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<\/p>\nU.S. military forces ‘remain postured’ to carry out further strikes on drug cartels that have already killed 17 people, a Pentagon notice said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Trump says US forces killed 11 cartel suspects in Caribbean strike<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump announced that U.S. forces killed 11 alleged Tren de Aragua members in a naval strike amid escalating counterdrug operations.<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump<\/a> has determined that the United States is in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels, according to a notice the Pentagon sent to some members of Congress this week, as the Trump administration is poised to ramp up a counter-cartel operation that has so far killed 17 people<\/a>.<\/p>\n Although the last deadly strike on a boat<\/a> that killed three people on Sept. 15 was “limited in scope, U.S. forces remain postured to carry out military operations as necessary to prevent further deaths or injury to American citizens by eliminating the threat posed by these designated terrorist organizations,” said the text of the notice obtained by USA TODAY.<\/p>\n The Trump administration designated multiple drug cartels<\/a> as foreign terrorist organizations in February. In recent months, the military has consolidated a massive amount<\/a> of naval firepower in the Caribbean Sea, including four Navy missile-guided destroyers and an amphibious assault ship.<\/p>\n Because drug cartels “are now transnational and conduct ongoing attacks throughout the Western Hemisphere,” Trump determined they are “non-state armed groups” and that “their actions constitute an armed attack against the United States,” according to the notice.<\/p>\n The military launched the first deadly strike<\/a> on a boat off the coast of Venezuela, killing 11 people, on Sept. 2. In the weeks since, two additional strikes each killed three people.<\/p>\n The notice said Trump directed the military to strike the boat “in compliance with the law of armed conflict.” Human rights advocates<\/a> and former military lawyers<\/a> have decried the strikes as illegal and unconstitutional and have said they amounted to extrajudicial killings. Neither the White House nor the Pentagon have released proof that the boats they struck and the people killed were trafficking drugs, or were affiliated with cartels.<\/p>\n Trump has not unveiled a new authorization for the use of military force to congressionally clear the military operation, although a draft bill that would grant him the power to do so is circulating in Congress, The New York Times reported<\/a> in September.<\/p>\n The Times earlier reported<\/a> that Trump signed a secret directive in July authorizing the military to use lethal force against cartels \u2013 the administration has also never publicly released that order.<\/p>\n The strikes have also fed speculation<\/a> that the Trump administration may be preparing to launch a military operation on Venezuelan territory. Although Trump and his officials have often urged action to stop the flow of fentanyl, Venezuelan cartels account for a small fraction of the fentanyl found in the U.S., which mostly comes from Mexico, according to experts<\/a> on the drug trade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"U.S. military forces ‘remain postured’ to carry out further strikes on drug cartels that have already killed 17…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":201293,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,25246,75920,1127,1340,6052,10071,14804,12,685,22046,15606,13962,4379,37261,34645,3,573,13470,34647,111,3479,9799,2830,12955,13692,21,19,22,20,25,24,18232,1139,84083],"class_list":["post-201292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-branch","tag-cartels","tag-conflict","tag-congress","tag-defense","tag-department","tag-donald","tag-donald-trump","tag-drug","tag-drug-cartels","tag-executive","tag-executive-branch","tag-military","tag-navy","tag-negative","tag-news","tag-of","tag-overall","tag-overall-negative","tag-politics","tag-trump","tag-u-s-congress","tag-u-s","tag-u-s-department-of-defense","tag-u0026","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa","tag-venezuela","tag-war","tag-war-u0026-conflict"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201292\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/201293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}