As this week got underway, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made the latest in a series of announcements: Deadly U.S. military strikes on Sunday killed six people as part of the latest operation against civilian boats in international waters. According to the Pentagon’s official tally, this was the 19th such strike since early September, with a collective death toll of 76 people.
The broader controversy surrounding this policy, which the Trump administration claims without evidence is intended to target vessels carrying drugs destined for American soil, is a multifaceted mess, including serious questions about whether the military operations are legal. What’s more, while Donald Trump and his team have insisted that the boat crews are made up of “narco-terrorists,” an analysis by The Associated Press found that these claims weren’t altogether true.
It’s against this backdrop that the controversy took on a new dimension this week related to international intelligence sharing. CNN reported that the U.K. is no longer sharing intelligence with U.S. officials about suspected drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean, “because it does not want to be complicit in US military strikes and believes the attacks are illegal.” From the report:
For years, the UK, which controls a number of territories in the Caribbean where it bases intelligence assets, has helped the US locate vessels suspected of carrying drugs so that the US Coast Guard could interdict them, the sources said. That meant the ships would be stopped, boarded, its crew detained, and drugs seized. The intelligence was typically sent to Joint Interagency Task Force South, a task force stationed in Florida that includes representatives from a number of partner nations and works to reduce the illicit drug trade.
That cooperation, however, is now apparently on hold. The report added that British officials began its “intelligence pause” more than a month ago.
CNN’s account hasn’t been independently verified by MSNBC, though The Washington Post published a related piece, as did some British media outlets. (Officials in the U.S. and the U.K. said they do not comment on intelligence-related matters.)
If the reporting is accurate, it’s a dramatic development in its own right. It suggests that one of the U.S.’ closest and most important allies doesn’t want to bear responsibility for deadly, extrajudicial military operations in international waters.
But it’s also worth acknowledging the unsettling larger pattern related to intelligence sharing.
When Trump first announced that he wanted Tulsi Gabbard, who has a habit of echoing Russian propaganda, to be the director of national intelligence, Time magazine reported that some foreign officials expressed concern about sharing intelligence with the administration with her in office.
Earlier this year, Shane Harris had a related report in The Atlantic that raised the same point: “Several foreign intelligence officials have recently told me that they are taking steps to limit how much sensitive intelligence they share with the Trump administration, for fear that it might be leaked or used for political ends.” Two months into the president’s second term, as the White House took steps to align U.S. foreign policy with the Kremlin, NBC News reported: “Some U.S. allies are considering scaling back the intelligence they share with Washington in response to the Trump administration’s conciliatory approach to Russia. … The allies are weighing the move because of concerns about safeguarding foreign assets whose identities could inadvertently be revealed, said the sources, who included a foreign official.” Now, it appears the problem has metastasized: Foreign officials haven’t just expressed concern about the Trump administration’s reliability with sensitive intelligence, but they also have reportedly concluded that the administration might use intelligence to launch legally dubious military strikes against civilian targets. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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