MAGA Senator Says Didn’t See Proof of Trump’s Main Claim on Drug Boats
At least one Republican is encouraging the Defense Department to blow up boats in the Carribbean—even if the ships have no apparent plans to enter U.S. waters.
New reports indicate that before the Pentagon double-tapped a boat on September 2, mercilessly killing a pair of survivors who clung to the flotsam, officials knew that the small watercraft was headed to Suriname and then to Europe or Africa—not the United States.
Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton told NBC News’s Kristin Welker Sunday that he wasn’t just “comfortable” that the military had bombed a ship in international waters that had no intention of arriving in the U.S., but that he would actually like the government to “continue” the practice.
“Is there any hard evidence that shows this particular boat was headed to the United States?” asked Welker.
“That didn’t come up in my briefing,” Cotton said. “But again, there’s very reliable, multiple sources of intelligence that tells us this boat had drugs on it, that everyone on this boat is associated with these designated foreign terrorist organizations that are trying to kill American children.”
“Are you comfortable having the United States target a boat in which you have not seen evidence that it’s actually heading to the United States?” Welker pressed.
“I’m not just comfortable with it, I want to continue it,” Cotton said.
Since early September, the U.S. has conducted at least 22 strikes on small boats traversing the Caribbean that Trump administration officials have deemed—without an investigation or interdiction—were smuggling drugs. At least 86 people have been killed in the attacks.
The White House has defended the violence, chalking it up to allegedly necessary efforts to thwart the pipeline of fentanyl into the country. But Donald Trump has simultaneously leveraged the aggression to try to shove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of power, something that he tried and failed to do in 2019.
“How is a boat that’s not heading to the United States an imminent threat to this country, senator?” Welker said at another point in the interview.
“Well, that’s one possibility,” Cotton said, explaining that he’s heard reports that some smaller watercraft “link up” with larger boats to pass drugs into the country. “I didn’t hear that specifically from Admiral [Frank “Mitch”] Bradley in my briefing, but what we know is that these drug cartels … are trafficking drugs to our shores.”
Other lawmakers that were briefed on the September 2 double tap left the meeting appalled by the country’s actions, relaying to members of the media that they were “deeply disturbed” by the barbarity of the killings.
“What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service,” Representative Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Thursday. “You have two individuals [in] clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, [who] were killed by the United States.”
