WASHINGTON \u2014 The U.S. military said Thursday that it had conducted two more strikes against boats it said were smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing five people.<\/p>\n
U.S. Southern Command posted on social media, \u201cIntelligence confirmed that the vessels were transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and were engaged in narco-trafficking operations,\u201d though it did not provide evidence. It posted videos of each boat speeding through water before being struck by an explosion.<\/p>\n
The military said three people in one vessel and two in the other were killed.<\/p>\n
The attacks brought the total number of known boat strikes<\/a> to 28 while at least 104 people have been killed, according to numbers announced by the Trump administration. President Donald Trump has justified the attacks<\/a> as a necessary escalation to stem the flow of drugs into the United States and asserted the U.S. is engaged in an \u201carmed conflict\u201d with drug cartels<\/a>.<\/p>\n The administration is facing increasing scrutiny from lawmakers<\/a> over the boat strike campaign. The first attack in early September involved a follow-up strike that killed two survivors<\/a> clinging to the wreckage of a boat after the first hit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON \u2014 The U.S. military said Thursday that it had conducted two more strikes against boats it said…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":357394,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-357393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357393","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=357393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357393\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/357394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}