By Sarah N. Lynch
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats on Wednesday asked the Justice Department to hand over all legal opinions its attorneys have produced to assess the legality of the military’s 13 deadly strikes against suspected drug vessels that have killed about 57 people.
“Summarily killing criminal suspects is prohibited under domestic and international law in both peacetime and wartime,” they wrote in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi that was seen by Reuters.
“These recent strikes raise numerous questions about whether the department provided adequate legal guidance to those involved in ordering, planning, and carrying out the killings.”
The letter was led by Vermont Democratic Senator Peter Welch and signed by all of the committee’s Democratic members, including Ranking Member Dick Durbin.
A DOJ official confirmed receiving the letter and said the military operations ordered are “consistent with the law of armed conflict.”
Since September, the U.S. military has carried out at least 13 strikes against alleged drug vessels, mostly in the Caribbean. The Pentagon has provided few details about the people targeted but has acknowledged some of them include people from Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador.
President Donald Trump’s administration has been tying the governments of Venezuela and, more recently, neighboring Colombia directly to the drug trade, allegations denied by both governments. The administration has not yet provided evidence that the U.S. is under any imminent threat from these vessels, and some legal experts have said the strikes amount to unlawful extrajudicial killings.
The use of the military to attack suspected drug vessels marks a stark departure from how the U.S. has historically dealt with them.
Typically it has fallen to the U.S. Coast Guard to interdict suspected drug vessels. A multi-agency strike force known as “Panama Express,” which was part of the Justice Department’s prosecutor-led Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Forces, would get involved in investigating and prosecuting the drug cases that stemmed from maritime interdictions in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific regions.
The Justice Department has since shut down that organized crime drug task force and transferred its remaining cases to a newly created Homeland Security Task Force.
Lawmakers criticized the department’s decision to shutter that Reagan-era task force and also questioned why federal agents who usually work drug cases have been diverted to pursue immigration enforcement.
“Your department has taken counterproductive steps to undermine our efforts to stem the drug epidemic,” they wrote.
(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama )
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