Donald Trump warned on Tuesday that any country he believes is illegally making drugs for the US is at risk of military attack.
The US president’s comments came during a question-and-answer session at the White House, in which he also said that military strikes on land targets inside Venezuela, which he accuses of narco-terrorism, would “begin very soon”.
The conversation with reporters followed a lengthy Cabinet meeting in which Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth proposed pinning responsibility on a Navy admiral for the extrajudicial killing of two survivors of an attack on an alleged drugs smuggling boat in September.
Asked if Venezuela was the only Pentagon target, Trump said he viewed any country producing drugs for trafficking as fair game, echoing previous saber-rattling directed at Mexico.
“If they come through a certain country or a certain country, or if we think they’re manufacturing mills, whether it’s fentanyl or cocaine… anyone doing that and selling it in our country can be attacked. Not just Venezuela,” Trump said, adding that he had “heard” that Colombia “is making cocaine, they have cocaine factories”.
Trump then said that military action inside Venezuela was imminent, escalating the conflict, which began with targeted attacks on ships his administration identified as engaged in drug trafficking, though without providing evidence to the public, and is now on the verge of becoming a broader regional conflict.
“We are also going to launch strikes on the ground,” he said.
“You know, the land is very easy, very easy. And we know what routes they take. We know everything about them. We know where they live. We know where the bad guys live, and we’re going to start doing that very soon, too.
“When we start this, we’ll get those numbers down a lot.”
During the Cabinet meeting, Hegseth gave conflicting accounts of his actions following the twin attacks on an alleged drug boat on September 2, which the armed services committees in both the House and Senate are investigating as potentially illegal.
Hegseth told a cabinet meeting on Tuesday that he “saw that first attack” but ultimately “did not stop for an hour or two”, during which two survivors from the boat were fired upon a second time and died.
This contradicted his comments to Fox News the day after the attack in which he had said that while he had seen the operation in real time, he had not claimed to have seen only part of it.
The admiral who ordered the second attack, Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley, is scheduled to brief members of congressional committees on Thursday.
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