck more than 20 other vessels. The administration insists the attacks are permitted because the U.S. is engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations” it refuses to name. Experts and lawmakers say these killings are outright murders — and that Trump could conceivably use similar lethal force inside the United States.

“The Trump Administration is trying to justify blowing small boats out of the water by arbitrarily calling them ‘designated terrorist organizations’ — a label not grounded in U.S. statute nor international law, but in solely what Trump says,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., told The Intercept. “If Trump is using this justification to use military force on any individuals he chooses — without verified evidence or legal authorization — what’s stopping him from designating anyone within our own borders in a similar fashion and conducting lethal, militarized attacks against them? This illegal and dangerous misuse of lethal force should worry all Americans, and it can’t be accepted as normal.”

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For almost a quarter century, the United States has been killing people — including American citizens, on occasion — around the world with drone strikes. Beginning as post-9/11 counterterrorism operations, these targeted killings in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and other nations relied on a flimsy legal rationale that consistently eroded respect for international law. Details of these operations were kept secret from the American people, and civilian casualties were ignored, denied, and covered up. The recent attacks on alleged drug boats lack even the rickety legal rationale of the drone wars, sparking fear that there is little to stop the U.S. government from taking the unprecedented step of military action against those it deems terrorists within the nation’s borders.

The military has carried out 22 known attacks in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September, killing at least 87 civilians. Last week, footage of the September 2 double-tap strike shown to select members of Congress ignited a firestorm. Trump announced, on camera, that he had “no problem” with releasing the video of the attack. This week, he denied ever saying it, in another example of his increasingly unbalanced behavior.

“The public deserves to know how our government is justifying the cold-blooded murder of civilians as lawful and why it believes it can hand out get-out-of-jail-free cards to people committing these crimes,” said Jeffrey Stein, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, on Tuesday, as the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit for the immediate release of a classified Justice Department’s opinion and other documents related to the attacks on boats. “The Trump administration must stop these illegal and immoral strikes, and officials who have carried them out must be held accountable.”

Since October, The Intercept has been asking if the White House would rule out conducting summary executions of members of the list “of any such groups or entities” designated as “domestic terrorist organization[s]” under NSPM-7, without a response. Similar questions posed to the Justice and War departments have also been repeatedly ignored, despite both departments offering replies to myriad other queries. The Justice Department responded with a statement that did not answer the question. “Political violence has no place in this country, and this Department of Justice will investigate, identify, and root out any individual or violent extremist group attempting to commit or promote this heinous activity,” a spokesperson told The Intercept.

“The Trump administration should answer all questions about the terrorist lists,” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., told The Intercept. “The American people have a right to answers about who is on them and what that means for all of us.”

Rebecca Ingber, a former State Department lawyer, notes that while the designated terrorist organization label as a targeting authority is “entirely manufactured,” the administration is relying on it to summarily execute people in the boat strikes, making their application of the terrorist label on the domestic front especially concerning. “Many of us have warned that there seems to be no legal limiting principle to the Administration’s claims of authority to use force and to kill people,” Ingber, now a law professor at Cardozo Law School in New York, told The Intercept. “This is one of the many reasons it is so important that Congress push back on the President’s claim that he can simply label transporting drugs an armed attack on the United States and then claim the authority to summarily execute people on that basis.”

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Last month, members of Congress spoke up against Trump’s increasingly authoritarian measures when a group of Democratic lawmakers posted a video on social media in which they reminded military personnel that they are required to disobey illegal orders. This led to a Trump tirade that made the White House’s failure to dismiss the possibility of summary executions of Americans even more worrisome.

“This is really bad,” the president wrote on Truth Social, “and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP???” A follow-up post read: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” Trump also reposted a comment that said: “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!”

“What’s most telling is that the President considers it punishable by death for us to restate the law,” the six lawmakers — Sens. Elissa Slotkin, Mark Kelly, and Reps. Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, and Chrissy Houlahan — all of them former members of the armed forces or the intelligence community — replied in a joint statement. “Every American must unite and condemn the President’s calls for our murder and political violence.” Trump later claimed he did not call for the lawmakers’ executions.

For decades, Trump has called for violence against — including executions of — those he dislikes, including a group of Black and Latino boys were wrongly accused of raping a white woman jogger in New York’s Central Park in 1989; immigrants at the southern border, those who carry out hate crimes and mass shootings; demonstrators protesting the death of George Floyd; the chief suspect in the fatal shooting of a Trump supporter in Portland, Oregon; former chair of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley; and former Rep. Liz Cheney. In August, Trump also called for “Capital capital punishment,” explaining: “If somebody kills somebody in the capital, Washington, we’re going to be seeking the death penalty.”

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In January, immediately after being sworn in, Trump also signed an order to expand the death penalty, and Attorney General Pam Bondi has spent the year carrying out orders to put more Americans to death. Eleven states have executed 44 people since January, according to the Death Penalty Information Center — the highest annual total in more than a decade.

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers failed to answer questions about Trump’s history of threatening to kill people and his recent unhinged behavior.

As Trump lobs threats at political foes and his administration seeks to put convicted and supposed criminals to death at home and abroad, NSPM-7 directs hundreds of thousands of federal officials to target U.S. progressive groups and their donors as well as political activists who profess undefined anti-American, antifascist, or anti-Christian sentiments. The memorandum harkens back to past government enemies lists and efforts that led to massive overreach and illegal acts of repression to stifle dissent. That includes the House Un-American Activities Committee, which began in the 1940s, the FBI’s secret Counter Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, which began in the 1950s, and the Patriot Act, enacted in the wake of 9/11, which led to abuses of Black, brown, and Muslim communities, along with racial, social, environmental, animal rights, and other social justice activists and groups.

“Trump’s NSPM-7 represses freedom of speech and association. Investigating any organization with anti-capitalism or anti-American views is anti-American. NSPM-7 is a greater infringement on freedoms than the Patriot Act,” said Khanna. “We’re seeing the greatest erosion of civil liberties and human rights in our modern history.”

NSPM-7 directs Bondi to compile a list “of any such groups or entities” to be designated as “domestic terrorist organization[s]” and Bondi has ordered the FBI to “compile a list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism,” according to a Justice Department memo disclosed by reporter Ken Klippenstein on Saturday. The department also shared the December 4 memo, “Implementing National Security Presidential Memorandum-7: Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” with The Intercept.

The Justice Department memo notes that under Section 3 of NSPM-7, “the FBI, in coordination with its partners on the [Joint Terrorism Task Forces], and consistent with applicable law, shall compile a list of groups or entities engaged in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism” and “provide that list to the Deputy Attorney General.” (The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces are located in each of the FBI’s 56 field offices and specifically “support President Trump’s executive orders,” according to a top FBI official.)

The Justice Department memorandum offers a fictitious apocalyptic vision of urban America which the Trump administration has previously employed to justify its military occupations, including “mass rioting and destruction in our cities, violent efforts to shut down immigration enforcement, [and] targeting of public officials or other political actors.” While Trump has even falsely claimed, for example, that members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua have engaged in hand-to-hand combat with U.S. troops on the streets of Washington, D.C., state attorneys general have repeatedly and successfully argued that troop deployments in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon, were illegal because Trump administration claims of rampant civil unrest were found to be overblown or fictional.

The December 4 Justice Department memo also claims that “certain Antifa-aligned extremists” profess “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment” and “a willingness to use violence against law-abiding citizenry to serve those beliefs.” Over the last decade, Republicans have frequently blamed antifa for violence and used it as an omnibus term for left-wing activists, as if it were an organization with members and a command structure.

In September, Trump signed an executive order designating antifa as a “domestic terror organization,” despite the fact that it is essentially a decentralized, leftist ideology — a collection of related ideas and political concepts much like feminism or environmentalism.

Last month, the State Department designated four European groups — Antifa Ost, based in Germany; Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front, a mostly Italian group; and Armed Proletarian Justice and Revolutionary Class Self-Defense, both Greek organizations — as “foreign terrorist organizations” because of their alleged threats and attacks against political and economic institutions in Europe. The State Department announced that the FTO designation specifically supports NSPM-7. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control also designated the groups as “specially designated nationals.”

Michael Glasheen, a longtime FBI agent serving as operations director of the bureau’s national security branch, was flummoxed by questions about antifa while testifying on Thursday before the House Committee on Homeland Security. He said antifa was the “most immediate violent threat” facing the United States, but could not answer basic details about the movement, including its size or where it is headquartered. The FBI, Glasheen said, has conducted more than 1,700 domestic terrorism investigations this year, including “approximately 70 antifa investigations,” and logged a 171 percent increase in arrests. He also drew attention to a “concerning uptick in the radicalization of our nation’s young people,” specifically “those who may be motivated to commit violence and other criminal acts to further social or political objectives stemming from domestic influences.”

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Last month, a federal grand jury in Fort Worth, Texas, indicted nine alleged “North Texas Antifa Cell operatives” — one of them a former Marine Corps reservist — on multiple charges, including attempted murder, stemming from a shooting during a July 4 protest at the ICE Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado in which a local police officer was injured. The Justice Department claims that the North Texas Antifa Cell is “part of a larger militant enterprise made up of networks of individuals and small groups primarily ascribing to an ideology that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and the system of law.”

The December 4 Justice Department memo states that within 60 days, the FBI “shall disseminate an intelligence bulletin on Antifa and Antifa-aligned anarchist violent extremist groups,” including their “organizations’ structures, funding sources, and tactics so that law enforcement partners can effectively investigate and policy makers can effectively understand the nature and gravity of the threat posed by these extremist groups.”

The memo also calls for bounties and a network of informants. The “FBI shall establish a cash reward system for information that leads to the successful identification and arrest of individuals in the leadership of domestic terrorist organizations,” reads the document, noting that the bureau also aims to “establish cooperators to provide information and eventually testify against other members and leadership of domestic terrorist organizations.”

Neither NSPM-7 nor the December 4 memo mentions summary executions, and both speak explicitly in terms of “prosecution” and “arrest” of members of domestic terrorist organizations. Attacks on members of designated terrorist organizations are justified by another document — a classified opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — that claims that narcotics on supposed drug boats are lawful military targets because their cargo generates revenue for cartels whom the Trump administration claims are in armed conflict with the United States. Attached to that secret memo is a similarly secret list of designated terrorist organizations.

The December 4 memorandum directs Justice Department prosecutors to focus on specific federal crimes highlighted in NSPM-7 and flags more than 25 federal charges including crimes that may be capital offenses under specific, aggravating circumstances, such as killing or attempting to kill a federal officer and murder for hire.

It’s notable that the alleged members of designated terrorist organizations summarily killed in boat strikes would never, if tried in court, receive the death penalty.

“The administration is creating new categories of organizations outside of the law, creating immense uncertainty about who and what they intend to target and how,” Faiza Patel, the senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, told The Intercept, drawing attention to the administration’s invented term: designated terrorist organizations. “But drug trafficking is not war, and these actions are patently illegal in the absence of Congressional authorization,” she added. “At the same time, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 is aimed at ‘domestic terrorist organizations’ — another term that has no basis in U.S. law. It is designed to ramp up law enforcement scrutiny of groups espousing a broad swath of First Amendment-protected beliefs from anti-Christianity to anti-Americanism. NSPM-7 does not in any way, shape, or form authorize military strikes and using it for that would be plainly unlawful.”

The post White House Refuses to Rule Out Summary Executions of People on Its Secret Domestic Terrorist List appeared first on The Intercept.

The capture comes after three months of U.S. military attacks on boats in the region, which have killed at least 87 civilians.

The U.S. government has not yet explained its justification for capturing the Venezuelan vessel.

The two government sources said the operation was led by the U.S. Coast Guard. “We would refer you to the White House for questions,” Lt. Krystal Wolfe, a Coast Guard spokesperson, told The Intercept in response to questions.

“We don’t have a comment,” said a Pentagon spokeswoman, who also referred questions to the White House.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

While the U.S. once bought much of Venezuela’s oil, that trade was halted in 2019 when the first Trump administration imposed sanctions on the country’s state-owned oil company. While shipments to the United States resumed in 2023, most of Venezuela’s oil is now exported to China. The U.S. has also imposed financial sanctions on the Venezuelan government.

“Congress and the international community should consider this as an illegal act of war, in the legal sense as well as for the surge in poverty and violence it could cause,” Erik Sperling of Just Foreign Policy, an advocacy group critical of mainstream Washington foreign policy, told The Intercept. “The Trump administration’s indiscriminate sanctions have increased hunger across the population but have failed to topple the government. It appears they’re now aiming to further tighten the economic noose, regardless of its impact on civilians, in pursuit of their regime change goal.”

The capture comes as the Pentagon has built up a force of more than 15,000 troops in the Caribbean since the summer — the largest naval flotilla in the region since the Cold War. That contingent now includes 5,000 sailors aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford, the Navy’s newest and most powerful aircraft carrier, which has more than 75 attack, surveillance, and support aircraft.

As part of a campaign of airstrikes on boats, the Trump administration has secretly declared that it is engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with 24 cartels, gangs, and armed groups including Cártel de los Soles, which the U.S. claims is “headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking Venezuelan individuals,” despite little evidence that such a group exists. Experts and insiders see this as part of a plan for regime change in Venezuela that stretches back to Trump’s first term. Maduro, the president of Venezuela, denies that he heads a cartel.

Since the attacks began, experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, have said the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

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Trump has pursued an abrasive and interventionist foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere during his second term. “[W]e will assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine,” reads the recently released U.S. National Security Strategy. It harkens back to President Theodore Roosevelt’s turn-of-the-20th-century “Big Stick” corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

President James Monroe’s 1823 announcement warned the nations of Europe that the United States would not permit the establishment of new colonies in the Americas. Roosevelt’s more muscular decree held that Washington had the right to interfere in the internal affairs of countries across the Americas. In the first quarter of the 20th century, that Roosevelt corollary would be used to justify U.S. occupations of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras, and Nicaragua.

What’s been called the “Donroe Doctrine” began to take shape with threats to seize the Panama Canal, acquire Greenland, and rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. The Trump administration also claimed the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had invaded the United States, allowing the government to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to fast-track deportation of people it says belong to the gang. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals eventually blocked the government from using the war-time law. “We conclude that the findings do not support that an invasion or a predatory incursion has occurred,” wrote Judge Leslie Southwick.

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More recently, Trump even claimed that U.S. troops engaged in combat with members of the gang on the streets of Washington, D.C., during the summer or early fall — an apparent fiction that the White House press office refuses to address.

While the Trump administration claims that Tren de Aragua is acting as “a de facto arm of” Maduro’s government, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence determined earlier this year that the “Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.”

The U.S. also maintains that Tren de Aragua is both engaging in irregular warfare against the United States and that it is in a non-international armed conflict with the United States. These are, however, mutually exclusive designations which cannot occur simultaneously.

Trump also renewed 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 on federal charges of narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine. Earlier this year, the U.S. doubled its reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest to $50 million. Meanwhile, Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the right-wing former president of Honduras who had been convicted of drug trafficking.

Trump recently told Politico that Maduro’s “days are numbered.” When asked if he might order an invasion of Venezuela, Trump replied, “I wouldn’t say that one way or the other,” before launching into a confusing ramble that devolved into insults about former President Joe Biden’s IQ, a tirade about Politico, and, in response to a follow-up question about his goals regarding Venezuela, his ownership of the Doral Country Club in Miami, Florida.

The post U.S. Realizes It Can Seize Boats After All appeared first on The Intercept.

Two more missiles followed that finally sank the foundering vessel. Bradley, now the chief of Special Operations Command, claimed that he conducted multiple strikes because the shipwrecked men and the fragment of the boat still posed a threat, according to the sources.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth distanced himself from the follow-up strike during a Cabinet meeting at the White House, telling reporters he “didn’t personally see survivors” amid the fire and smoke and had left the room before the second attack was ordered. He evoked the “fog of war” to justify the decision for more strikes on the sinking ship and survivors.

Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, said Hegseth provided misleading information and that the video shared with lawmakers Thursday showed the reality in stark light.

“We had video for 48 minutes of two guys hanging off the side of a boat. There was plenty of time to make a clear and sober analysis,” Smith told CNN on Thursday. “You had two shipwrecked people on the top of the tiny little bit of the boat that was left that was capsized. They weren’t signaling to anybody. And the idea that these two were going to be able to return to the fight — even if you accept all of the questionable legal premises around this mission, around these strikes — it’s still very hard to imagine how these two were returning to any sort of fight in that condition.”

Three other sources familiar with briefings by Bradley provided to members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate and House Armed Services committees on Thursday confirmed that roughly 45 minutes elapsed between the first and second strikes. “They had at least 35 minutes of clear visual on these guys after the smoke of the first strike cleared. There were no time constraints. There was no pressure. They were in the middle of the ocean and there were no other vessels in the area,” said one of the sources. “There are a lot of disturbing aspects. But this is one of the most disturbing. We could not understand the logic behind it.”

The three sources said that after the first strike by U.S. forces, the two men climbed aboard a small portion of the capsized boat. At some point the men began waving to something overhead, which three people familiar with the briefing said logically must have been U.S. aircraft flying above them. All three interpreted the actions of the men as signaling for help, rescue, or surrender.

“They were seen waving their arms towards the sky,” said one of the sources. “One can only assume that they saw the aircraft. Obviously, we don’t know what they were saying or thinking, but any reasonable person would assume that they saw the aircraft and were signaling either: don’t shoot or help us. But that’s not how Bradley saw it.”

Special Operations Command did not reply to questions from The Intercept prior to publication.

During the Thursday briefings, Bradley claimed that he believed there was cocaine in the quarter of the boat that remained afloat, according to the sources. He said the survivors could have drifted to land or to a rendezvous point with another vessel, meaning that the alleged drug traffickers still had the ability to transport a deadly weapon — cocaine — into the United States, according to one source. Bradley also claimed that without a follow-up attack, the men might rejoin “the fight,” another source said.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., echoed that premise, telling reporters after the briefings that the additional strikes on the vessel were warranted because the shipwrecked men were “trying to flip a boat, loaded with drugs bound for the United States, back over so they could stay in the fight.”

None of the three sources who spoke to The Intercept said there was any evidence of this. “They weren’t radioing anybody and they certainly did not try to flip the boat. [Cotton’s] comments are untethered from reality,” said one of the sources.

Sarah Harrison, who previously advised Pentagon policymakers on issues related to human rights and the law of war, said that the people in the boat weren’t in any fight to begin with. “They didn’t pose an imminent threat to U.S. forces or the lives of others. There was no lawful justification to kill them in the first place let alone the second strike,” she told The Intercept. “The only allegation was that the men were transporting drugs, a crime that doesn’t even carry the death penalty.”

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Secret Boat Strike Memo Justifies Killings By Claiming the Target Is Drugs, Not People

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel this summer produced a classified opinion intended to shield service members up and down the chain of command from prosecution. The legal theory advanced in the finding claims that narcotics on the boats are lawful military targets because their cargo generates revenue, which can be used to buy weaponry, for cartels whom the Trump administration claims are in armed conflict with the U.S.

The Trump administration claims that at least 24 designated terrorist organizations are engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with the United States including the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua; Ejército de Liberación Nacional, a Colombian guerrilla insurgency; Cártel de los Soles, a Venezuelan criminal group that the U.S. claims is “headed by Nicolas Maduro and other high-ranking Venezuelan individuals”; and several groups affiliated with the Sinaloa Cartel.

The military has carried out 22 known attacks, destroying 23 boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September, killing at least 87 civilians. The most recent attack occurred in the Pacific Ocean on Thursday and killed four people.

Since the attacks began, experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, have said the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

The post Boat Strike Survivors Clung to Wreckage for Some 45 Minutes Before U.S. Military Killed Them appeared first on The Intercept.

A small number of members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate and House Armed Services committees, as well as some staff directors, saw the recording during closed-door briefings Thursday with Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the head of Special Operations Command, and Gen. Dan Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“What I saw in that room is one of the most troubling scenes I’ve ever seen in my time in public service,” said Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “You have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion with a destroyed vessel who were killed by the United States.

Until Thursday, the only video of the attack that had been seen by lawmakers was an edited clip posted to the Truth Social account of President Donald Trump on September 2 announcing the strike. The edited clip captures the initial strike, showing a four-engine speedboat erupt in an explosion. It does not show the second strike on the wreckage of the vessel and the survivors — which was first reported by The Intercept.

Himes said the unedited video clearly shows the U.S. striking helpless people.

“Any American who sees the video that I saw will see the United States military attacking shipwrecked sailors — bad guys, bad guys, but attacking shipwrecked sailors,” he told The Intercept.

Himes said that Bradley — who conducted the follow-up strike as the then-commander of Joint Special Operations Command — “confirmed that there had not been a ‘kill them all’ order.” The Washington Post recently reported that Hegseth personally ordered the follow-up attack, giving a spoken order “to kill everybody.”

Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, also expressed dismay after watching the footage. “I am deeply disturbed by what I saw this morning. The Department of Defense has no choice but to release the complete, unedited footage of the September 2 strike, as the President has agreed to do,” he said on Thursday.

“This briefing confirmed my worst fears about the nature of the Trump Administration’s military activities, and demonstrates exactly why the Senate Armed Services Committee has repeatedly requested — and been denied — fundamental information, documents, and facts about this operation. This must and will be the only beginning of our investigation into this incident,” said Reed.

Trump has said he supports the release of the video showing the second boat strike that killed the remaining survivors of the initial September 2 attack. “I don’t know what they have, but whatever they have, we’d certainly release, no problem,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday.

Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is a specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war, told The Intercept that intense scrutiny needs to extend far beyond the first strike in the U.S. operation in the waters near Venezuela.

“Oversight needs to be broader than this one incident. It needs to cover the entire maritime bombing campaign. And it needs to go beyond the Department of Defense,” he told The Intercept. “We need to know how this policy was formulated in the first instance. What was the process by which some aspect of it got legal blessing from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel? That all needs to be drug out into the open.”

The military has carried out 21 known attacks, destroying 22 boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September, killing at least 83 civilians. The most recent strike on a vessel was November 15.

Since the attacks began, experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, have described the strikes as illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. Throughout the long-running U.S. war on drugs, law enforcement agencies have arrested suspected drug smugglers rather than relying on summary executions. The double-tap strike first reported by The Intercept has only made worse a pattern of attacks that experts and lawmakers say are already tantamount to murder.

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Secret Boat Strike Memo Justifies Killings By Claiming the Target Is Drugs, Not People

Sarah Harrison, who previously advised Pentagon policymakers on issues related to human rights and the law of war, cautioned against undue focus on the double-tap strike. “I can understand why the public and lawmakers are shocked by the second strike on Sept 2. The imagery of humans clinging to wreckage, likely severely injured, and then subsequently executed, is no doubt jarring. But we have to keep emphasizing to those who are conducting the strikes within DoD that there is no war, thus no law of war to protect them,” said Harrison, a former associate general counsel at the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel, International Affairs. “All of the strikes, not just the Sept 2 incident, are extrajudicial killings of people alleged to have committed crimes. Americans should have been and should continue to be alarmed by that.”

The Pentagon continues to argue it is at war with undisclosed drug cartels and gangs. “I can tell you that every single person who we have hit thus far who is in a drug boat carrying narcotics to the United States is a narcoterrorist. Our intelligence has confirmed that, and we stand by it,” Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said Tuesday.

“There is no such thing as a narco-terrorist,” Himes said on Thursday. “Apparently, we have enough evidence to kill these people, but we don’t have enough evidence to try them in a court of law. People ought to sort of let that sink in and think about the implications of that.”

Sources briefed about the video footage say it contradicts a narrative that emerged in recent days that intercepted communications between the survivors and their supposed colleagues demonstrated those wounded individuals clinging to the wreckage were combatants, rather than shipwrecked and defenseless people whom it would be a war crime to target.

The Pentagon’s Law of War Manual is clear on attacking defenseless people. “Persons who have been rendered unconscious or otherwise incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck, such that they are no longer capable of fighting, are hors de combat,” reads the guide using the French term for those out of combat. “Persons who have been incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack.”

“The notion that radioing for help forfeits your shipwreck status is absurd — much less than it enables them to target you,” said Finucane. “I don’t believe there’s an armed conflict, so none of these people are lawful targets. They weren’t combatants, they’re not participating in hostilities. So the whole construct is ridiculous. But even if you accept that this is some sort of law of war situation, radioing for help does not deprive you of shipwreck status or render you a target under the law of war.”

The post Video of U.S. Military Killing Boat Strike Survivors Is Horrifying, Lawmakers Reveal appeared first on The Intercept.

“I can tell you that every single person who we have hit thus far who is in a drug boat carrying narcotics to the United States is a narcoterrorist. Our intelligence has confirmed that, and we stand by it,” Wilson said on Tuesday during a pseudo Pentagon press briefing where attendance was limited to media outlets that have agreed to limits on the scope of their reporting.

“Our intelligence absolutely confirms who these people are,” she said. “I can tell you that, without a shadow of a doubt, every single one of our military and civilian lawyers knows that these individuals are narcoterrorists.”

In exclusive comments to The Intercept, Houlahan expressed her doubts and demanded proof.

“If there is intelligence that ‘absolutely confirms’ this — present it. Come before the House or Senate Intelligence committees and let Congress provide the proper oversight and checks and balances the American people deserve,” said Houlahan, who serves on the House Armed Services Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “Put the whispers and doubts to rest once and for all. If there is intelligence to ‘absolutely confirm’ this, the Congress is ready to receive it. Until we all see it, you can surely understand why we are skeptical.”

Both the House Armed Services Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, both of which Houlahan serves on, routinely receive classified briefings from the military.

Wilson — who touted a “new era” of working to “keep the American people informed and to ensure transparency” on Tuesday — did not respond to questions or requests for comment from The Intercept about Houlahan’s remarks or appearing before Congress.

In past classified briefings to lawmakers and congressional staff, the military has admitted that it does not know exactly who it’s killing in the boat strikes, according to seven government officials who have spoken with The Intercept.

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Trump Administration Admits It Doesn’t Know Who Exactly It’s Killing in Boat Strikes

Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., also a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said that Pentagon officials who briefed her admitted that the administration does not know the identities of all the individuals who were killed in the strikes.

“They said that they do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessels to do the strikes,” Jacobs told The Intercept in October. “They just need to show a connection to a DTO or affiliate,” she added, using shorthand for “designated terrorist organizations,” the Trump administration’s term for the secret list of groups with whom it claims to be at war.

Twenty-One Attacks

The military has carried out 21 known attacks, destroying 22 boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September and killing at least 83 civilians. It has not conducted a strike on a vessel since November 15.

Since the strikes began, experts in the laws of war and members of Congress from both parties say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

The summary executions mark a major departure from typical practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, where law enforcement agencies arrest suspected drug smugglers.

A double-tap strike during the initial September 2 attack — where the U.S. hit an incapacitated boat for a second time, killing two survivors clinging to the wreckage — added a second layer of illegality to strikes that experts and lawmakers say are already tantamount to murder. The double-tap strike was first reported by The Intercept.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth has been under increasing fire for that strike. The Washington Post recently reported that Hegseth personally ordered the follow-up attack, giving a spoken order “to kill everybody.”

Hegseth acknowledged U.S. forces conducted a follow-up strike on the alleged drug boat during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Tuesday but distanced himself from the killing of people struggling to stay afloat.

“I didn’t personally see survivors,” Hegseth told reporters, noting that he watched live footage of the attack. “The thing was on fire. It was exploded in fire and smoke. You can’t see it.”

He added, “This is called the fog of war.”

Hegseth said Adm. Frank M. Bradley, then the commander of Joint Special Operations Command and now head of Special Operations Command, “made the right call” in ordering the second strike, which the war secretary claimed came after he himself left the room. In a statement to The Intercept earlier this week, Special Operations Command pushed back on the contention that Bradley ordered a double-tap attack.

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Department of War Disputes Second Attack on Boat Strike Survivors Was a “Double-Tap”

“He does not see his actions on 2 SEP as a ‘double tap,’” Col. Allie Weiskopf, the director of public affairs at Special Operations Command, told The Intercept on Tuesday.

Bradley and Gen. Dan Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are slated to go to Capitol Hill on Thursday to answer questions about the attack amid an ongoing uproar. Congressional staffers say that Bradley is currently slated to only meet with House Armed Services Committee Chair Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and ranking member Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., along with the Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and ranking member Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I.

“The Seditious Six”

Houlahan was one of six Democratic members of Congress who appeared in a video late last month reminding members of the military of their duty not to obey illegal orders. President Donald Trump called for the group to face arrest and trial or even execution, saying the video amounted to “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS.”

Wilson, during her faux press briefing — delivered to mostly administration cheerleaders after outlets from the New York Times to Fox News relinquished their Pentagon press passes rather than agree to restrictions that constrain reporters’ First Amendment rights — called out Houlahan and her fellow lawmakers in the video.

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“[T]he Seditious Six urged members of our military to defy their chain of command in an unprecedented, treasonous and shameful conspiracy to sow distrust and chaos in our armed forces,” said Wilson. She went on to call the video “a politically motivated influence operation” that “puts our warfighters at risk.”

Hegseth described the members of Congress’s video as “despicable, reckless, and false.” Hegseth himself, however, had delivered a similar message recorded in 2016 footage revealed by CNN on Tuesday.

“If you’re doing something that is just completely unlawful and ruthless, then there is a consequence for that. That’s why the military said it won’t follow unlawful orders from their commander-in-chief,” Hegseth told an audience in the footage. “There’s a standard, there’s an ethos, there’s a belief that we are above what so many things that our enemies or others would do.”

Wilson did not reply to a request for comment about Hegseth’s remarks.

Hegseth is also in the hot seat after the Pentagon Inspector General’s Office determined that he risked the safety of U.S. service members by sharing sensitive military information on the Signal messaging app, according to a source familiar with the forthcoming report by the Pentagon watchdog.

The report, which is expected to be released on Thursday, was launched after a journalist at The Atlantic revealed he had been added to a chat on the encrypted messaging app, in which Hegseth and other top officials were discussing plans for U.S. airstrikes in Yemen that also killed civilians.

The post Pentagon Claims It “Absolutely” Knows Who It Killed in Boat Strikes. Prove It, Lawmaker Says. appeared first on The Intercept.

“He does not see his actions on 2 SEP as a ‘double tap,’” Col. Allie Weiskopf, a Special Operations Command spokesperson told The Intercept on Tuesday in response to questions about the follow-up attack.

In military jargon, the term “double tap” — which has no legal or doctrinal meaning — typically refers to a follow-on strike to kill rescuers or first responders. Such attacks have been carried out by U.S. forces in conflicts including the drone wars in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Israel has carried out double-tap strikes in its most recent war on Gaza, targeting journalists and rescue efforts.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth acknowledged U.S. forces conducted a follow-up strike on the alleged drug boat during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Tuesday, but distanced himself from the killing of individuals clinging to the wreckage. “I didn’t personally see survivors,” Hegseth told reporters, noting that he watched live footage of the attack. “The thing was on fire. It was exploded in fire and smoke. You can’t see it.” He added, “This is called the fog of war.”

Hegseth said Bradley — then the commander of Joint Special Operations Command and now head of Special Operations Command — “made the right call” in ordering the second strike after Hegseth allegedly left the room.

The statements from Hegseth and Special Operations Command on Tuesday mark an evolution in the Pentagon’s response to the killings. But several government officials and experts on the laws of war said messaging focusing on technical definitions misses the reason this strike has drawn widespread condemnation.

“Quibbling over the semantics of ‘double-tap’ doesn’t change the reality that the strike was a summary execution of men clinging to the remains of a boat,” Sarah Harrison, who advised Pentagon policymakers on issues related to human rights and the law of war in her former role as associate general counsel at the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel, International Affairs, told The Intercept.

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Entire Chain of Command Could Be Held Liable for Killing Boat Strike Survivors, Sources Say

The military has carried out 21 known attacks, destroying 22 boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September, killing at least 83 civilians. Since the attacks began, experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat. In the long-running U.S. war on drugs, suspected smugglers have been arrested by law enforcement rather than subjected to summary execution.

The multiple strikes on September 2 added a second layer of illegality to attacks that experts and lawmakers say are already tantamount to murder. “Persons who have been incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack,” reads the Pentagon’s Law of War Manual.

Weiskopf did not respond to other questions by The Intercept. “ADM Bradley looks forward to briefing Congress on your questions. He will do this on Thursday,” she wrote in an email.

Capitol Hill staffers say that Bradley is currently slated to only meet with the House Armed Services Committee Chair Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and ranking member Adam Smith, D-Wash., and the Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and ranking member Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I.

The post Department of War Disputes Second Attack on Boat Strike Survivors Was a “Double-Tap” appeared first on The Intercept.

The Washington Post recently reported that Hegseth personally ordered the follow-up attack, giving a spoken order “to kill everybody.” Multiple military legal experts, lawmakers, and now confidential sources within the government who spoke with The Intercept say Hegseth’s actions could result in the entire chain of command being investigated for a war crime or outright murder.

“Those directly involved in the strike could be charged with murder under the UCMJ or federal law,” said Todd Huntley, a former Staff Judge Advocate who served as a legal adviser on Joint Special Operations task forces conducting drone strikes in Afghanistan and elsewhere, using shorthand for the Uniform Code of Military Justice. “This is about as clear of a case being patently illegal that subordinates would probably not be able to successfully use a following-orders defense.”

The military has carried out 21 known attacks, destroying 22 boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September, killing at least 83 civilians. Since the attacks began, experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies arrested suspected drug smugglers. The double-tap strike on September 2 added a second layer of illegality to strikes that experts and lawmakers say are already tantamount to murder.

The Pentagon’s Law of War Manual is clear on attacking defenseless people. “Persons who have been rendered unconscious or otherwise incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck, such that they are no longer capable of fighting, are hors de combat,” reads the guide using the French term for those out of combat. “Persons who have been incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack.”

This fundamental tenet stretches back to the 1863 “Lieber Code,” the first modern codification of the laws of war, promulgated by President Abraham Lincoln, which held that anyone who “intentionally inflicts additional wounds on an enemy already wholly disabled, or kills such an enemy, or who orders or encourages soldiers to do so, shall suffer death, if duly convicted.”

Over the weekend, lawmakers expressed rare bipartisan agreement about the illegality of killing survivors. “Obviously if that occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that that would be an illegal act,” Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, and a former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., a member of the Armed Services Committee, said on CBS that if the Post’s reporting was accurate, the attack “rises to the level of a war crime.”

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Secret Boat Strike Memo Justifies Killings By Claiming the Target Is Drugs, Not People

The Trump administration insists the attacks are defensible because it has deemed the targets — alleged drug-traffickers — to be terrorists. On Sunday, as questions mounted about the order to kill all survivors of the initial boat strike, President Donald Trump said Hegseth told him that “he did not say that, and I believe him, 100 percent.”

“As usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland,” Hegseth wrote on X.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared to confirm on Monday that Hegseth authorized the double-tap attack. “On September 2, Secretary Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes,” she said, referring to Adm. Frank Bradley, then the commander of Joint Special Operations Command and now head of Special Operations Command.

Top Republicans and Democrats on the two congressional committees overseeing the Pentagon vowed over the weekend to increase their scrutiny of the attacks. “This committee is committed to providing rigorous oversight of the Department of Defense’s military operations in the Caribbean,” House Armed Services Committee Chair Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and Ranking Member Adam Smith, D-Wash., said in a joint statement. “We take seriously the reports of follow-on strikes on boats alleged to be ferrying narcotics in the SOUTHCOM region and are taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question.” Staffers on Capitol Hill told The Intercept that they have started gathering information toward that end.

Sarah Harrison, who advised Pentagon policymakers on issues related to human rights and the law of war in her former role as associate general counsel at the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel, International Affairs, said each strike creates potential legal liability for the entire chain of command involved in the attacks. “While the September 2 strike seems uniquely depraved, every single strike taken against these boats by DoD is a summary execution of criminal suspects, people who even if tried in court would never get the death penalty,” she told The Intercept. “Every single strike exposes those in the chain of command to the risk of criminal liability under murder statutes and international law prohibiting extrajudicial killings.”

A government source who has been briefed on the September 2 strike told The Intercept, on the condition of anonymity, that Hegseth is “making murderers” up and down the chain of command.

The administration insists the attacks are permitted because the U.S. is engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations. Trump has justified the attacks, in a War Powers report to Congress, under his Article II constitutional authority as commander in chief of the U.S. military and claimed to be acting pursuant to the United States’ inherent right of self-defense as a matter of international law. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has also produced a classified opinion that provides legal cover for the lethal strikes.

The Former JAGs Working Group — an organization made up of former and retired military judge advocates founded in February — issued a statement condemning Hegseth’s reported kill-everybody order and its execution by subordinates as “war crimes, murder, or both.”

“If the U.S. military operation to interdict and destroy suspected narco-trafficking vessels is a ‘non-international armed conflict,’ as the Trump Administration suggests, orders to ‘kill everybody,’ which can reasonably be regarded as an order to give ‘no quarter,’ and to ‘double-tap’ a target in order to kill survivors, are clearly illegal under international law,” according to the former JAGs. If the attacks are taking place outside of an armed conflict, which most experts contend is the case, the JAGs say that such orders “to kill helpless civilians clinging to the wreckage of a vessel our military destroyed would subject everyone from SECDEF down to the individual who pulled the trigger to prosecution under U.S. law for murder.”

After the September 2 strike, a high-ranking Pentagon official who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity said that it was a criminal attack on civilians and that the Trump administration paved the way for it by firing the top legal authorities of the Army and the Air Force earlier this year.

In addition to the firings, Hegseth 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. The Former JAGs Working Group said that if not for the “systematic dismantling of the military’s legal guardrails,” they were confident that safeguards “would have prevented these crimes.”

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In response to reporting that he ordered the U.S. military to kill survivors, Hegseth explained in a post on X that the intent of the mission was to kill. “As we’ve said from the beginning, and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be ‘lethal, kinetic strikes.’”

Later Monday, Hegseth suggested in a post on his personal X account that he wasn’t responsible decisions surrounding the Sept. 2 strike. “Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made — on the September 2 mission and all others since.”

Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson failed to respond to detailed questions about the attacks, Hegseth’s orders, and the assessments of the Former JAGs Working Group.

The government official who said Hegseth’s orders were turning military personnel into “murderers” scoffed at the secretary’s defense that he was allowed to offer no quarter because the strikes were intended to be lethal. “That’s not how that works,” the official said.

“Seems like a confession,” said Huntley. “It certainly isn’t a denial.”

The post Entire Chain of Command Could Be Held Liable for Killing Boat Strike Survivors, Sources Say appeared first on The Intercept.

The administration insists the attacks are permitted because the U.S. is engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations,” or DTOs. President Donald Trump has justified the attacks, in a War Powers report to Congress, under his Article II constitutional authority as commander in chief of the U.S. military and claimed to be acting pursuant to the United States’ inherent right of self-defense as a matter of international law. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has also produced a classified opinion that provides legal cover for the lethal strikes.

Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies arrested suspected drug smugglers.

The Pentagon has repeatedly withheld information on the attacks from members of Congress and the American public, despite mounting questions from lawmakers about the legality of these deadly strikes.

So The Intercept is publishing a strike tracker documenting America’s newest war. The locations and casualty figures are drawn from information provided by U.S. Southern Command, which oversees military operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Office of the Secretary of War, and social media posts by Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth.

December 29, 2025

• Death toll: 2
• Theater: Pacific Ocean
• Target: Unspecified Designated Terrorist Organization

December 22, 2025

• Death toll: 1
• Theater: Pacific Ocean
• Target: Unspecified Designated Terrorist Organization

December 18, 2025

• Death toll: 5 killed in two strikes, death tolls of 3 and 2.
• Theater: Pacific Ocean
• Target: Unspecified Designated Terrorist Organization

December 17, 2025

• Death toll: 4
• Theater: Pacific Ocean
• Target: Unspecified Designated Terrorist Organization

December 15, 2025

• Death toll: 8 killed in three strikes, death tolls of 3, 2, and 3.
• Theater: Pacific Ocean
• Target: Unspecified Designated Terrorist Organization

December 4, 2025

• Death toll: 4
• Theater: Pacific Ocean
• Target: Unspecified Designated Terrorist Organization

November 15, 2025

• Death toll: 3
• Theater: Pacific Ocean
• Target: Unspecified Designated Terrorist Organization

November 10, 2025

• Death toll: 4
• Theater: Caribbean
• Target: “Narcoterrorists”

November 9, 2025

• Death toll: 6 killed in two strikes, 3 aboard each ship.
• Theater: Both in Pacific Ocean
• Target: Unspecified Designated Terrorist Organizations

November 6, 2025

• Death toll: 3
• Theater: Caribbean
• Target: Unspecified Designated Terrorist Organization

November 4, 2025

• Death toll: 2
• Theater: Pacific Ocean
• Target: Unspecified Designated Terrorist Organization

November 1, 2025

• Death toll: 3
• Theater: Caribbean
• Target: Unspecified Designated Terrorist Organization

October 29, 2025

• Death toll: 4
• Theater: Pacific Ocean
• Target: Unspecified Designated Terrorist Organization

October 27, 2025

• Death toll: 14 killed in three separate strikes — with one reported survivor (eight aboard one boat, four on another and three on the last). The Mexican Navy failed to find the survivor, who is presumed to be dead, bringing the total to 15.
• Theater: Pacific Ocean
• Target: Unspecified Designated Terrorist Organization

October 23 or 24, 2025

• Death toll: 6
• Theater: Pacific Ocean
• Target: Tren de Aragua (Venezuela)

October 22, 2025

• Death toll: 3
• Theater: Pacific Ocean
• Target: Unspecified Designated Terrorist Organization

October 21, 2025

• Death toll: 2
• Theater: Pacific Ocean
• Target: Unspecified Designated Terrorist Organization

October 17, 2025

• Death toll: 3
• Theater: Caribbean
• Target: Ejército de Liberación Nacional (Colombia)

October 16, 2025

• Death toll: 2 killed, 2 captured and later repatriated to Colombia and Ecuador.
• Theater: Caribbean
• Target: “Narcoterrorists”

October 14, 2025

• Death toll: 6
• Theater: Caribbean
• Target: Unspecified Designated Terrorist Organization

October 2, 2025

• Death toll: 4
• Theater: Caribbean
• Target: Unspecified Designated Terrorist Organization

September 19, 2025

• Death toll: 3
• Theater: Caribbean
• Target: Unspecified Designated Terrorist Organization

September 15, 2025

• Death toll: 3
• Theater: Caribbean
• Target: “Drug trafficking cartels and narcoterrorists”

September 2, 2025

• Death toll: 11
• Theater: Caribbean
• Target: Tren de Aragua (Venezuela)

The post The U.S. Has Killed More than 100 People in Boat Strikes. We’re Tracking Them All. appeared first on The Intercept.

Amid mounting questions from senior military and civilian lawyers about the legality of proposed strikes on civilian boats, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel this summer produced a classified opinion intended to shield service members up and down the chain of command from prosecution, according to three government officials.

The legal theory advanced in the finding, two sources said, differs from some of President Donald Trump’s public statements on the killings. It claims that narcotics on the boats are lawful military targets because their cargo generates revenue for cartels whom the Trump administration claims are in armed conflict with the U.S.

One senior defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, blasted the opinion. “I don’t know what’s more insane – that the ‘President of Peace’ is starting an illegal war or that he’s giving a get out of jail free card to the U.S. military,” said the official, referencing President Donald Trump’s self-proclaimed moniker. “Hopefully they realize there’s no immunity for war crimes. Nor is there a statute of limitations.”

The Trump administration continues to keep the OLC memo from the American people but, this week, finally allowed members of Congress and their staffs to read the document. On Wednesday, just 20 copies were made available in a secure room, causing delays among lawmakers and staffers who have been waiting months to understand the legal reasoning underpinning the attacks.

On Thursday evening, War Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the campaign of attacks is called Operation Southern Spear. Led by Joint Task Force Southern Spear and Southern Command, “this mission defends our Homeland, removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people,” he wrote on X. Southern Spear kicked off earlier this year as part of the Navy’s next-generation effort to use small robot interceptor boats and vertical take-off and landing drones to conduct counternarcotics operations.

The military has carried out 20 known attacks, destroying 21 boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September, killing at least 80 civilians. The most recent attack, on a vessel in the Caribbean on Monday, first reported by CBS on Thursday, reportedly killed four people. Following most of the attacks, Hegseth or Trump have claimed that the victims belonged to an unspecified designated terrorist organization, or DTO.

A list of DTOs, consisting of Latin American cartels and criminal organizations, is attached to the OLC opinion which claims that attacks on suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean and Pacific are lawful and that personnel involved are immune from prosecution.

“The strikes were ordered consistent with the laws of armed conflict, and as such are lawful orders. Military personnel are legally obligated to follow lawful orders and, as such, are not subject to prosecution for following lawful orders,” a Justice Department spokesperson told The Intercept.

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Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement arrested suspected drug smugglers.

Senior government attorneys questioned the legality of the strikes long before they began, sources told The Intercept. “I’m not surprised that civilian and military lawyers raised significant concerns with these strikes, given that they are manifestly unlawful even under the most permissive wartime legal frameworks government lawyers have deployed at any point in the past two decades,” Rebecca Ingber, a former State Department lawyer and law-of-war expert told The Intercept.

One current government official speaking anonymously, as well as Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is a specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war, both drew specific attention to the fact that this summer — at the time the Defense Department officials were expressing reservations about the legality of summary executions of alleged drug smugglers — Trump signed a secret directive ordering the Pentagon to use military force against Latin American drug cartels he has labeled terrorist organizations.

“There was a policy desire for strikes at sea and there was pushback, potentially from Joint Staff and Southern Command, on those requests, both on policy grounds, but also on legal grounds,” said Finucane, now the senior adviser for the U.S. program at the International Crisis Group. “That seems to have generated two documents: this permission slip from OLC, blessing these actions as legal, and the directive from the White House basically telling DOD ‘No! You will develop these options.’”

Several government officials suggested to The Intercept that Rear Adm. Milton “Jamie” Sands III, head of Naval Special Warfare Command, was fired by Hegseth in August due to the admiral’s concerns about impending attacks on civilian vessels by Special Operations forces. Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson denied the officials’ claims, and Sands did not respond to repeated requests by The Intercept for an interview.

Last month, Adm. Alvin Holsey — the chief of Southern Command — announced his retirement years ahead of schedule. “Never before in my over 20 years on the committee can I recall seeing a combatant commander leave their post this early and amid such turmoil,” said Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.

Current and former government officials familiar with the OLC opinion say that it relies on a theory for the strikes that differs from the Trump administration’s public pronouncements. “Every single boat that you see that’s shot down kills 25,000 [Americans] on drugs and destroys families all over our country,” Trump said on “60 Minutes” recently. But the OLC opinion indicates that it is the sale of drugs, what is known as the “revenue generating target theory,” that the U.S. relies on to claim the narcotics aboard the boats are military objectives and, thus, lawful targets under the law of war. Under this theory, the civilians aboard would be considered collateral damage, and their deaths would be excused through a proportionality analysis tied to the military advantage gained by the attack.

Experts say the OLC reasoning is faulty and appears to have been fashioned to suit a political decision already made by the White House. While such theories have been employed before, such as ultimately fruitless strikes on drug labs in Afghanistan, they were in the context of actual armed conflicts against true belligerents, like the Taliban.

The OLC opinion also argues that, in conducting the attacks, the U.S. is coming to the collective self-defense of various Latin American countries, even if strikes are, in some cases, killing their nationals. “The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood — and we will protect it,” Hegseth wrote in his Thursday Southern Spear announcement. Experts also say that such a unilateral decision, without a request from the nations being defended, is also unprecedented.

“It really strikes me that OLC was given an assignment. ‘We need a legal justification to do the following’ and then they just cooked something up. This is legal backfilling. ‘How do you lawyer your way to yes?’” said Finucane. “It’s legal Mad Libs. They’re throwing all these terms and concepts at the wall, but there’s no real content or substance behind them.”

The Intercept reported last month that the Trump administration secretly declared DTOs were in a state of “non-international armed conflict” with the United States during the summer, long before the attacks commenced. Despite concluding that the U.S. is involved in armed conflict, the OLC opinion nonetheless claims the operation is not covered by the War Powers Resolution, a 1973 law that requires presidents to terminate deployments of troops into “hostilities” after 60 days if Congress has not authorized them.

The OLC opinion, which runs nearly 50 pages, argues that these non-international armed conflicts are waged under the president’s Article II constitutional authority as commander in chief of the U.S. military, which is key to the argument that the strikes are permissible under domestic law.

The list of groups supposedly engaged in armed conflict with the United States, as The Intercept previously reported, includes the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua; Ejército de Liberación Nacional, a Colombian guerrilla insurgency; Cártel de los Soles, a Venezuelan criminal group that the U.S. claims is “headed by [Venezuelan President] Nicolas Maduro and other high-ranking Venezuelan individuals”; and several groups affiliated with the Sinaloa Cartel, according to two government sources who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose classified information. The Justice Department, War Department, and White House have repeatedly failed to respond to requests for comment.

“For the United States to use military force in ‘self-defense’ against a non-state actor — as the government has asserted to Congress — or a state, the standard is whether we have suffered an ‘armed attack,’ in which case we may use force in self-defense to repel that attack. This is a term of art that has meaning. For example, the attacks of 9/11, the worst attacks on the homeland since Pearl Harbor, constituted the armed attack to which the U.S. responded in the conflict with al Qaeda,” said Ingber, now a law professor at Cardozo Law School in New York. “I’ve seen no evidence or even allegations that suggest there has been an armed attack on the United States. I’ve seen nothing to suggest that any of these alleged drug smugglers are acting as part of an organized armed group, or that they are involved in military-like hostilities with the United States, let alone prolonged hostilities.”

Experts say it’s unlikely that military personnel will face prosecution by a future administration for their roles in the extrajudicial killings of suspected drug smugglers that are covered by the OLC finding. “Legal advice, including an OLC opinion, itself does not provide ‘immunity’ per se,” Ingber told The Intercept. “But good faith reliance on it in this case would be a significant hurdle to prosecution.” Still, experts caution that there is no guarantee of absolute immunity.

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A secret January 2002 OLC memo claimed that “customary international law cannot bind the executive branch under the Constitution,” empowering the George W. Bush administration, during the early days of the war on terror, to ignore the prohibition of torture under international law. “We conclude that customary international law, whatever its source and content, does not bind the President, or restrict the actions of the United States military,” it reads.

While Bush and top administration officials never faced legal consequences for the torture of detainees, low-level U.S. guards involved in the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were court-martialed and convicted. A 2008 Senate Armed Services Committee report concluded “abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own,” but that:

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely.

While U.S. civilian leaders and high-ranking U.S. officers routinely escape punishment for atrocities, not all top officials evade justice. During his first term in office, Trump regularly praised President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and said he was doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem.” Duterte’s government was, in fact, carrying out summary executions of suspected drug dealers. Duterte now faces charges of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court for his drug war.

The post Secret Boat Strike Memo Justifies Killings By Claiming the Target Is Drugs, Not People appeared first on The Intercept.

The current $473 million price tag now includes $172 million spent in Los Angeles, where troops arrived in June; almost $270 million for the occupation of Washington, D.C., which began in August; nearly $15 million for Portland, Oregon, which was announced in September; and more than $3 million for Memphis, Tennessee, and almost $13 million for Chicago, which both began last month.

The National Priorities Project, a nonpartisan research group, tallied these totals from open-source information and costs-per-day estimates supplied to The Intercept by the office of Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.

The skyrocketing price of Trump’s occupations come as the president threatens to deploy additional troops to more American cities to quell dissent and turn America into a full-blown police state. Trump recently said he could “send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines — I could send anybody I wanted” into urban America — while threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act, one of the executive branch’s most potent, oldest, and rarely used emergency powers. He has specifically threatened to surge troops into Baltimore, New York City, Oakland, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Seattle to put down supposed rebellions and to aid law enforcement agencies, despite falling crime numbers and pushback by local officials. Troops are also expected to be deployed to New Orleans later this month.

Despite the Trump administration’s unprecedented use of the military within the U.S., it has kept even basic details about domestic troop deployments, including the costs, secret.

“If Donald Trump is burning through hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on his authoritarian campaign of intimidation, the American people deserve to know about it. Federal judges across the country — including a Trump appointee — have ruled that these deployments are not justified, and thus not only wasteful, but also illegal and unconstitutional, and our National Guard troops did not sign up to police their own neighbors or be used as political pawns,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., told The Intercept. “Trump’s continued abuse of our military to intimidate Americans in their own neighborhoods — the very same Americans he expects to foot the bill for these deployments — must end immediately.”

Duckworth was one of 11 senators who asked the Congressional Budget Office late last month to provide an independent assessment of the projected expense of deploying federalized National Guard units for “domestic security operations,” including the activation, deployment, compensation and sustainment costs. The CBO did not say whether it will provide the requested assessment, telling The Intercept that it is “unable to respond to external inquiries due to a lapse in appropriated funds.”

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Over the last six months, a Trump administration urban occupation playbook has emerged. In city after city, armed federal agents storm into neighborhoods, violating people’s rights. When American citizens exercise their First Amendment right to protest the authoritarian measures, federal agents respond with violence. While such protests have remained overwhelmingly peaceful and have never overwhelmed the capacity of local law enforcement, Trump has repeatedly proclaimed himself unable to enforce the law and seized command of National Guard members over the objections of state governors to quash dissent.

A federal judge in Oregon on Friday evening ruled that Trump illegally ordered state National Guard units to Portland, issuing a sweeping injunction that restrains the president’s claimed authority to deploy Guard members over a governor’s objection.

In a 106-page opinion, District Judge Karin Immergut ruled that Trump’s federalization of 200 Oregon National Guard members and deployments of federalized California and Texas Guard troops to an ICE facility in Portland exceeded his statutory authority and violated the 10th Amendment’s protections for state sovereignty. “[T]here was neither ‘a rebellion or danger of a rebellion’ nor was the President ‘unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States’ in Oregon when he ordered the federalization and deployment of the National Guard,” she wrote.

A federal district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit have so far blocked Trump’s attempt to federalize National Guard troops and deploy them into Chicago and surrounding counties. The Trump administration filed an emergency stay request last month with the Supreme Court and, on Monday, implored the justices to show “extraordinary deference” to the president as commander-in-chief, claiming Trump could have already deployed active-duty troops. “The standing military was undoubtedly an available option to quash the violent resistance to federal immigration enforcement,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the court.

In September, District Judge Charles Breyer ruled that the Trump administration’s ongoing Los Angeles occupation is illegal, noting that while troops were deployed “ostensibly to quell a rebellion,” there was “no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.”

Members of the National Guard have been activated or deployed under Title 10 authority or federal control in at least seven states — Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, New Mexico, Oregon, and Texas — as occupation forces or to conduct anti-immigrant border operations. The occupation of D.C. is technically a Title 32 deployment — a federal-state hybrid — but since the capital has no governor, the D.C. National Guard’s chain of command runs from its commanding general to the secretary of the Army, to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, to Trump.

At Trump’s urging, military leaders have recently ordered the National Guard in every state to develop a “quick reaction force” — trained to combat civil disturbances and riots — that can be ready to deploy with just hours’ notice. The units, in total, will reportedly number around 23,000 troops.

“It’s extremely concerning, on so many levels, that in less than six months since Trump first activated troops in LA, domestic military occupations are escalating — despite their dubious legality — and expenses are already approaching half a billion dollars,” said Hanna Homestead of the National Priorities Project, who provided the estimates on the deployment costs. “Especially given all the GOP’s massive social spending cuts that are stripping health care and food benefits from millions of families, and the fact that the Pentagon is reportedly planning to ramp up use of National Guard troops for an impending nationwide crackdown.”

Durbin’s office provided The Intercept with data from the Senate Armed Services Committee that placed the price tag for the Los Angeles deployment at $170 million as of mid-October, as well as an estimate for the typical deployment cost for 500 National Guard member for a period of 60 days: approximately $323,333 per day, or $647 per soldier per day. The National Priorities Project used these figures and open-source information about the size and length of deployments to provide cost estimates through November 15.

For months, the Pentagon has refused to provide figures on the mounting expense of federal troop deployments. “We won’t know the total cost until the mission concludes,” a Pentagon spokesperson told The Intercept in July, when forces were only deployed to Los Angeles. Recent follow-up requests for further information have gone unanswered.

“Why is the Trump administration refusing to be transparent about how much money it’s spending on this political stunt?” asked Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., another of the lawmakers who requested the CBO analysis. “People don’t need troops in their backyard — they need health care, housing, and cheaper groceries.”

Trump has teased using urban occupations to hone the skills of the armed forces. “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military,” he told a gathering of hundreds of generals and admirals.

Trump has also justified his push to militarize urban America through hyperbole, dog-whistle politics and the peddling of baseless lies. Trump said protesters in Los Angeles were “animals” and “a foreign enemy,” calling the city “a trash heap” with “entire neighborhoods under control” of criminals. Trump described Chicago as a “war zone.” He similarly claims that Portland is “war-ravaged” and in a state of rebellion. “Portland has been on fire for years. … I really think that’s really criminal insurrection,” Trump told reporters. He said D.C.’s homicide rate is higher than “the worst places on Earth.” (Not only did Trump use older, misleading statistics, but even cherry-picking the data, at least 49 other cities across the world had higher homicide rates.) He even fabricated a story of hand-to-hand combat between troops and child gangsters from the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua on the streets of the capital. For weeks, the White House has failed to respond to questions about this fictional incident.

Trump has repeatedly threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to circumvent the Posse Comitatus Act, a bedrock 19th-century law banning the use of federal troops to execute domestic law enforcement; Posse Comitatus is seen as fundamental to the democratic tradition in the United States. “The Insurrection Act has been used routinely by presidents. I haven’t chosen to use it, but … if I needed it, I could do it. And if I needed it, that would mean I could bring in the Army, the Marines, I could bring in whoever I want,” Trump told “60 Minutes” recently.

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Trump seems to believe that the Insurrection Act affords him almost unlimited power to wield the military against Americans and has repeatedly made wild and erroneous claims about the law. Trump claimed, for example, that an unnamed president used the Insurrection Act “28 times during the course of a presidency,” but no president has invoked the Act on more occasions than Ulysses S. Grant’s six times, according to research by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. The act and the similar prior laws have been invoked on only 30 occasions in U.S. history. Trump also claims that “50 percent of the presidents” have invoked the act when only 17 of 45 presidents — less than 38 percent — have invoked the act or its precursor laws, according to the Brennan Center.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the president’s confusion about the act.

“The Insurrection Act is an extremely powerful tool, but it’s not a blank check. The president can deploy active-duty troops or federalized National Guard forces under the law only if its criteria are met. And while those criteria appear quite broad, the Department of Justice has long taken the position that they are limited by the Constitution and tradition,” Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Brennan Center’s liberty and national security program, told The Intercept. “Properly interpreted, the law can only be used in extreme circumstances that simply aren’t present in Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, or anywhere else in the United States.”

The president isn’t the only one peddling misinformation about federal troop deployments. U.S. Northern Command — which oversees federal troop deployments — provides a link to an official National Guard document on “Federalizations of the Guard for Domestic Missions through 2025,” which details deployments of state militia and National Guardsmen from the 1790s to the present. Although an attached chart shows that in six of 11 instances, troops were deployed without the consent of a state’s governor, the document nonetheless asserts: “In each of these instances, the governor requested federal forces to assist in maintaining order.”

Goitein scoffed at the claim. “That’s simply not true,” she said, pointing to Little Rock, Arkansas. The document cites President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1957 deployment of National Guard and active-duty troops to enforce desegregation in the schools as an example of an instance in which a governor requested and received help from federal forces. “Far from requesting this deployment, the governor had deployed the Arkansas National Guard to prevent desegregation,” she explained. “Eisenhower actually federalized the National Guard for the purposes of ordering them to stand down. To portray this famous standoff as an incident in which the governor asked for federal help is laughable.” (The document even notes that Gov. Orval Faubus “is famously quoted as having called his own National Guard ‘occupation troops’ after they were federalized.”)

Trump’s pricey urban occupations come amid a welter of authoritarian acts, including a crackdown on domestic enemies and an undeclared war in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean in which the president claims the right to summarily execute persons he deems to be “narco-terrorists.”

Trump unilaterally decreed that 24 “designated terrorist organizations,” or DTOs are in a state of “non-international armed conflict” with the United States. In addition to this secret list of foreign groups, Trump has also ordered his administration to compile a “domestic terrorist organization” list made up of his political foes, despite the fact there is no legal mechanism for labeling exclusively domestic organizations as terrorist groups. Under Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, he instructed his administration to target U.S. progressive groups and their donors as well as political activists who profess undefined anti-American, anti-fascist, or anti-Christian sentiments.

The White House has not responded to repeated requests, for more than a week, to clarify whether those who belong to groups on the administration’s secret “domestic terrorist organization” list are subject to summary execution as are members of groups on the administration’s secret “designated terrorist organizations” list.

Trump’s authoritarian measures have been bolstered by his half-billion-dollar effort to employ troops to chill dissent in America’s cities. “Protest plays an essential role in our democracy and President Trump is hellbent on suppressing it,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “The president is attempting to normalize military policing of protest, but as the founders of this country made abundantly clear, turning troops on civilians is an intolerable threat to our liberties. President Trump is imperiling our First Amendment rights, and we urge the court to deny his application.”

The post Trump’s Military Occupations of U.S. Cities Cost $473 Million and Rising appeared first on The Intercept.

This new list of Latin American cartels and criminal organizations is attached to a classified opinion produced by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to support the administration’s argument that attacks on suspected drug-traffickers in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean are lawful.

The list of groups supposedly engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with the United States includes the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua; Ejército de Liberación Nacional, a Colombian guerrilla insurgency; Cártel de los Soles, a Venezuelan criminal group that the U.S. claims is “headed by Nicolas Maduro and other high-ranking Venezuelan individuals”; and several groups affiliated with the Sinaloa Cartel, according to two of those government sources who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose classified information. The full list has not been disclosed, even to all lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee.

Of the groups now known to be on the list, there is no evidence that they are actually participating in armed conflict with the United States.

“The administration has established a factual and legal alternate universe for the executive branch,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is a specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war. “This is the president, purely by fiat, saying that the U.S. is in conflict with these undisclosed groups without any congressional authorization. So this is not just a secret war, but a secret unauthorized war. Or, in reality, a make-believe war, because most of these groups we probably couldn’t even be in a war with.”

The U.S. military has carried out 17 known attacks on boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean since September, killing at least 70 people. The most recent attack, on a vessel in the Caribbean Sea on Thursday killed three civilians. Military officials admitted to lawmakers that they do not know the identities of all the people on board a vessel before they conduct a lethal strike. Following most of the attacks, War Secretary Pete Hegseth or President Donald Trump have claimed that the victims belonged to an unspecified designated terrorist organization, or DTO.

Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement arrested suspected drug smugglers.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Hegseth, and other administration officials held a briefing with a small, bipartisan group of lawmakers who oversee national security issues for roughly an hour in a secure facility in the Capitol on Wednesday. Attendees said the administration’s legal justifications didn’t hold up.

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“The Trump administration remains unable to provide any credible explanation for its extrajudicial and unauthorized military strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific. It was clear from this briefing that the administration’s legal justifications are dubious and meant to circumvent Congress’ constitutional power on matters of war and peace,” said Rep. Gregory W. Meeks, D-N.Y., the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, after attending the briefing. “I continue to believe these strikes are illegal, and an enormous overreach of executive power.”

The Pentagon has been withholding key information about the attacks and the list of DTOs for almost two months and has still yet to share all the relevant information with all lawmakers.

“While I am glad to have finally been provided the OLC opinion to review, I continue to find it unconvincing and am concerned that the legal reasoning it employs could be used to justify a range of operations that, like the current operations, are deeply problematic,” Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told The Intercept. “It’s unacceptable that only a handful of Members are allowed to understand the Administration’s interpretation of the law. The Administration needs to immediately make the opinion and list of DTOs available for all of Congress to review so that we can conduct our constitutionally mandated oversight of the use of lethal military force.

Senate Republicans blocked a war powers resolution on Thursday aimed at preventing Trump from attacking Venezuela after a bipartisan group of senators warned that the undeclared war on alleged drug smugglers in the region could escalate. The vote to advance the resolution failed with 49 senators supporting it and 51 opposing it.

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The resolution, led by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., would have directed the president “to terminate the use of United States Armed Forces for hostilities within or against Venezuela, unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or specific authorization for use of military force.” The resolution had 15 co-sponsors, including Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.

“If colleagues believe that a war against the narco-traffickers in the ocean or a war against Venezuela is a good idea, then put an [authorization of military force] on the table and debate and vote it, but don’t just hand the power over to an executive,” Kaine said on Thursday. “That runs against everything that this nation was founded on.”

The administration has no plans to seek an authorization for the use of military force similar to the 2001 AUMF, which authorized counterterrorism operations by the U.S. military against those responsible for 9/11, Pentagon briefers told lawmakers last week. “Even if Congress authorized it, this would still be illegal under U.S. and international law because we are not in an armed conflict with these cartels,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee who attended a briefing on the strikes last week, told The Intercept. “And so this is just murder.”

Six government officials, among them two who confirmed the count of 24 DTOs, who spoke to The Intercept over weeks expressed high confidence that most, if not all, of the boats targeted in the strikes have been smuggling drugs. Sources said the United States has been using top secret sensitive compartmented information involving human sources and signals intelligence, provided by the National Security Agency and the CIA, to inform the attacks.

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Lawmakers still expressed concern about U.S. targeting procedures. Himes said he wasn’t confident that U.S. forces are using the same “structure and architecture” employed in past counterterrorism strikes during the war on terror to prevent the killing of innocent civilians, and that sufficient safeguards within the intelligence community may not be in place.

“If they cannot find a connection or show a connection with a DTO, then it goes to the law enforcement route with an interdiction. So that was their decision tree. But nailing them down more on what that connection is and how they show it and what they’re looking for, we didn’t get a lot of good information on that,” said Jacobs. “They know how many people they killed, but they made it seem like they were not really doing any post-strike evidence gathering.”

The people aboard the boats are hardly drug kingpins. An investigation by The Associated Press into the lives of nine of those killed in U.S. strikes found that while they had been smuggling drugs, they were not narco-terrorists or gang leaders but laborers, a fisherman, a motorcycle taxi driver, two were low-level criminals, and one was a local crime boss. All were from a desperately poor area, and most were crewing such boats for the first or second time.

Military briefers have admitted to members of Congress that they cannot satisfy the evidentiary burden necessary to hold or prosecute survivors of the strikes.

Neither U.S. Southern Command, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Justice Department, nor the White House would provide the list of 24 DTOs who it claims are engaged in secret wars with America. The count of 24, according to a single source, was first reported by CNN on Thursday.

The fantasy conflicts between the United States and Tren de Aragua, Ejército de Liberación Nacional, Cártel de los Soles, and various Sinaloa Cartel groups and other criminal organizations are a farce since America’s adversaries do not even know they are considered at war with the U.S., nor do the American people know with whom the U.S. is facing in a supposed state of armed conflict.

Some experts even doubt the Cártel de los Soles — one the 24 DTOs — actually exists, explaining it is more a system of corruption than a group with a leadership structure. It is a foreign analogue to antifa, which the Trump administration claims is a “domestic terror organization” but is actually a set of ideas. Notably, Cártel de los Soles is not even mentioned in a two-volume, 670-page State Department report on global anti-drug operations released earlier this year.

“The bottom line is, these strikes are illegal,” said Finucane. “We need to see the full list of groups that the government has given itself permission to attack without congressional authorization. And Congress needs to push back on this lawless killing and a potential real, illegal war with Venezuela.”

The post Trump Has a Secret List of 24 “Designated Terrorist Organizations.” We Got Some of the Names. appeared first on The Intercept.

But these designations aren’t enough for President Donald Trump. The U.S. government has instead begun drawing up new lists of terrorist organizations without disclosing the identities of the groups to Congress or the American people.

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One of these lists is tied to Trump’s undeclared war in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean, where the U.S. military is summarily executing alleged drug traffickers. There are reportedly dozens of groups on the list, but only two organizations — the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and the Colombian guerrilla group Ejército de Liberación Nacional — are publicly known.

Trump has also ordered his administration to compile a domestic terrorist list made up of his political foes, despite the fact there is no legal mechanism for labeling exclusively domestic organizations as terrorist groups. Under Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, he instructed his administration to target U.S. progressive groups and their donors as well as political activists who profess undefined anti-American, anti-fascist, or anti-Christian sentiments.

Unlike with prior lists, such as the State Department’s register of FTOs, it’s currently impossible to know if you are a member of a domestic terrorist group and what the penalties might include.

“By claiming this authority and by defining a wide range of political views—from anti-Christianity to anti-Americanism—as markers of domestic terrorism, the president has essentially created an enemies list and directed federal agencies to go after them. It is a classic authoritarian move, designed to sow fear and silence opposition to the administration’s policies,” Faiza Patel, the senior director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program told The Intercept.

“Existing laws allow the president to create a list of designated foreign terrorist organizations. Statutes specify the results of being on this list, such as being liable for material support and financial sanctions,” Patel said. “But neither this authority, and none of these laws, authorizes the president to designate domestic groups as terrorist organizations.”

Lawmakers see Trump’s push to build secret terrorist lists as an authoritarian overreach that could result in government violence — or even deadly force — against American citizens exercising their constitutional rights in the United States.

“You can easily see a world where the president of the United States labels protest groups ‘terrorists,’ doesn’t tell anyone, and creates an excuse to unilaterally use the military inside our cities, similar to the way he’s used them in the Caribbean,” Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., said in a Senate floor speech last month. “This time, instead of stopping drug traffickers, it will be stopping Americans, potentially from exercising their right to free speech.”

“I don’t think that’s an irrational fear to have,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said of the possibility of Trump expanding his war on supposed terrorists in the Caribbean and the Pacific to the United States. “I represent a border community. I have a lot of fears about what this will mean for my community and what they’ll try to use these so-called authorities to do domestically.”

The Department of War, Department of Justice, and the White House all failed to provide lists of the groups being targeted to The Intercept. The White House did not respond to repeated requests to clarify whether those on the administration’s domestic enemies list are subject to summary execution.

Antifa, short for anti-fascist, is a decentralized, leftist ideology; a collection of related ideas and political concepts much like feminism or environmentalism. Over the last decade, however, Republicans have blamed antifa for violence and used it as an omnibus term for left-wing activists — as if it were an organization with members and a command structure.

In 2019, during his first term, Trump floated the idea of declaring antifa “a major Organization of Terror,” likening the group MS-13, an international criminal gang that originated in the U.S. that the Trump administration added to the FTO list earlier this year. “The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization,” Trump tweeted in 2020, during protests after the police killing of George Floyd. But then-FBI Director Christopher Wray said antifa was “not a group or an organization” but a “movement or an ideology.” Trump lashed out, calling antifa “well funded ANARCHISTS & THUGS who are protected because the … FBI is simply unable, or unwilling, to find their funding source.” After Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in order to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, Trump blamed “antifa people” for inciting violence. 

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In September, Trump signed an executive order designating antifa as a “domestic terror organization.” He followed it by issuing NSPM-7, which directs the Justice Department and elements of the Intelligence Community and national security establishment to target “anti-fascism … movements” and “domestic terrorist organizations.”

Under U.S. law, the government can designate “foreign terrorist organizations,” a process that typically entails a formal declaration by the secretary of state at the direction of the president, allowing the Treasury Department to impose financial penalties and the Justice Department to prosecute people for providing “material support” to the group. Congress has not passed any law creating a domestic terrorism designation, nor is there a standalone crime of “domestic terrorism.” 

Under NSPM-7, vaguely defined enemies are not only typified by “support for the overthrow of the United States Government,” according to the Trump administration, but also advocacy of opinions clearly protected by the First Amendment including “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as well as “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

Trump’s memorandum calls on Attorney General Pam Bondi to compile a list “of any such groups or entities” to be designated as “domestic terrorist organization[s].” NSPM-7 also directs government agencies to target “all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies—including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them.” 

In response to a request for further information, including the names of the groups on Bondi’s NSPM-7 domestic terror list, senior Justice Department spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre replied: “No comment.” When asked why the United States has a secret list of domestic terror groups and why the information was being withheld from the American people, Baldassarre responded: “And again, no comment.”

“While we don’t yet know exactly how NSPM-7 will be implemented, we do know the dangers of the government targeting groups and individuals based on their First Amendment-protected ideology and beliefs,” Hina Shamsi, the director of the ACLU National Security Project, told The Intercept.

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The Trump administration ramped up its efforts to target domestic enemies in the wake of the killing of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, making wild claims about a vast leftist network that funds and incites violence and investigating whether a foreign government or domestic groups were involved in his murder.

Last week, during a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on politically motivated violence, which also repeatedly referenced Kirk, Chair Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., blamed the left for “organized, coordinated political terror.”

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is now heading a sweeping effort to deploy the weight of the federal government — the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, IRS, Justice Department, and Treasury Department — against liberal and left-wing groups. “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks,” Miller told Vice President JD Vance on Kirk’s podcast on September 15, days after the influencer’s death.

“I will also be strongly recommending that those funding ANTIFA be thoroughly investigated in accordance with the highest legal standards and practices,” Trump posted on Truth Social in September, announcing that he was designating the decentralized movement as a “MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION.” Fox News announced the arrest of a “Portland Antifa lieutenant” last week, mimicking the language of the early- to mid-global war on terror when the United States routinely announced the killing of an endless number of supposed top Al Qaeda and ISIS “lieutenants.” 

Thirty-one members of Congress sent a letter to Trump last month, expressing “serious concerns” about the anti-antifa executive order and NSPM-7, warning that “these directives pose serious constitutional, statutory, and civil liberties risks, especially if used to target political dissent, protest, or ideological speech.”

“Regardless of whether the President agrees with someone’s political views, the Constitution guarantees their right to speak and assemble peacefully. Officials must not label individuals as ‘supporting Antifa’ or ‘coordinating with Antifa’ based solely on their protected speech,” wrote the lawmakers. “In fact, neither the memo nor the executive order clearly defines ‘Antifa’ as a specific entity. Instead, the executive order conflates nonviolent protest and activism with doxing and violent behavior. Without clear definitions and limits, this vague framing could subject lawful political expression and assembly to the same treatment as terrorism.”

Trump’s targeting of domestic enemies comes at the same time he has deployed troops to occupy Los Angeles, Memphis, New Orleans, Chicago, and Portland, Oregon. A federal judge ruled in September that the first of those deployments, which is ongoing, is illegal.

Meanwhile, Trump has been threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 — one of the executive branch’s most potent, oldest, and rarely used emergency powers — and taken aim at other cities he claims “are run by the radical left Democrats,” including San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. “We’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room,” he said in a rambling address to hundreds of generals and admirals in late September. “That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.”

Trump has consistently peddled misinformation to justify federal crackdowns and urban military occupations. Along with claims that American cities are “burning to the ground” beset by “Antifa-led hellfire” and “Violent Radical Left Terrorism,” the president even fabricated a story of hand-to-hand combat between troops and child gangsters from the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua on the streets of Washington, D.C.

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Regularly casting the gang as a bogeyman has served to justify illegal, authoritarian efforts by the administration. In an attempt to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to fast-track deportation of people it says belong to the gang, the Trump administration, for example, claimed Tren de Aragua had invaded the United States. In September, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the government from using the war-time law. “We conclude that the findings do not support that an invasion or a predatory incursion has occurred,” wrote Judge Leslie Southwick.

Since September, Trump has repeatedly killed civilians that he claims are members of Tren de Aragua as part of a campaign of attacks on supposed drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean. That group is one of an unknown number of “designated terrorist organizations,” or DTOs, that Trump has unilaterally decreed to be in a state of “non-international armed conflict” with the United States. A defense official who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity called the DTO label “meaningless.”

The Office of the Secretary of War acknowledged a series of detailed questions by The Intercept about DTOs but would not even say if it knew which DTOs the U.S. is targeting with lethal attacks, much less provide a list of the groups.

Jacobs, despite her role on the Intelligence and Special Operations subcommittee, has yet to see a DTO list. Both she and Slotkin believe that there are now dozens of designated terrorist organizations.

Slotkin noted that when Republican and Democratic members of the Senate Armed Services Committee asked a Senate-confirmed official whether the Pentagon could produce a list of the organizations that are now considered terrorists by the United States, the official declined. “I think we should have as a basic principle that you can’t have a secret list of terrorist organizations that the American public and certainly the U.S. Congress don’t even get to know the names of,” said Slotkin. Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, told The Intercept, “Every American should be alarmed that their President has decided he can wage secret wars against anyone he calls an enemy.”

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has produced a classified legal opinion that justifies the lethal strikes on suspected drug smugglers, according to three government officials who spoke to The Intercept. The opinion argues that the president can authorize summary executions of members of designated cartels because they pose an imminent threat to Americans. The Justice Department failed to reply to The Intercept’s requests for further information.

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Experts on the laws of war say that the OLC opinion provides the president with legal cover to designate drug traffickers as enemy combatants and kill them without due process. This is a major deviation from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which the Coast Guard interdicted drug-trafficking vessels and arrested smugglers, as opposed to summarily executing them.

Sarah Harrison, who advised military leaders on extrajudicial killings in her former role as associate general counsel at the Pentagon, spoke of the dangers of concealing the legal analysis surrounding the administration’s undeclared war on DTOs. “My biggest concern with keeping this secret, including the list of groups the administration says it is at war with, is that it indicates the likelihood of little or no limitation on the use of military force,” she told The Intercept. “What do they have to hide? It seems most likely that they’re wanting to obscure the fact that they think the executive can do things we have traditionally viewed for decades as illegal.”

In 1947, President Harry S. Truman issued an executive order for the government to create a list of organizations engaged in subversive activity against the United States. By the early 1970s, the list had grown to 283 groups. The House Un-American Activities Committee also investigated alleged Communist activity in Hollywood and various New Deal government agencies, compiling an initial list of 90 organizations, many of which it claimed were affiliated with the Communist Party. U.S. attorneys general maintained and updated the list, which grew to 621 groups and publications. The list was abolished in 1974 during the Nixon administration.

Nixon, for his part, maintained a private enemies list, targets for whom the president could — in the words of White House counsel John Dean — “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” Dean said that the government could wield “grant availability, federal contracts, litigation, prosecution, etc.” There were initially 20 names on the list: a mix of politicians, business, and union leaders, journalists, and celebrities. As part of his war on whistleblowers, Nixon had FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover tap the phone of another person on the list, Morton Halperin, who served on Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council staff.

Hoover’s FBI also launched a top-secret program “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” a sprawling list of persons and groups opposed to the Vietnam War, as well as Black leaders, civil rights groups, Native American, and other social justice groups and activists. The FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program — better known as COINTELPRO — was eventually exposed and led to a landmark congressional investigation, the 1975 Church Committee, that resulted in an overhaul of national security and intelligence agencies.

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Post-9/11, however, many of the 1970s reforms were rolled back, leading to renewed abuses of Black, brown, and Muslim communities, and racial, social, environmental, animal rights, and other social justice activists and groups. The Patriot Act, signed into law in the aftermath of the attacks, defined domestic terrorism as acts of intimidation that are “dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States” but did not define it as a crime in and of itself. Instead, the Act was frequently used to surveil people without a legal basis, including those engaged in First Amendment-protected protest and other activities.

The current FBI director, Kash Patel, published his own enemies list, and since taking office, many on it have come under federal investigation or been indicted on criminal charges, including former President Joe Biden, former White House national security adviser John Bolton, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former FBI Director James Comey. Trump has also called for political opponents like Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to be jailed for opposing his deployment of the National Guard to Chicago. The administration has also used the power of the federal government to crack down on immigrants, anti-ICE protesters, and pro-Palestinian activists, among others.

Slotkin, a former CIA analyst who served three tours in Iraq and worked in national security roles at the Pentagon and White House, sees Trump’s new lists as a gateway to further abuses. “They said that they were going to, again, make secret lists of terrorist groups inside the United States and send the full force of the U.S. government against those terrorist organizations. They are not telling anyone about this but asking that law enforcement come up with that list,” she warned in the Senate floor speech last month. “If this administration is not telling us who’s on their secret designated terrorist list for groups in the Caribbean, they’re definitely not going to tell us who’s on their list of domestic terrorist organizations.”

Faiza Patel, of the Brennan Center, also drew attention to the overlapping dangers of the Trump administration’s attacks on suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean and the Pacific and the president’s domestic use of troops. “Designating drug cartels as terrorist organizations for purposes of criminal or financial sanctions laws does not change the lack of legal authority for military force,” she told The Intercept. “Using methods of war against drug traffickers also blurs the line between law enforcement operations and war, a particularly alarming development given the administration’s deployment of National Guard and active-duty soldiers to cities to assist in general crime control and immigration enforcement.”

Trump has teased using urban occupations to hone the skills of the armed forces. “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military,” he told his generals and admirals. Last Wednesday, Trump said he could “send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines — I could send anybody I wanted” into America’s cities.

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Slotkin drew specific attention to Trump’s threats to invoke the Insurrection Act,  which allows the president to circumvent the Posse Comitatus Act, a bedrock 19th-century law banning the use of federal troops to execute domestic law enforcement that is seen as fundamental to the democratic tradition in the United States. “The president is looking for an excuse to send in the U.S. military into our streets — to deploy the U.S. military against his own people — to prompt confrontation, and to hope that that confrontation justifies even more military force and military control,” she warned, noting that the Insurrection Act gives the U.S. military the power to “raid, arrest, and detain.”

“I’ve only seen this kind of thing in other countries,” Slotkin said on MSNBC last Thursday, calling Trump’s use of the “military inside the United States completely and fundamentally un-American in my mind.”

Amid urban occupations and crackdowns on immigrants, activists, and other foes, the Trump administration’s undisclosed enemies’ lists represent a new and dangerous front in their war on disparate but as yet unnamed enemies.

“Trump’s secret designations of DTOs are a naked attempt to use all levers of law enforcement to attack his political enemies rather than protect the people. He is going after those who disagree with him or fight back against his corruption and authoritarianism and trying to classify opposition to his views as ‘domestic terrorism,’” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., told The Intercept. “The attempt to broadly classify domestic terrorism as ‘anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity’ is dangerous for everyone, and keeping the American people in the dark about who he is going after and why is all part of the authoritarian’s playbook.”

But Shamsi, of the ACLU, said that public should not be cowed by the administration’s latest despotic efforts. “We can’t let ourselves be intimidated in our pursuit of human rights and the civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution,” she told The Intercept. “Congressional and state and local officials must also speak up and help make sure the administration does not act in secrecy and without accountability.”

Update: November 4, 2025, 1:39 p.m. ET
This story was updated with a new quote from Faiza Patel, the senior director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program.

The post Are You on Trump’s List of Domestic Terrorists? There’s No Way to Know. appeared first on The Intercept.

Since September 2, the U.S. military has been attacking boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing more than 60 civilians. The Trump administration insists the slayings are permissible because the U.S. is engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations,” or DTOs. Two government officials told The Intercept that the administration secretly declared a “non-international armed conflict” weeks if not months before the first attack of the campaign.

Trump has justified the attacks, in a War Powers report to Congress, under his Article II constitutional authority as commander in chief of the U.S. military and claimed to be acting pursuant to the United States’ inherent right of self-defense as a matter of international law. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has also produced a classified opinion that provides legal cover for the lethal strikes.

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Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement arrested suspected drug smugglers.

The administration has no plans to seek an authorization for the use of military force similar to the 2001 AUMF, which authorized counterterrorism operations by the U.S. military against those responsible for 9/11, Pentagon briefers told lawmakers on Thursday. “Even if Congress authorized it, this would still be illegal under U.S. and international law because we are not in an armed conflict with these cartels,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee who attended the briefing, told The Intercept. “And so this is just murder.”

Jacobs said the Pentagon officials who briefed her on Thursday admitted that the administration does not know the identities of all the individuals who were killed in the strikes. “They said that they do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessels to do the strikes,” Jacobs told The Intercept. “They just need to show a connection to a DTO or affiliate.”

Three people are known to have survived the U.S. attacks: two on an October 16 strike, and one during a series of attacks on October 27. But none have been prosecuted for the supposed drug smuggling for which Trump claims the right to summarily kill them. “They said they could not actually hold or try the individuals that survived one of the attacks — in our country or one of the repatriating countries — because they could not satisfy the evidentiary burden,” said Jacobs. “It led some to speculate that there’s a higher evidentiary standard to hold someone than to kill them, which is problematic.”

Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson did not reply to questions about why the Department of War is unwilling to positively identify the people it is killing and cannot satisfy the evidentiary burden necessary to hold or prosecute suspects.

Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is a specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war, noted that Trump administration’s inability to identify the people it is killing “certainly undermines the labelling of these individuals as ‘narco-terrorists.’”

Jacobs and other government officials who spoke to The Intercept conjectured that the administration may not want to reveal its sources and methods of determining that the targeted craft are smuggling drugs. “These individuals don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. It’s not worth it. If it’s not the leader of the cartel, you’re not burning your sources,” said one government official, referring to so-called top secret sensitive compartmented information involving human sources and signals intelligence integral to the U.S. attacks.

Three government officials who spoke to The Intercept said that the Pentagon deems survivors of strikes in the water to be “unprivileged belligerents,” a term for those who are not entitled to immunity from prosecution for lawful acts of war and do not benefit from prisoner of war status if they fall into enemy hands. The term has been used to designate members of a non-state armed group in a non-international armed conflict. Experts noted that the designation was used during the global war on terror for Al Qaeda and associated groups.

“The problem with DoD calling cartels ‘unprivileged belligerents’ is that the U.S. is not actually in a non-international armed conflict — a legal term of art that, to be applicable, requires specific facts that just aren’t the current reality — and so cannot lawfully use lethal force as a first resort,” said Sarah Harrison, who advised military leaders on extrajudicial killings in her former role as associate general counsel at the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel, International Affairs. “Notwithstanding the fictional narrative being pushed by the White House, the U.S. is not in a war with these groups and the people DoD is targeting are civilians who should be afforded due process.”

Wilson, the Pentagon press secretary, did not reply to a request for comment about the reasons behind the War Department’s use of unprivileged belligerent status for attack survivors.

The Thursday House briefing was led by Rear Adm. Brian H. Bennett, a military officer overseeing Special Operations for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff with assistance from Richard Tilley who serves as the acting assistant secretary of war for special operations and low-intensity conflict. Military lawyers had been scheduled to join them but were withdrawn at the last moment on orders from the Trump administration, according to two government officials who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity. As a result, the Pentagon officials were unable to provide a full explanation of the legal basis for the military strikes.

“At a classified HASC briefing on recent counternarcotics operations in the Pacific and Caribbean, the Pentagon pulled its lawyers — the exact people who would supply a legal justification for these strikes — from the briefing with no notice,” Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., explained. “If the Trump Administration thinks these strikes are legally justified, hiding from Congress sends the opposite message.”

“I found their justification for what they’re doing so flimsy that it makes the case for the Iraq War look like a slam dunk,” he said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “It was that bad.”

The Pentagon has been withholding key information about the attacks and the list of DTOs for almost two months. During a Wednesday press conference, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, blasted the Trump administration for conducting a secret briefing on the legal rationale for the strikes for a select group of Republican senators on Wednesday after Secretary of State Marco Rubio had assured Warner that the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel opinion would be provided.

“Shutting Democrats out of a briefing on U.S. military strikes and withholding the legal justification for those strikes from half the Senate is indefensible and dangerous. Decisions about the use of American military force are not campaign strategy sessions, and they are not the private property of one political party,” Warner said in a statement. “This partisan stunt is a slap in the face to Congress’ war powers responsibilities and to the men and women who serve this country. It also sets a reckless and deeply troubling precedent. The administration must immediately provide to Democrats the same briefing and the OLC opinion justifying these strikes, as Secretary Rubio personally promised me that he would in a face-to-face meeting on Capitol Hill just last week.”

Two government officials told The Intercept that a select group of lawmakers were able to see the OLC opinion and list of DTOs in a restricted setting on Thursday, following Warner’s press conference. Warner’s office did not return a request for comment about whether he was one of those lawmakers.

Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., believes that there may be “dozens” of DTOs. Jacobs agreed. “Dozens is the range,” she told The Intercept.

Jacobs, despite her role on the Intelligence and Special Operations subcommittee, has yet to see either the Justice Department opinion or DTO list. “They told us is that they’re working on getting the OLC memo, the list of DTOs, and one or two other things that we’d asked for over to us, but that they wouldn’t give us a timeline,” she said.

The post Trump Administration Admits It Doesn’t Know Who Exactly It’s Killing in Boat Strikes appeared first on The Intercept.

“I was buried under the rubble and after about one hour my brother came and pulled me out,” one of the survivors told Amnesty. “I was bleeding. … I had a head injury and I lost sight in one eye. … It is a miracle we survived and got out of that place.” The April 28, 2025, strike on the facility in Sa’ada, in Yemen’s northwest, killed 61 detainees and injured another 56, according to Houthi records.

“This was a lethal failure by the U.S. to comply with one of its core obligations under international humanitarian law: to do everything feasible to verify whether the object attacked was a military objective,” said Kristine Beckerle, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, who called on the United States to investigate the attack as a war crime. “The harrowing testimonies from survivors paint a clear picture of a civilian building, packed with detainees, being bombed without distinction.”

Amnesty International interviewed 15 survivors of the attack on the Sa’ada detention center, and people who visited it and two nearby hospitals and their morgues in the immediate aftermath of the strike. (Their names are withheld from the report to protect them from reprisal.) Amnesty’s researchers also analyzed satellite imagery and video footage, including scenes showing bodies strewn across the compound, rescuers pulling badly wounded survivors from rubble, and the injured immigrants in hospitals.

Of the 15 survivors with whom Amnesty International spoke, 14 suffered significant injuries, including lost limbs, serious nerve damage, and head, spine, and chest trauma. Two of the 15 had their legs amputated, one had one of his hands amputated, and one lost one of his eyes.

“I saw 25 injured migrants in the Republican Hospital and nine in Al Talh General Hospital. … They suffered from different fractures and bruises. Some were in critical condition and two had amputated legs,” one witness to the aftermath recalled. “The morgue in the Republican Hospital was overwhelmed and there was no place left for tens of corpses that were still left outside the morgue for the second day.”

Amnesty International requested information about the strikes from Central Command, which overseas military operations in the Middle East, as well as from Joint Special Operations Command, the secretive organization that controls the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, the Army’s Delta Force, and other elite special mission units. Central Command issued a boilerplate response, stating that it is in the process of investigating, takes reports of civilian harm seriously, and assesses them thoroughly. JSOC failed to respond to Amnesty’s request.

Four current and former U.S. officials told The Intercept that JSOC, which operates under Special Operations Command, was responsible for strikes in Yemen during Operation Rough Rider. SOCOM did not answer any of The Intercept’s questions about the strikes or the attack on the Sa’ada detention center.

An original battleground in the U.S. war on terror, Yemen is one of many majority-Muslim nations — from Afghanistan and Iraq to Niger and Somalia — ravaged in the forever wars. More than 940,000 people have died in America’s post-9/11 conflicts due to direct violence, almost 4 million have died indirectly from causes like food insecurity and battered infrastructure, and as many as 60 million people have been displaced, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

The United States has conducted attacks in Yemen since 2002, ranging from commando raids and drone assassinations to cruise missile attacks and conventional airstrikes. U.S. drone strikes there repeatedly killed and maimed civilians. Other Yemenis, including women and children, were massacred by Navy SEALs in a ground raid in 2017.

For years, the U.S. employed a low-profile proxy force to conduct secret counterterrorism missions in Yemen. America also provided weapons, combat training, and “logistical and intelligence support” for the Saudi Arabia-led coalition’s war in Yemen — launched in support of Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who was overthrown by the Iran-backed Houthi rebels — from 2015 until 2021.

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The Real Outrage About the Yemen Signal Group Is That It Called for Attack on Civilian Home

The Pentagon said it conducted strikes on more than 1,000 targets in Yemen between March 15 and April 29, 2025, with notable attacks on civilians bookending the campaign. The disclosure of classified Yemen attack plans in a Signal chat group earlier this year — that included The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, along with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, then-national security adviser Mike Waltz, and Vice President JD Vance — revealed that in order to kill a Houthi official on or about March 15, the U.S. military destroyed a civilian apartment building. “The first target — their top missile guy — we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed,” wrote Waltz on Signal. 

The airstrike monitoring group Airwars tracked reports of at least 224 civilians in Yemen killed by U.S. airstrikes during Operation Rough Rider. This nearly doubled the civilian casualty toll in Yemen from U.S. attacks since 2002, meaning that almost as many civilians were reportedly killed in 52 days as the previous 23 years of airstrikes and commando raids. The Yemen Data Project put the death toll at 238 civilians, at a minimum, and another 467 civilians injured. After the U.S. burned through $1 billion and failed to even achieve air superiority in Yemen, Trump ended the stalemate. Despite having vowed the Houthis would be “completely annihilated,” Trump announced a cessation of hostilities with the Houthis on May 6.

Wes Bryant, a former Pentagon official who previously worked as a Special Operations joint terminal attack controller and called in thousands of strikes against the Islamic State and other terrorist groups across the greater Middle East, said that the large number of strikes in such a short time during Operation Rough Rider stretched the capacity for U.S. forces to conduct adequate target vetting, collateral damage analysis, and civilian harm mitigation processes.

“Although the U.S. military continuously targets and databases potential targets in any theatre or active conflict zone, the ability to conduct updated intelligence vetting in such a short period of time for so many targets is implausible — especially considering the lack of partner forces on the ground and likely lack of any robust human intelligence network,” Bryant told The Intercept. “These limiting factors will also apply to the command’s ability to conduct collateral damage analysis and assessment on risk to civilians — to even properly characterize the civilian environment and pattern of activity in and around these target sets.” He continued, “From direct experience, I can say that there is no possible way these processes were effectively carried out on over a thousand targets.”

The attack on the immigrant detention center was one of the most lethal strikes on civilians of Trump’s 2025 Yemen campaign, according to Airwars. It notably came as the Trump administration was dismantling its Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, or CHMR, efforts, as it sought to eliminate or downsize offices, programs, and positions focused on preventing civilian casualties during U.S. combat operations. Just days before the attack on the migrant detention facility, one Pentagon official told The Intercept that Hegseth’s focus on “lethality” could lead to “wanton killing and wholesale destruction and disregard for law.”

Bryant — who served until earlier this year as the senior analyst and adviser on precision warfare, targeting, and civilian harm mitigation at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence — said Hegseth’s anti-CHMR efforts certainly contributed to the deaths. He pointed to “an incredible failure in civilian environment characterization that should have been blatantly well known by the prosecuting targeting teams and the command.” Bryant noted, along with Amnesty’s report, that the U.S. should have had detailed knowledge of the facility because the Saudi-led coalition using U.S.-made munitions carried out an airstrike on another detention facility within the same prison compound in 2022 that killed more than 90 detainees. “These failures not only reflect the rapid dismantling at the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response program and architecture that the DoD had been building up until the Trump administration,” said Bryant, “but reflect a failure in carrying out even basic targeting competency and collateral damage mitigation practices under existing DoD targeting doctrine and standards.”

Amnesty found that “U.S. authorities should have known that the building it hit on 28 April 2025 was a migrant detention facility.” They noted that the facility had been used for years to detain immigrants and was regularly visited by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Amnesty further noted that it could find no evidence that the detention center was a military objective or that it contained any military objectives. Survivors told Amnesty International that, throughout their time in detention, they were able to see everyone who was present in the building and never saw any Houthi fighters.

“The USA does not seem to have complied with its obligation to do everything feasible to verify whether the object attacked was a military objective,” reads the report. Amnesty called on the Pentagon to investigate the attack as a war crime and promptly make the results of the inquiry public. The group also called on the Pentagon to provide reparations to victims or their families.

Four current and former U.S. officials told The Intercept that JSOC conducted strikes in Yemen during Operation Rough Rider. One of the former defense officials who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity said that CENTCOM and JSOC were both previously responsible for attacks in Yemen, with CENTCOM acting as the overarching authority and JSOC given the prerogative of striking specific targets. Prior to this operation, however, JSOC was given the primary authority for strikes in the region, the official said.

The public generally thinks of JSOC’s special mission units as small teams conducting raids like the 2011 SEAL Team 6 mission that killed Osama bin Laden; the 2015 killing of Islamic State oil and gas “minister” Abu Sayyaf by Delta Force commandos; the 2017 SEAL Team 6 massacre of civilians in Yemen; and a 2019 massacre of North Korean civilians by members of SEAL Team 6. But elite operators have long been central to the U.S. military’s most consequential airstrikes. A JSOC unit, Task Force 48-4, carried out lethal airstrikes in Yemen and Somalia in the early 2010s. Later in the decade, Task Force 111, a JSOC-led unit, was responsible for drone attacks in Somalia, Libya, and Yemen. At the same time, Delta Force commandos, as part of a strike cell known as Talon Anvil, were central to the air war against the Islamic State in Syria.

A 2021 New York Times investigation of the air war in Iraq and Syria found it was plagued by flawed intelligence and imprecise targeting and led to the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children. A 2022 RAND report on the U.S. battle to retake Raqqa, Syria, from ISIS found “military leaders too often lacked a complete picture of conditions on the ground; too often waved off reports of civilian casualties; and too rarely learned any lessons from strikes gone wrong.” While the U.S. estimated 1,457 civilians were killed in the anti-ISIS campaign, Airwars found that the number could be as high as 13,340.

Recently, elite Special Operations forces have been responsible for strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean that have killed dozens of civilians.

Amnesty International received a brief response from CENTCOM on the same day, in August, that it submitted a detailed request for information about the attack on the detention center in Yemen. CENTCOM said it was still “assessing all reports of civilian harm resulting from operations during that time period” and that it took all such reports “seriously” and assessed them “thoroughly.” On Monday, a defense official sent boilerplate language with some of the exact same phrasing to The Intercept. “CENTCOM is assessing all reports of civilian harm resulting from operations during that time period,” the official told The Intercept. “These cases are still ongoing and under review.”

A 2020 study of post-9/11 civilian casualty incidents found most have gone uninvestigated. When they do come under official scrutiny, American military witnesses are interviewed while civilians — victims, survivors, and their family members — are almost totally ignored, “severely compromising the effectiveness of investigations,” according to the Center for Civilians in Conflict and Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute. 

Amnesty International did not receive a response from JSOC prior to publication of the report. “SOCOM doesn’t have anything for you on this,” Col. Allie Weiskopf, the command’s director of public affairs, told The Intercept, in response to questions about JSOC’s role.

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Bryant believed that the attack was most likely a “complete targeting mistake” and called out Hegseth for a complete lack of transparency and accountability. “From my perspective, the Yemen campaign was, at the very least, a gross devolution from U.S. best practices in targeting, civilian harm mitigation, civilian harm investigation and response, and transparency both to the U.S. public and to U.S. policy makers,” he said. “It is very dangerous and telling of what may be to come, especially taken together with the Iran strikes, the narcoterrorism campaign, and the deployment of the U.S. military domestically.”

CENTCOM told The Intercept that it adheres to the law of war and international humanitarian law in all its operations.

“Any way you look at it, whether from the scale of civilian harm or that the U.S. should have known this was not a military target, this is the most egregious U.S. air strike in many years, since at least the campaign against ISIS,” said Brian Castner, the head of crisis research with Amnesty International’s Crisis Response Program. “If CENTCOM takes this seriously, as they said they do, they need to do a transparent investigation and provide compensation to the victims.”

The post Trump’s Yemen Strike Killed 61 Immigrants and No Combatants appeared first on The Intercept.