A series of dark discoveries in the waters of the Caribbean prompted further questions about President Donald Trump's military strikes on boats alleged to be operated by drug traffickers.
"The first body washed ashore on Trinidad’s northeastern coast soon after the United States carried out its first strike in September on a boat in the Caribbean. Villagers said the corpse had burn marks on its face and was missing limbs, as if it had been mangled by an explosion," reported Simon Romero and Prior Beharry. "The tides deposited another corpse on a nearby beach days later, drawing a wake of vultures. Its face was similarly unrecognizable, and its right leg appeared to have been blown off."
The bodies have not been definitively tied to the U.S. airstrikes on boats, the report noted — but it has heightened tensions in Trinidad itself, where Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar "is explicitly supporting the strikes on boats that U.S. officials say are carrying drugs" — one of the only politicians in the Caribbean to do so.
“There’s no question in my mind that these men are casualties of war,” local water utilities employee Lincoln Baker told The Times, one of many in Trinidad who fear their government isn't seeking proper answers from the United States about the bodies.
Trump's strikes on boats, which have been going on for weeks, are a radical departure from both international law and longstanding U.S. policy. Typically, suspected drug trafficking vessels are interdicted and their crews arrested, rather than treated as active military combatants.
Even a number of right-wing legal figures are upset over the strikes. John Yoo, the former DOJ lawyer who wrote the George W. Bush administration's infamous memo justifying torture, said, “We can’t just consider anything that harms the country to be a matter for the military. Because that could potentially include every crime.” And former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's law clerk Ed Whelan proclaimed the strikes are "very likely illegal."