Ever since Donald Trump started to conduct strikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, everyone has been waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Quite a few people believe that the president is using the rationale as a way to start a war with Venezuela to remove its president from power, but the second strike controversy that erupted from an initial hit that took place in September has threatened to derail any plans Trump may have had.
Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle are now making moves to block Trump by limiting his presidential powers as well as removing funding for the operations.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has been a nightmare for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on this front.
He has stood against the strikes from the outset, but now he is going after Hegseth’s professional reputation, calling him incompetent.
He stated, “Secretary Hegseth said he had no knowledge of this and it did not happen. It was fake news. It didn’t happen. And then the next day, from the podium of the White House, they’re saying it did happen.” Paul continued, “So, either he was lying to us on Sunday, or he’s incompetent and didn’t know it had happened.”
With all the outrage over the second strike that followed a first boat attack on Sept. 2, members of Congress have been demanding more transparency over the strike. And for the first time, we really started to see a bit of an uprising among the GOP regarding the legality of the strikes.
The commanding officer, Admiral Frank M. Bradley, was called before Congress to show lawmakers video footage of the strike as well as to explain his thinking when he approved the second wave of missiles.
With two survivors trying to cling to the wreckage, Bradley ordered the second strike. He reasoned that he did not want the survivors to reach out to other drug boats in the area, saying that he believed they were trying to complete their trafficking run, so they were still considered a threat.
Some lawmakers, such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), himself a military veteran, called the strike “righteous,” but not everyone saw it that way, and that included some Republicans.
Democrats and those opposed to these strikes are already using this strike as a way to remove funding and presidential powers that Trump is using to conduct them. For instance, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) brought up a recent Trump pardon, stating, “If President Trump can pardon a convicted narco-terrorist trafficker, how does this campaign where we are targeting and killing folks on the open ocean to prevent their trafficking of drugs anywhere, how is that legitimate?”
The Democrats and a handful of Republicans who are against the strikes are now looking at legislation that would defund these operations and dial back Trump’s powers to require congressional approval for any such attacks.
Even though Republican pushback is limited so far, it looks like it could be enough to override a Trump veto of any legislation proposed. Geoff Ramsey, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council international affairs think tank, stated, "At this point I think we have to assume that increased Congressional oversight will make military action inside Venezuela less likely, unless the White House presents a clearer case for it.”
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly responded to the reports, "As President Trump has said, all options are on the table as he works to combat the scourge of narcoterrorism that has resulted in the needless deaths of thousands of innocent Americans. All of these decisive strikes have been in international waters against designated narcoterrorists bringing deadly poison to our shores."
For all the outrage over Hegseth and his alleged order, the initial report of him saying that everyone on the boat must be killed appears to have been debunked. If you look through the two initial reports that came from the Washington Post and the New York Times, they are similarly sourced, but the Post appears to trust a single unnamed source for its conclusion, while the Times goes with the overwhelming majority of sources that never heard or saw such an order given by Hegseth. That being the case, I think Hegseth will be in the clear. So, if there are any “war crime” allegations made, I think it will be Bradley who faces the brunt of it.
