Inland NW Republicans defend Caribbean boat strikes amid bipartisan scrutiny of potential war crimes

WASHINGTON – Congressional Republicans from the Inland Northwest have largely stood by the Trump administration this week amid bipartisan scrutiny of U.S. military strikes on small boats allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean, after the Pentagon acknowledged launching a second missile to kill two survivors of an attack in September.

Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Adm. Frank Bradley, the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command who oversaw the Sept. 2 attack, met with senior members of Congress in closed-door briefings on Thursday. Afterward, Rep. Adam Smith of Bellevue, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said in a joint statement with his counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee that the administration’s policies “put our service members in extraordinarily difficult positions where they are asked to execute missions that push the boundaries of the law and our values.”

“The video we saw today showed two shipwrecked individuals who had no means to move, much less pose an immediate threat, and yet they were killed by the United States military,” said Smith and Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., who called for the full video of the “double tap” strike to be released to the public.

“There is no question that illicit drugs are a major problem in the United States, but so is the President of the United States taking unilateral lethal action,” the two Democrats said. “Americans must ask themselves: Are we OK with this enormous expansion of the President’s power to kill people without due process?”

While some Republicans have expressed concerns about the legality of the strikes, most have supported the campaign and President Donald Trump’s claim that the alleged drug traffickers are “terrorists” whose illicit commerce is equivalent to an attack on the United States. GOP senators struck down a measure in October that would have halted the strikes under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, a Vietnam War-era law that restricts a president’s authority to start wars.

Risch: ‘No difference’ between drugs and explosives

Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a brief interview Wednesday that he had seen “conclusive evidence” that the boats targeted in the strikes are carrying drugs and he believes they represent a threat to the United States, because so many Americans die of drug overdoses.

More than 80,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2024, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but fentanyl and other opioids account for about 55,000 of those deaths. According to the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan agency that advises Congress, most opioids enter the United States from Mexico or China.

Meanwhile, the predominant drug trafficked to the United States from Venezuela and other Caribbean nations is cocaine, the Drug Enforcement Agency says. According to CDC data, cocaine accounted for about 22,000 overdose deaths in 2024.

Risch, who told The Spokesman-Review in October that he had seen evidence that the boats are carrying not just cocaine but opioids, backed away from that claim on Wednesday.

“Are you going to argue that cocaine doesn’t kill Americans?” he said. “I’m not going to dissect that, as to whether it’s cocaine or opioids or marijuana or anything else. What I am going to say is that there is absolute, 100% concrete evidence that controlled substances, prohibited for sale on the streets of the United States, are being trafficked by those boats coming to the United States.”

The Sept. 2 incident – the first of at least 22 attacks on boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific – has received more attention after the Washington Post reported on Nov. 28 that Bradley had ordered a second strike to kill two survivors who were clinging to the boat’s wreckage after the first missile hit. According to two unnamed sources who spoke to the Post, that followed an order from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to kill everyone on board.

Although Congress hasn’t formally declared war on drug traffickers, Risch said carrying illicit drugs across the ocean “absolutely” constitutes an act of war against the United States.

“If you loaded a boat up with explosives and you were going to distribute it around the United States through a distribution system and those explosives were then detonated and killed Americans, would you have any question at all that that was a lawful activity?” he said.

“To me, there’s no difference between that and drugs. In fact, if anything, I would argue that the drugs are more dangerous, because they’ve got people sucked into using them, and other reasons. But they are a danger to the people of the United States of America, and I have thanked the president personally for putting those drugs on the floor of the ocean. Because every time he does that, he has saved thousands of lives.”

Risch, who also sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was careful not to disclose classified information. He said he couldn’t speak to the legality of the Sept. 2 strikes, deferring to the Justice Department to make that determination.

Zinke: ‘They ain’t fishermen’

Rep. Ryan Zinke, a Republican who represents Western Montana, agreed that a boat carrying drugs is equivalent to an act of war.

“It’s no different than a missile – probably worse – because if they launched a missile, we might lose 200 people,” Zinke said in an interview Wednesday. “What they’re doing is carrying enough drugs to kill thousands.”

Asked whether he makes a distinction between cocaine and opioids like fentanyl, he said no.

“Drugs, weapons, all that kind of stuff, but they’re terrorists,” Zinke said. “We’re in a war on drugs. We’ve been in a war on drugs for a long time.”

Then-President Richard Nixon famously declared a “war on drugs” in 1971, kicking off a supply-side effort to reduce the drug trade. But for all its power as a rhetorical device, no such war has ever been formalized by Congress, which has the sole power to declare war under Article I of the Constitution.

Asked whether the war on drugs justifies airstrikes on drug traffickers, Zinke replied, “The alternative is no enforcement.”

“You can’t match them boat for boat,” said the former Navy SEAL, who said he interdicted boats during his time in the military.

Zinke said he believes the people killed in the boat strikes – at least 87 as of Thursday, according to the Pentagon – “were given due warning.”

On Wednesday, the family of a Colombian man who was killed in a U.S. strike on Sept. 15 filed a complaint against the United States with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, claiming that the 42-year-old was a fisherman who wasn’t carrying drugs.

“They ain’t fishermen,” Zinke said. “Now, I assume the intelligence is at the level where they can make that judgment. And it can’t be just ‘I think so’ – it has to be beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Zinke said he hasn’t personally seen that intelligence, but he knows and trusts Admiral Brady, a fellow Navy SEAL whom he called “an attention-to-detail man.” The congressman said launching a second strike to eliminate a threat is fairly common and can be permitted by the military’s rules of engagement, unless “you have a combatant who puts up his hands and you accept custody.”

Asked whether someone clinging to wreckage in the ocean could reasonably be expected to put up their hands and surrender to aircraft flying overhead, Zinke said, “I would refer to the rules of engagement.” He said he hasn’t seen the rules of engagement that applied in this case, but he assumed they were “to kill or capture terrorists.”

Some Republicans have raised concerns about the legality and morality of the Sept. 2 strikes. In a brief interview on Wednesday, Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Sunnyside, said he welcomes the bipartisan investigations promised by the leaders of both the House and Senate Armed Services committees.

“If this were a declared war, that would seem to go against even the Geneva Convention,” Newhouse said, noting that Congress hasn’t authorized the strikes.

Democrats have been united in condemning the attacks and calling for more transparency from the Defense Department, which Hegseth prefers to call the Department of War. After viewing the full video of the Sept. 2 attack in a closed-door briefing on Thursday, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., called for the Pentagon chief to resign.

“What we heard today was truly disturbing, and more accountability and answers must be provided – not only on this second strike, but on the Trump administration’s broader unauthorized military campaign in the Caribbean,” she said. “Full, unedited video of the second strike must be made public by the Department of Defense as soon as possible.”

Baumgartner: Time to ‘apply maximum pressure’ on Venezuela

In an op-ed published in National Review on Nov. 8, Rep. Michael Baumgartner of Spokane asked and answered a question at the center of the Trump administration’s military campaign in the Caribbean.

“We have to ask: Is Venezuela today a threat to international peace and security – and a direct threat to the United States? Yes, on both counts,” the Eastern Washington Republican wrote, concluding that “It’s time to end appeasement and apply maximum pressure.”

The world’s largest warship, the USS Gerald R. Ford, moved to the Caribbean in November, and the U.S. military currently has some 15,000 troops in the region. That buildup has raised suspicions that Trump’s campaign in the region isn’t primarily about drugs and the American president is seeking to topple his Venezuelan counterpart, Nicolas Maduro.

In an interview on Thursday, Baumgartner said he initially had concerns and questions about the legality of the strikes, their effect on U.S. allies in the region and other issues, but after briefings from administration officials, he concluded that the strikes are in the United States’ interest.

“There’s a tremendous threat of drugs coming into the country, as we’ve seen in places like Spokane,” he said, criticizing the policies of Democratic state leaders in Olympia for exacerbating drug use and making Spokane “one of the best places in the world to use and die from fentanyl.”

Acknowledging that boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific aren’t the source of that fentanyl, Baumgartner said, “I think there’s a bit of a misalignment in the actuality of what drugs are being transported.”

“It is fentanyl that is causing most of the deaths in America, but the strategic nexus and the risk to the U.S. interest is that the same narco-traffickers that are operating out of Venezuela have links to the narco-traffickers in Mexico and in Central America that are moving the fentanyl in,” he said. “And so the strategic risk to the U.S. is that these narcotic traffickers grow so strong, like they have in Mexico, that they begin to subvert the general governance of these countries, like they have in Venezuela and in Honduras.”

After bringing up Honduras, Baumgartner said he hadn’t been briefed by the administration on Trump’s pardon on Monday of Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former Honduran president of the Central American country who was convicted by a U.S. jury of using his position to help import more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States.

Baumgartner conceded that “in isolation, it would be very confusing and counterproductive” for Trump to grant clemency to a former Latin American president guilty of drug trafficking when the U.S. president is accusing Maduro of precisely the same thing, but the congressman said he suspects that the pardon is a strategic move by Trump to encourage Maduro to step down by hinting that the U.S. criminal justice system may look the other way.

“Of course, anyone would be confused about why a government official involved in narco-trafficking would be given exoneration,” Baumgartner said. “But again, I think, given the intensity of the moment in Venezuela, and the demands of the administration that Maduro leave the easy way or the hard way, showing him a pathway that he can leave and have confidence that he would be not prosecuted for his drug offenses, that has a rational nexus to me.”

Trump claimed the prosecution of Hernandez was a “setup” by Democrats, even though the Justice Department revealed that the Honduran president was the subject of a federal investigation in 2019, during Trump’s first term.

Baumgartner, who worked at the U.S. embassy in Iraq and as a government contractor in Afghanistan before entering politics, compared the Trump administration’s approach to combating drug trafficking to the George W. Bush administration’s response to the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“After 9/11, what the Bush administration did – largely Dick Cheney and the folks that worked with him – was to create a legal toolkit and a security toolkit that allowed us to deal with the threat of Islamic terrorism proactively, and as a military matter,” Baumgartner said. “Quite frankly, I think they could do a better job of laying this out to the American people, but what the administration is essentially doing is a parallel effort to what happened with Islamic terrorism.”

Narco-terrorism, he said, is killing more people than Islamic terrorism has killed, while also undermining “key U.S. security interests in the Western Hemisphere” by increasing “migrant flows, criminal lawlessness and lack of good governance.” But despite tens of thousands of Americans dying of drug overdoses each year, he said the country is more politically divided over the response because there hasn’t been “a galvanizing event” like 9/11.

Baumgartner said he thinks Congress should authorize the strikes because they’re in the nation’s interest, but he defended Trump’s authority to use military force without lawmakers officially authorizing it. He pointed out that the U.S. strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen earlier this year were conducted under a 24-year-old authorization passed by Congress at a time when almost none of the legislature’s current members were there.

“The American people understand the damage of drugs and how devastating they have been,” the congressman said. “So if you accept the premise that I do, that it’s every bit as significant if not worse than Islamic terrorism, and you accept that the only practical way to deal with this is to expand the toolkit – that it’s not a law enforcement issue; it’s a national security, full-use-of-force-and-America’s-assets issue – then you can follow the logic and the reasoning to the legality and the appropriateness of what’s going on.”