A Pentagon official admitted in a classified briefing that some of the people the U.S. military killed in its first boat strike may have been victims of human trafficking.

"Why would 11 people be on board a boat carrying drugs? It's a high risk for the cartels. That always stood out."

— Government source at classified Pentagon briefing, via The Intercept

Nine months into the Trump administration's campaign to shoot down suspected drug boats from secret aircraft, the math still does not add up. The U.S. military has conducted more than 60 attacks across the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, killing over 200 people without trial, arrest, or due process. In nearly every strike, one to four people died. But on September 2, 2025, the very first attack of the campaign, eleven people were killed in a single blast.

The question that has dogged the operation ever since is simple: why was there anyone else on that boat?

Rear Adm. Brian Bennett, a military officer overseeing Special Operations for the Pentagon's Joint Staff, was asked directly during a classified briefing on Capitol Hill last fall whether any of the people aboard the September 2 boat could have been human trafficking victims. His answer, according to two people present: "They could be."

One official at the briefing said they were astonished by Bennett's candor. "I was surprised. But only by the admission," that person told The Intercept.

The boat in question was a 40-foot go-fast vessel with four 200-horsepower engines, departing from San Juan de Unare on Venezuela's Paria Peninsula in the early hours of September 1. Secretary of State Marco Rubio later said it was "probably headed to Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean." A secret U.S. Special Operations aircraft tracked it from above, dove low enough to spook the crew, and then fired missiles that engulfed the vessel in fire.

Two men survived the initial blast. They clung to a fragment of overturned hull for roughly 45 minutes, drifting in open water. According to five people familiar with classified briefings, the survivors waved their arms at the aircraft overhead, presumably signaling for help or surrender. Under international law, both shipwrecked persons and those who surrender are hors de combat and protected from attack. The Pentagon's own Law of War Manual calls it "dishonorable and inhumane" to target people rendered helpless by shipwreck.

Adm. Frank Bradley, then head of JSOC, ordered a second strike anyway. He reportedly told aides he did not perceive their waving as a "two-arm surrender." Two more missiles followed, sinking the remnants of the boat.

Translation: the U.S. military watched two drowning men for 45 minutes and decided they had waved incorrectly.

The towns from which all eleven victims hailed, San Juan de Unare and nearby Güiria, are not cartel headquarters. They are impoverished coastal communities in Venezuela's Sucre state where 90 percent of the population is food insecure. The region has long been identified as a transit hub for human trafficking. A 2020 report found that Venezuela was "the greatest supplier of trafficking victims to Trinidad and Tobago," with 43 percent of those trafficked traveling from Sucre specifically.

The Associated Press investigated nine of the men killed in boat strikes and found that one of the September 2 victims, Luis "Che" Martínez, a 60-year-old local crime boss, made his living smuggling both drugs and people across borders. He had been incarcerated in late 2020 on human trafficking charges after a boat he operated capsized, killing nearly 25 people including two of his own sons. He was released and returned to the trade.

A consortium of Venezuelan journalists reported that in Güiria, illicit transport of drugs, weapons, and people is "as ordinary a job as teaching school, only far better paid." They noted that boats routinely carry mixed cargos. Gangs from Sucre are involved in cocaine trafficking, human trafficking and smuggling, arms trafficking, and contraband of animals and minerals, according to InSight Crime, a think tank that studies organized crime in the Americas.

No one would smuggle cocaine with 11 people on board their drug-running boat, said one current government official briefed on the strikes. It is a waste of space, fuel, and creates security risks. Full stop. The vessel's profile more closely matched a ship smuggling various types of cargo, including people.

The legal architecture supporting the boat strikes was built in secret. A classified opinion from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, drawn up by an interagency lawyers working group, claims that narcotics on supposed drug boats are lawful military targets because they generate revenue for cartels with whom the Trump administration says it is in a "non-international armed conflict." The memo was not signed until days after the September 2 attack.

Attached to the memo is a secret list of designated terrorist organizations. In later classified briefings, the Pentagon revised its account of who was aboard the first boat: just one person was a member of a designated terrorist organization, while ten were "DTO affiliates." Government officials told The Intercept they understood "affiliate" status to mean little more than having had a conversation with a DTO member.

Rep. Jim Himes said in December that he did not believe the military knew the identities of all eleven people killed. Rep. Sara Jacobs reported in October that Pentagon officials told her they do not need to positively identify individuals on vessels to strike them, only to show "a connection to a DTO or affiliate."

Sen. Tim Kaine revealed last week that the presence of narcotics on a boat is not one of the targeting criteria for the strikes. The military does not stop and search boats before shooting them down.

The error rates in U.S. maritime interdiction are sobering. Between September 2024 and October 2025, the Coast Guard interdicted 212 boats it suspected of drug trafficking heading toward the United States. Forty-one of them, roughly 20 percent, had no illicit contraband on board. For vessels off the coast of Venezuela specifically, the false-positive rate was 21 percent.

Sarah Yager, a former senior adviser to the chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, called this "a high rate of mistaken identity" and said her guess is that the U.S. military has no idea who these people actually are before moving to kill them. She added that positive identification of both targets and civilians has been a known problem in the U.S. military kill chain for decades.

Adm. Bradley told the Senate Armed Services Committee in April that the boat strikes are built on "the lessons learned and the processes perfected over the last 25 years of persona targeting." Yager's response was blunt: "There has never been a 'perfecting' of persona targeting. Just because the U.S. military conducted many strikes against known targets under the moniker of counterterrorism does not mean that they became significantly better at it over time."

She is referring to two decades of drone warfare in which the U.S. killed civilians from Afghanistan to Iraq, Pakistan to Somalia, Libya to Yemen. A 2023 Intercept investigation found that Special Operations forces conducting a strike in Somalia were confused about basic details including how many passengers were in their target vehicle. They mistook a woman and child for an adult male and never knew how many people they killed.

Marco Rubio mentioned human trafficking in his very first explanation of the boat strikes at a press conference a day after September 2. "They are traffickers of people, they are traffickers of deadly drugs," he said. The irony was not lost on observers: the administration's justification for killing these men cited the same crime that may have made some of them victims rather than perpetrators.

The Pentagon continues to insist every person killed was an affiliated member of a designated terrorist organization actively transporting illicit material. Southern Command says it has "full confidence in the operational and intelligence professionals who inform our missions." Yet Rubio himself admitted last week that U.S. forces sometimes walk away from strikes when doubt creeps in, because the target "doesn't meet the criteria."

The question is not whether the boats carry contraband. The question is whether a system that gets it wrong one in five times, that cannot identify who is on board before firing missiles, and whose own officials concede trafficking victims may be among the dead can ever be called anything other than extrajudicial killing at scale.

The Pentagon admitted some of those people could have been trafficked. It then killed them anyway.