Was The U.S. Attack On A Venezuelan Boat A War Crime?

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I'm Terry Gross.

My guest, Alex Horton, is the reporter who broke the story that's been dominating the news since last Friday when it was published in the Washington Post.

It's about what happened on September 2nd when the U.S. military carried out the first deadly strike on a Venezuelan boat in the Caribbean.
All 11 aboard were killed.

The Trump administration alleged the targets were narco-terrorists and that the boat was carrying drugs despite providing no evidence. However, two of the crew actually survived the initial strike.

They were alive in the water holding on to the wreckage when they were killed in a subsequent strike.

Horton and his colleague Ellen Nakashima reported that the command to kill the survivors was issued by Admiral Frank Bradley, the Special Operations Commander overseeing the mission, and that he was complying with Defense Secretary Pete Hexeth's verbal command to kill everyone on board.

But Hexeth's order came before the actual strikes. The Washington Post report led to House and Senate lawmakers from both sides of the aisle to call for reviews of the boat strikes.

Some are raising the question of whether this amounts to a war crime or murder. The U.S.

military has conducted strikes on at least 20 other vessels of alleged drug smugglers, killing dozens in the last few months.

This may be part of the Trump administration's pressure campaign to get Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro to relinquish power and the possibility that the U.S.

could go to war with Venezuela if he doesn't. That's something we'll discuss later in the interview.
Alex Horton is a Washington Post national security reporter focused on the U.S. military.

We recorded our interview yesterday morning. Later in the day, President Donald Trump and Secretary Pete Hexeth commented on the story during a cabinet meeting.

So we spoke to Horton again this morning to get his response to what was said. We'll hear that in a few minutes.

But the first part of this interview sets up what happened during the September 2nd attack.

Alex Horton, welcome to Fresh Air. I want you to describe the story that you broke on Friday.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Terry.

The strike was the first one that the Pentagon undertook in its mission directed from the White House to stop drug trafficking and drug traffickers from bringing their drugs into the United States.

So there was this entire apparatus that was surged into the Caribbean. There's warships, there's aircraft carriers, and what you describe is

a buildup for this pressure campaign. But at the same time, there was a parallel mission to go after drug traffickers, particularly in speedboats and in semi-submersibles.

Really, the business and the last few miles to get to their distribution point.

So, you know, what we know from our reporting now is this first mission and some of the ones that followed were not undertaken by these forces that were in the region.

This wasn't a matter of fighter jets and destroyers. It was an elite team of special operators from SEAL Team 6.
This is the same unit that went on the mission to kill Osama bin Laden.

These are the ones you call for the most high-stakes missions that can be done. So on September 2nd, they observed a boat that they grew increasingly confident had drugs.

And once they reached a certain level of confidence that this boat was carrying drugs, Secretary Hegseth, who was overseeing the operation that day, he is what's known as the target engagement authority.

What he says goes on to strike a target, and he authorized a strike to be taken.

So once that decision was made to strike the boat, Admiral Frank Bradley, who was at the time the Joint Special Operations Commander, authorized a missile to hit that boat.

The commanders had watched it for some time burned, and they felt pretty good that everyone aboard was killed. But watching it live stream? They were watching a live drone surveillance video of it.

But once the smoke cleared, they saw there were two survivors. And Admiral Bradley,

acting on his orders and guidance from Exeth that he wanted people in that boat to be killed, ordered a second strike.

And his rationale at the time, during that moment, was they could be picked up by other traffickers and the drugs could be picked up too.

And the drugs are the ultimate mission, so they needed to do something about that. So Admiral Bradley authorized that second strike on those survivors.

And from what we heard from someone who watched it, those two men were blown apart in the water.

So you served in the Army infantry in Iraq, and you're familiar with certain rules of engagement. And you know the difference between attacking survivors at sea versus on land.

So tell us what the rules of engagement are in the sea with a shipwreck like this where the survivors are clinging to the remains of the ship for their life.

Aaron Ross Powell, yeah, there's a lot of distinction between the two. And like you said, I'm a land guy.

You know, the maritime domain is less familiar to me, but here's how I understand it and what law of war experts have laid out.

When you're fighting someone on land in combat, there's a number of places you can go. You You can retreat to another room.
You could patch yourself up in a corner if you're shot.

You have the ability to call other people on the radio to come get you in a vehicle.

There are other circumstances of where you could conceal yourself and maybe rearm and regroup before your enemy has a chance to figure out what has happened to you.

It's a pretty low standard to reattack someone.

Can you give us an example of what you mean? Sure. You know, one moment comes to mind when I was with my platoon in Dialla province in 2007.
So this was, you know, the most violent year of the surge.

We were fighting street to street and house to house with the group that would become the Islamic State. And we were on patrol on a particularly heavy fighting day.

And we set up in a school to sort of look out over some rooftops. And we watched a two-man machine gun team set up and put their gun in our direction to get ready to fire.

So several of us shot them while they were setting up. They stopped moving for the most part.
We kept shooting just to make sure that they were dead. We couldn't go there and check.

And then after a few minutes, we called in an Apache gunship to shoot a hellfire into the building to do two things. One, to make sure they were dead.

And two, to kill any other militants that we weren't even sure about, that we didn't see at the time. And that was, that's permissible because we had an engagement.

We knew there were armed militants in the area. We We knew civilians were, by and large, had evacuated.
And, you know, we couldn't be sure that they were killed until we got closer to them.

If we were to have gotten closer to them, this calculus would change. You know, we would see they were wounded.

And if they cannot reach a gun or if they don't have explosives on them, then it would become our obligation and responsibility to help them. Compare that to the rules at sea after a shipwreck.

There's a very stark line between these two, and it's much less forgiving for this type of environment. If a U.S.

ship strikes a Navy vessel and it goes down, or it's basically a wreck that can't function or move or fire back, and there are sailors in the water,

unless they are engaging you with a weapon,

they are essentially, as the law says, shipwrecked. They have no ability to do anything except wade in the water and try to survive.
They have no ability to retreat.

They certainly don't have an option to get away from you.

And they have very few, if any, ways where they could play a trick on you and try to ambush you if you came to retrieve them. So there are very clear protections.

And this came out of World War II when

this happened on both the Allies and the Axis side of people who were shipwrecked getting engaged when they couldn't do anything about it.

So now the rule for international war and lawfare is

you need to protect people who are shipwrecked and you can't shoot them again in a circumstance like this. Now, there is room for nuance.

You know, how destroyed was that boat? Did Bradley make a determination that it was still seaworthy?

That part's unclear at this moment.

So there is some wiggle room if you want to say they were legitimate targets because they could have gotten out of there.

Was Secretary Heckseth's order ambiguous?

Did the order need to be more specific?

We're still trying to understand the contours of that order, that verbal order. You know, the manner in which he gave it.

Was it a swashbuckling swagger type of thing, as he is prone to do as the Defense Secretary? Was it a formal directive to Bradley and how many people heard it?

These are all things we're still trying to figure out.

Speaking of swashbuckling orders, I want to play something Hexeth said to military leaders when he gathered military leaders from around the globe in Quantico, Virginia on September 30th.

We fight to win.

We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy.

We also don't fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country.

No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement. Just common sense, maximum lethality, and authority for warfighters.

So, Alex, is Hexeth saying we're just ignoring the rules of engagement now because we decided to?

You know, this is something that the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees are looking to entangle is any number of things to include, you know, what were the authorities taken and do they violate any rules of engagement.

You know, I think it's important to remember, you know, Hexeth, I think, made it pretty crystal clear his view on this.

As you may know, you know, before he was Defense Secretary, one of his priorities while he was a Fox News host on the weekends was to champion Iraq and Afghanistan veterans that he felt were unfairly prosecuted for war crimes.

And there were a number that, you know, weren't just accused, but were convicted.

He talked about this consistently, that he feels military attorneys who offer the advice of how to conduct yourself lawfully, that it's too overbearing, it's too bureaucratic of a process, and too soft.

And he would prefer that war is left to what he calls the warfighters and not to the military lawyers.

And the consensus of military law experts have said that all of this talk about the rules of engagement, that all of that is an academic exercise that's besides the point that these are civilian traffickers who are alleged criminals, but not lawful combatants.

So therefore, you know, everything that I laid out about, you know, what it's like to be in combat and making these decisions and the distinctions, what they're saying is this, it is all moot because this is homicide or murder on the high seas rather than this trying to pick apart the nuances of military law.

That is, it is a separate thing entirely.

If you're just joining us, my guest is Alex Horton. He's a Washington Post national security reporter.
We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air.

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Let's get back to my interview with Alex Horton, a Washington Post Post national security reporter.

He was the lead reporter on the story he broke with his colleague Ellen Nakashima last Friday about the U.S. military strike on an alleged Venezuelan drug smuggling boat in early September.

After nine of the 11 people on board were killed, two survivors were in the water clinging to the wreckage. They were killed in a subsequent strike.

According to Horton's reporting, the admiral who gave the command to kill the survivors was in compliance with Defense Secretary Pete Hexeth's order to kill all the people aboard.

The order was issued before the attack. We recorded our interview yesterday morning.
Later in the day, President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hexeth commented on the story in a cabinet meeting.

Horton returned to fresh air this morning so I could ask him about his reaction to what they said.

Well, let's hear what Trump and Hexeth had to say at yesterday's cabinet meeting. Let's start with Hexeth.
Here's his comment.

Now, the first couple of strikes, as you would, as any leader would want, you want to own that responsibility.

So I said, I'm going to be the one to make the call after getting all the information and make sure it's the right strike. That was September 2nd.

There's a lot of intelligence that goes into that building that case and understanding that a lot of people providing information. I watched that first strike live.

As you can imagine, at the Department of War, we've got a lot of things to do.

So I didn't stick around for the hour and two hours, whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs. So I moved on to my next meeting.

A couple of hours later, I learned that that commander had made the, which he had the complete authority to do.

And by the way, Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat. He sunk the boat, sunk the boat, and eliminated the threat.
And he was the right call.

We have his back. And the American people are safer because narco-terrorists know you can't bring drugs through the water and eventually on land if necessary

to the American people. We will eliminate that threat and we're proud to do it.
So you didn't see any survivors, to be clear, after that first strike? You personally?

I did not personally see survivors, but I stand because the thing was on fire. It was exploded in fire and smoke.
You can't see anything. You got digital.

This is called the fog of war. This is what you and the press don't understand.

You sit in your air-conditioned offices or up on Capitol Hill and you nitpick and you plant fake stories in in the Washington Post about kill everybody phrases on anonymous sources not based in anything, not based in any truth at all.

And then you want to throw up really irresponsible terms about American heroes, about the judgment that they made.

I wrote a whole book on this topic because of what politicians and the press does to warfighters.

President Trump has empowered commanders, commanders to do what is necessary, which is dark and difficult things in the dead of night on behalf of the American people.

We support them and we will stop the poisoning of the American people.

Okay, that was Pete Hegseth yesterday at a cabinet meeting with President Trump. So he attacked the Washington Post reporting.

I'm assuming he's referring to the article that you were the lead reporter of last Friday about the strike. Has he singled out any facts that you reported in that investigative article?

As untrue? Yeah.

The Pentagon and the White House have contended that Hegseth did not say in so many words to kill everyone on the boat before the first strike occurred, but everything else, they've essentially corroborated our reporting.

This bit about Hexeth not being around for the second strike, you know, that was our understanding and belief, but we didn't have enough reporting to put that in the story the first time.

But he confirmed that he was out of the room when Admiral Bradley made the decision. to strike the two people in the water.

And we reported as such that Bradley made that call himself and ordered that strike. Our reporting was that Hexeth made it clear to Admiral Bradley that he wanted to kill everyone in the boat.

So what our reporting says is Bradley executed that first strike and then minutes later, when it was clear there were survivors, ordered the second strike to comply with that intent to kill everyone on board.

And do you stand by the fact that he did say kill them all?

Yes. We don't know his exact verbiage, but that was his

message to folks like Admiral Bradley.

Does it make sense to you that Hexeth would leave without seeing the final results of the strike? Because he has a busy job and needed to go to a meeting.

He is right that he has a busy job and there's a lot to do.

What he's talking about is what we reported too, that everyone believed that the strike was a lethal success and they did the original intent, which was to kill them.

And since the boat was on fire and obscured what was happening there, that I think,

based on folks I've spoken to, that people just assumed that the mission was over. There was nothing else to do.
So, what it sounds like is he watched it. He saw it.
It was on fire.

He believed it was mission accomplished, and he went on with his day.

Well, let's move on to what President Trump said at the cabinet meeting yesterday.

So, here's President Trump. As far as the attack is concerned,

it wasn't one strike, two strikes, three strikes. Somebody asked me a question about the second strike.
I didn't know about the second strike. I didn't know anything about people.

I wasn't involved in it. I knew they took out a vote.
But I would say this.

They had a strike. I hear the gentleman that was in charge of that is extraordinary.
He's an extraordinary person. I'll let Pete speak about him.
But Pete was satisfied.

Pete didn't know about second attack having to do with two people,

and

I guess Pete would have to speak to it. I can say this.
I want those boats taken out, and if we have to, we'll attack on land also, just like we attack on sea.

So that was President Trump yesterday speaking at a Cabinet meeting. So he said he hadn't gotten a lot of information.
He's the Commander-in-Chief.

Shouldn't he be demanding a detailed briefing right afterwards? I mean, he's not a passive recipient of these things.

I mean, it really depends on how this was packaged for everyone.

You know, when a mission like this happens, there's the after-action review, and a lot of times it's a very short and succinct summary of what happened.

And it could be that when this was rolled up for Hexeth's review or for Trump's review, if it even went to the White House, would say something to the effect of, you know, on September 2nd, the task force carried out a mission mission targeting one vessel with 11 crew, 11 crew KIA with four weapons released.

It might say something to that effect. Does it go into a complete narrative of the decision-making? Maybe and maybe not.

So it could be that they didn't understand, you know, the finer details of the events, just that the overall ending was the same of 11 people were killed.

And that's what Trump put on TrueSocial later that day, was 11 people were killed. And that is an accurate summary of what happened.
didn't get into the how they got there but that's that is true

it's my understanding that the policy on survivors changed after the first attack on venezuelan boats in early september um when did it change and how did it change

oh we don't know and we're still trying to figure that out you know we reported in our first story that there was a greater emphasis in planning in strikes to account for the possibility of survivors after that first strike but we don't know who directed it in what form it took, but we do know that it, you know, later on in other strikes, it led to a rescue mission to recover two survivors.

I think just as likely and maybe even more likely is

they didn't think clearly enough through the process to account for survivors because they were confident that when you hit an unarmored, essentially a fishing boat at sea with a missile, that everyone's going to die.

But here's the very first strike and that didn't happen.

I think what is pretty possible here is they regrouped after the first strike was over and everyone was dead.

And they said, perhaps we should account for this in our planning to what do we do if there's a survivor? What are some of the things?

We need to just be more deliberate about that.

I think that's probably the more likely event is they realized that this was a potential gap in their planning and they addressed it after that.

So there are people in Congress, the military, legal experts, former JAGs, thinking that this attack wasn't legal.

And there's a debate between whether it was a war crime or murder, whether it's a war offense or a criminal offense.

So how significant is that? The difference between those two? Aaron Powell, it's pretty significant, and it has to be one or the other. It can't be both, really.

Just because you use the military doesn't mean whoever you're attacking is a combatant or a lawful target. You have to be attacking other combatants.

So that's one thing to underline is just because the U.S. military was involved doesn't mean it automatically is in this basket of permissible or impermissible conduct in military operations.

You know, it would be the same thing if they shot protesters in downtown L.A. You know, they're not lawful military targets and you can't use them that way.

Then the question becomes, well, is it this other thing?

Are they saying that they're fighting a group of combatants and they're really just killing civilians who are criminals.

You know, I'm not a legal expert, and I don't know what venue this would be discussed, but these are the questions that the Hill

and others are trying to ascertain: where do we go from here, who's culpable, and for what?

Aaron Powell, so Admiral Bradley is a former head of JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, whose work includes the military's most sensitive and dangerous missions.

So you'd think that he would know what is a legal and illegal order. Yes.
And you'd also think he'd know that you're not supposed to obey an illegal command.

During that operation, he was operating in the position of joint special operations commander.

Since then, he has been promoted to the four-star position of special operations commander, which is above what he was doing before.

So now he oversees all matters of special operations within the military. But an important point about his background is a couple things.
One, he's in the Navy, right?

So he is attuned and has the cultural and institutional fluency of what you do in a maritime situation. It's part of the culture.
I was in the Army. I didn't know this stuff.
I was a land guy.

He's a sea guy. He would understand this much better when it comes to the maritime restrictions and legalities of who you can strike and when you can strike them in the water.

The second part of that, though, is throughout his Navy career, he came through that Navy SEAL pipeline. You know, he was a member of SEAL Team 6, the same group that carried out the mission.

So his career has been defined

by two decades of

low-intensity conflict against insurgents who are often fighting in austere environments and fighting in a very specific way.

And

I've spoken to some military lawyers about this.

The idea that I mentioned before about being on land is a lot more permissible permissible when you can reattack somebody, you have to wonder how much of Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria and

any number of other conflicts that the U.S. has been in over the last two decades, how much of that understanding and that finesse of dealing in that way has seeped into the rest of the military.

Aaron Ross Powell, it sounds as if Hexeth might be trying to

blame Bradley for what happened,

as opposed to taking any responsibility for it while praising Bradley at the same time. Let me read the social media post that he wrote on Monday of this week.
Let's make one thing crystal clear.

Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he's made on the September 2nd mission and all others since.

America is fortunate to have such men protecting us. When this Department of War says, says, we have the back of our warriors, we mean it.

Okay, so it's a very praiseworthy thing to say of Bradley, but it's also blaming him.

He stands behind him, but he wants to footstom that Admiral Bradley was the one who took that second strike.

And by the way, this is something we articulated pretty carefully and clearly in the story, that Bradley, on his own, determined he was going to take that second strike.

But his justification and the framing in his mind mind was he was going to fulfill the original order that Exeth had.

Aaron Powell, getting back to the two survivors of the first attack on a boat from Venezuela allegedly carrying narcotics, allegedly fentanyl. Do you think that that puts the U.S.
military at risk?

Like if we can kill two survivors against our own rules of engagement,

are survivors of an attacked boat that is shipwrecked, an American boat, are they more likely to be killed

with the U.S. setting the example that it's okay?

And I'm asking you this both as a journalist, but also as a former member of the military in Iraq. You know, I think it's a bit hypothetical.

I mean, there's reasons why you conduct yourself in a professional manner in a war, and you do that, not because it's the right thing, but the U.S.

has always,

and not perfectly, though, has tried to set a different standard that is more than the adversaries, like Russia and China and Iran.

That, you know, we have a tough military, we have a lethal military, we will kill you with force, but when a hurricane comes, we're going to help you out too, right?

And setting the difference and distinction of what a world leader is and how it conducts itself is also just a good example to set. Because in a conflict, say with China,

if you put torpedoes into 10 boats and in all 10 boats

there were Chinese sailors in the water and the next order was to strafe them with fighter jets and kill them without any ability for them to be rescued or patched up or wounded or whatever.

If China sees that, it says, well, why do we have to follow the rules? If the U.S. doesn't do it, then it doesn't matter what we do.

And there is this, in warfare, there is sometimes this tit for tat that they do it and therefore the gloves are off. And that could happen happen in small ways and in big ways.

And you do not want to be an American sailor who goes down with the ship and see a Chinese plane coming and be like, man, I really wish my buddies in the other squadron didn't shoot up those survivors because that pilot's going to feel a whole different set of ways about whether he can kill me or not.

That is a concern. I mean, it's still hypothetical, but this is why.
We want to have these guardrails in warfare so we can set an example.

example, but also we need to be able to say we're doing the right thing, that we're following orders that are lawful.

We have confidence in our leaders and we will execute those orders.

If you're just joining us, my guest is Alex Horton. He's a Washington Post national security reporter.
We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air.

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So, who might be liable for violating the law of armed conflict or liable for murder?

That's something that really needs to be unspooled. The fair and accurate answer is, I don't know.

I can tell you what law of experts have sort of speculated on, but they still need more information because the other things that matter have consequence to that answer.

Did Edmond Bradley misinterpret what Hexeth said?

Did Bradley figure that that boat was seaworthy or they needed to attack the drugs and the people were just collateral rather than trying to kill the people themselves is another thing.

During the ISIS war, there was a permissible target

because fuel was being sold to finance terror operations that you could strike fuel depots. And if civilians or others got caught up in it, you know, they would do a calculated assessment.

But there is a world where some civilians would be acceptable to risk in something like that if they determined it was worth it.

So you have to determine what you're shooting at and whether that was the point of shooting in the first place.

But we need Bradley and we need Exeth to make that clear, you know, whether that's on the Hill. Aaron Powell, and does it still get back to that the order was ambiguous?

It didn't say if there were survivors after the shipwreck, shoot them too. It could be.

I mean, we do not know if that original strike had a contingency or planning on what to do in these kinds of operations. Sometimes it's detailed, but sometimes it's not as detailed as you would like.

But there is a line or some sort of mention of what do you do if this happens? And one thing that should or could have happened is what do we do if someone survives a strike?

And if they're 10 feet from shore or if they're 100 miles from shore, does it matter what we do? Do we just let them go back to what they're doing? Or

was it in global waters? I mean, like in the international waters. You know, we didn't say where this was.
You know, we have a decent idea. We said it was off the coast of Trinidad.

But I'll tell you, I think where the strike likely occurred, it would make getting back to Venezuela probably an impossible task. There was not a clear option for them just to go home.

So that matters too,

whether they're going to live to fight another day.

But like I said before, a lot of this is besides the fact that the administration is the only one with confidence saying that these guys are part of an armed conflict with the United States and intend on doing the United States homeland harm and therefore lethal military forces authorized.

The way this has always happened is the Coast Guard has interdicted drugs because it's illegal and it shouldn't happen.

And they board the vessels and they take the drugs and then they arrest them for prosecution either in the United States or their home countries or another country.

That's the way it's always been done. That this is a criminal enterprise, but it is a law enforcement matter, not a U.S.
military, as you put it, kinetic strike matter until now.

Aaron Ross Powell, this is what the six Democratic lawmakers warned about in their video, was it last week or two weeks ago, about the oath that members of the military take saying they are required to decline orders that are illegal.

Yeah, I mean, this certainly could fall under that. Like I said, I'm not the adjudicator.

I will say in the Department of Defense's manual has lines in there that say you should not follow an order that is illegal. And the example it gives is firing on someone that that is shipwrecked.

It just so happens that what we're talking about is an example. But then this goes back to were they shipwrecked or were they not? Aaron Powell.

Trump has threatened to recall Democratic Senator Mark Kelly to active duty in the military and then have him court-martialed.

Yes, to put him on active duty to try him on military court, yes. To say he has incited the military and he needs to come back and face discipline under military law.

And what he said was that you have to follow the rules. I mean, that was the gist of what he said.
Aaron Powell, yeah, that's right.

I mean, the message they delivered was, you know, there is a responsibility for everyone to follow lawful orders and when the time comes for an illegal order to disobey it.

And that's not a controversy. I mean, it is because it's political and these are Democrats.
This is just the age we live in. But, you know, when you strip all that away, that is what you expect U.S.

service members to do. Aaron Powell, so do you think that these attacks on people who Trump is labeling as narco-terrorists is part of Trump's efforts to oust Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro?

You know, it's hard to say what the connective tissue is between these missions and the larger military buildup.

You know, because as I mentioned, like 99.9% of the forces that are in the Caribbean are not striking the boats.

This is done by a very small, select elite crew

of targeters and intelligence operatives.

So then it becomes, okay, well, if they're not doing anything about the boats, or maybe they're supporting it in some ways, like Intel or whatever, what are they actually accomplishing in the Caribbean?

And then there's this priority that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump, you know, going back to his first administration, you know, they have been fixated on Nicolas Maduro and getting him out of power.

You know, he's backed by Russia.

You know, the U.S. considers him an adversary in the region and a point of instability.
And they want to see him out of office. And they've said as much in the last few months.
So

these two things are kind of related, but you have to take a step back and say, well, why are they related? Because Trump talked about every boat has like so many thousands of deaths.

What he means is fentanyl. These boats are not carrying fentanyl.
They're carrying cocaine? They're carrying cocaine. Fentanyl precursors come from China.
They go to Mexico where fentanyl is produced.

And then from Mexico, they go to the United States and other markets.

Cocaine comes from two key places: Ecuador and Colombia. And cocaine that comes from Venezuela is,

if it's not very small numbers produced in the country, it's coming from

those two countries

as part of an elaborate trafficking operation. But Venezuela is not a drug player.

Every official I've spoken to about this with experience in the region says Venezuela is not on the radar for any kind of considerable drug trafficking.

And the stuff they do have, a lot of it goes to Europe, not the United States. And they certainly don't do anything with fentanyl.

So this thing where Trump is doing the connective tissue between drug deaths are happening and they're out of control, i.e. fentanyl, to Venezuela to Maduro

orchestrating or supporting drug traffickers that help give fentanyl and other drugs to the United States.

They have made that line go all through those points.

And some of it is very tenuous

because they're relying on the fact that they're trying to kill Americans intentionally, right?

And therefore we're in armed conflict and they're backed by Maduro and therefore Maduro is an adversary that we have to do something about.

Aaron Powell, yeah, Trump has accused Maduro of being the head of the Cartel de los Sols,

which the State Department has designated as a terrorist organization. What do you know about the cartel?

There's not a ton. that's known about them.

I mean, the origins of the group are people in the government who had some sort of, you know, kind of handshake, wink-wink deal that would engage in, you know, illicit activity to include, you know, drug trafficking.

But as part of a formal organization,

there is a lot of discussion about this on whether this group is an actual group. Is it a real thing or sort of this sort of collective of

high-ranking people and criminals that's just sort of an amorphous thing and not like Islamic State or al-Qaeda or even like the Sinaloa cartel that has a structure as a boss and it has

economics on the payroll, they have scientists and they have distribution networks and they're essentially a company.

This is not that, as far as we can tell. They are not in the same realm of any of these groups I mentioned, terrorists or drug cartels in particular.

If you're just joining us, my guest is Alex Horton. He's a Washington Post national security reporter.
We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air.

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Trump has made it clear that he's willing to use military force against Venezuela on land as well as sea in the name of the war on narco-terrorists.

What can you tell us about Trump's threats to continue this war on land? We know there's already warships off the coast of Venezuela, but he's willing to use military force.

Does that mean he wants to get us into war with Venezuela? And how can he do that without informing Congress? What can a commander-in-chief do without consent?

I mean, the commander-in-chief at this moment can carry on what he has justified as, you know, actions taken against

an armed group

and combatants. That's the way he's described some of these drug trafficking organizations.
So, I mean, there's a Chinese menu somewhere in the Pentagon of

who to attack and where that matters on Trump's preference, right? If he wants to hit these cartels at a more meaningful way, like a lab or a facility or a storage place,

perhaps that is one option rather than striking military forces in Venezuela. You know, an air defense system or a military barracks.

That would be far different than hitting a drug lab or hitting a distribution point.

If President Trump wanted to attack military targets in a limited campaign that ramped up, he is certainly able to do that with what he has in the region now.

If he wants to strike cartel and drug-type groups in Venezuela, short of hitting military targets, he can certainly do that. He has the capability and it seems like he has the desire to.

Whether that all comes to play is anyone's guess, but the pieces are in place for something like that to happen.

Aaron Powell, is narcoterrorism possibly a pretext to justify his campaign against Maduro?

And

are there other reasons he wants Maduro out? Aaron Powell, you know, I can't get into the President's head, but we do know if his stated goal is to

and Hexeth's goal is to adversely impact the ability of drug traffickers to move product,

Venezuela is like probably among the last on the list in the region you would focus on because Colombia and Ecuador, who are U.S.

allies, send the vast majority of cocaine up and not just in the Caribbean, they send it in the Pacific.

So if your stated goal was to do drugs and you had no designs about Venezuela or regime change or anything like that,

you would construct an operation focused solely on the Pacific

and maybe a little bit of the Caribbean to get your money's worth of traffickers. The volume of drugs and the volume of ships is in the Pacific.

And a few strikes have happened there, but not all of them. And certainly not some of the more consequential ones like this first one.
Aaron Powell, so

one of President Trump's comments yesterday at the cabinet meeting was that if we have to attack on land, we would. And so how close are we to going to war with Venezuela?

I think strikes in Venezuela are,

you know,

it's hard to say if it's becoming more or less likely as time goes on and the diplomatic talks go the direction. But from his comments,

he didn't make it clear whether he was interested in attacking land targets for drug traffickers or Venezuelan military targets.

Those are two different things that would invite very different responses from the Venezuelan government of whether they are in actual war with the United States.

You know, strikes like that may be an off-ramp for further action, right? Like sort of how when the U.S.

and Israel shot down drones and missiles heading to Israel, that was an off-ramp that allowed Iran after strikes hit their country to take shots and sort of publicly settle the score.

This could be something similar for the U.S. and Venezuela that we'll attack bad guys in the area and we'll get what we want.

We'll have the public narrative of taking some targets out, but we're not going to blow up military targets. So just let us do it, and we both get what we want.

So while we're talking about

trying to

basically get rid of

a president that Trump doesn't like, Trump has pardoned a former president of Honduras. He was convicted last year of working for cartels to flood the U.S.

with cocaine, of conspiring to possess destructive devices, including machine guns, and taking bribes during his campaign from Joaquin Guzman, the former leader of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico.

He was known as El Chapo. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison in federal district court in Manhattan, and Trump just pardoned him.

Like, I don't understand how he's going after allegedly carrying narcotics,

allegedly narcoterrorists, allegedly carrying fentanyl when it's probably not fentanyl, it's probably cocaine. And yet, somebody who was sentenced in the U.S.

in Manhattan, he was sentenced to 45 years in prison.

So, how do we square that? Yeah, how do we square that? Well, I mean, when you said about probably not fentanyl, I mean, I would say what they're carrying is more likely marshmallows than fentanyl.

Wow. Okay.
That's so unlikely it's fentanyl. All right.
You know, it's cocaine. You don't smuggle cherries out of Iowa.
You smuggle corn, right?

So it's that obvious.

It's that obvious. This is what they do.
This is the region. So how do you square these two things?

That the message from Trump and the rest of the government is we are at war with drug traffickers and cartels and people who are intent on doing us harm by sending deadly products to the United States.

And then you see,

this deal with someone who's convicted in a U.S. court of these crimes

for a very long time.

And you contrast that with killing

these people in these boats that have the smallest amount of drugs you could get to transport to effect. I mean, we're talking on fractions of a percent of the trafficking volume that comes in.

We're talking tons and tons and hundreds of tons of cocaine, maybe even thousands of tons of cocaine a year.

You know, this is, these are drops in the bucket they are focused on, but meanwhile, you know, the big fish is getting another deal entirely.

So, you know, I don't know how it squares, I don't know what their relationship or any sort of deal that was made, but there is, you know, we are looking for more consistency in Trump's, what they describe as a hardline approach to drug trafficking.

I want to thank you so much for your reporting and for being with us today. Yeah, I really appreciate it.

Alex Horton is a Washington Post national security reporter focused on the military. Our interview was recorded yesterday with an update we recorded today.

Tomorrow on Fresh Air, our guest will be George Clooney. He became famous at 34.
Late enough, he says, that he learned how to live before he learned how to be famous.

His new character, Jay Kelly, wasn't so lucky. He'll talk about playing a movie star who has the fame part down, but the father, partner, friend part, not so much.
I hope you'll join us.

Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.
Our managing producer is Sam Brigger.

Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Boldonato, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Onik Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman.

Our digital media producer is Molly C.B. Nesper.
Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Roberta Schurach directs the show.
Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.

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