The top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee said that the Pentagon had refused for weeks to share with Congress key information about its strikes on marine vessels that the Trump administration says are carrying drugs, despite repeated requests that it divulge the directives initiating the operation as well as its legal justification. In a brief statement, Sen Roger Wicker, the Republican chair of the panel, and Sen Jack Reed, the senior Democrat, made public two letters that they jointly sent to Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth over the past several weeks requesting the information. “To date, these documents have not been submitted,” Wicker and Reed wrote.
The senators’ decision to publicise their requests and Hegseth’s failure to meet them reflected growing bipartisan alarm on Capitol Hill about President Donald Trump’s expanding and open-ended military campaign, undertaken without consultation with or approval by Congress. It also reflected deepening frustration with the administration’s lack of transparency about an operation whose legal justification is in question.
The senators shared two separate requests made to the Pentagon. In one letter, in late September, they asked for a copy of the president’s orders to carry out the military strikes. By law, that letter noted, the Pentagon is required to provide Congress with copies of “execute orders” within 15 days of the president’s issuing of them, a deadline the senators said the Trump administration had missed.
In a second letter, in early October, they again sought the execute orders, as well as the Justice Department’s legal justification for the attacks and a “complete list” of designated terrorist organisations and drug trafficking organisations “with whom the president has determined the United States is in a non-international armed conflict and against whom lethal military force may be used.” Top House Democrats sent a similar request earlier this month for the list of targets but have not received any information from the White House.
Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said on Friday that House Republicans were also concerned about the lack of transparency around the legal justification for the strikes, even if they were not saying so broadly or publicly. “There is definitely strong bipartisan concern that the administration just has not provided information to Congress that they’re supposed to provide to us,” Smith said in an interview. “And yes, I’ve heard Republicans, as well as Democrats, express concern about the legality of it.”
Trump has sought to justify strikes on alleged drug-trafficking vessels by designating certain cartels as terrorist organisations. The senators’ announcement on Friday came amid rising concern in both parties over the Trump administration’s failure to follow the law to inform Congress about the president’s escalating military campaign against drug traffickers off the coast of Central and South America.
A decision to exclude Senate Democrats from a briefing on Wednesday on the strikes, which so far have killed at least 61 people, drew ire from both sides of the aisle Sen Mike Rounds, R-S D, told reporters he spoke with the White House after the briefing and said the Senate had always worked on a bipartisan basis when it came to matters of defense and national security. “We want to keep it that way,” said Rounds, a member of the Armed Services Committee and the Intelligence Committee.
House lawmakers in a classified briefing on Thursday asked Pentagon officials for bipartisan access to the legal memo justifying the strikes but were not given a specific answer as to when the administration would give that to Congress. Military legal experts were meant to brief lawmakers in that closed-door meeting, but the administration opted at the last minute not to send them and offered no explanation why. “I’m walking away without an understanding of how and why they’re making an assessment that the use of lethal force is adequate here,” Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo, said as he exited that briefing. Crow, a member of the House Armed Services and Intelligence committees and a former Army Ranger, stressed the importance of congressional oversight on US military action abroad. “I fought in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said. “Our country spent over 20 years, $3 trillion, thousands of American lives, using tactics and strikes against terrorists. And most of that ended up poorly.”
US officials have said that the military has identified potential targets inside Venezuela, should Trump decide to expand the Pentagon’s maritime campaign against the purported drug traffickers to land. But on Friday, Trump indicated that he had not made any decisions about such an escalation. As the president headed to Mar-a-Lago for the weekend, reporters aboard Air Force One asked him directly if he was weighing whether to attack military sites in Venezuela. He replied, “No, it’s not true.”
The Pentagon has ordered an aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R Ford, to the region, but it will take several weeks for it to reach the Caribbean. The military is likely to hold off on any potential escalation of the Trump administration’s campaign against drug trafficking until the arrival of the Ford, which carries around 5,000 sailors when fully staffed.
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
