WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s justification for summarily killing alleged drug smugglers, rather than arrest, try and convict them in court, appears to be based on a massive lie: that they were in the process of bringing to the United States the deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl.

“You can see it, the boats get hit, and you see that fentanyl all over the ocean,” Trump said at an Oct. 15 news conference, the day after the fifth of what are now 15 lethal attacks on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean that have killed 65. “It’s, like, floating in bags. It’s all over the place.”

“Every boat that we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives,” Trump also told reporters.

“U.S. Intelligence confirmed this vessel was loaded up with mostly Fentanyl, and other illegal narcotics,” he wrote in a social media post three days later about yet another missile strike on Oct. 16.

However, the claim that the missile attacks on small boats — in most cases far too small to have been en route to the United States without requiring multiple stops for refueling — are disrupting fentanyl trafficking into the U.S. are belied by what Pentagon officials have told members of Congress in recent briefings.

“They’ve not recovered fentanyl in any of these cases. It’s all been cocaine,” said one congressional source familiar with the content of one of the briefings.

“They argued that cocaine is a facilitating drug of fentanyl, but that was not a satisfactory answer for most of us,” California Democratic Rep. Sara Jacobs told reporters after a briefing she attended last week for members of the House Armed Services Committee.

The mounting frustration over the lack of clear information is bipartisan. Last week, the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Mississippi Republican Roger Wicker, took the unusual step of posting two letters demanding details of how the military is conducting the boat strikes on its website.

“I’m not getting follow-up. We’re not getting the information. How do they choose this boat?” added Oklahoma Republican James Lankford, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Pentagon officials have also told lawmakers that they do not actually know the identities of everyone they have killed in these attacks, only that each vessel had on board at least one person who is on a target list of drug cartel members the administration has created, the congressional source said.

“They didn’t know the names of all the people on these boats,” the source said. “In some cases, they know only one person.”

This is in contrast to statements by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State and national security adviser Marco Rubio suggesting that military and intelligence officials knew exactly who was on board the boats they have destroyed.

“We track them from the very beginning. We know who’s on them, who they are, where they’re coming from, what they have on them,” Rubio said during an Oct. 22 photo opportunity at the White House.

President Donald Trump talks with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after a roundtable on criminal cartels in the State Dining Room of the White House on Oct. 23 as Attorney General Pam Bondi watches.

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Defense Department officials declined to detail what drugs have been recovered or provide any other information about the military strikes, including whether they knew the identities of everyone they had killed. Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell instead criticized members of Congress for speaking to reporters.

“The department is deeply concerned that members of Congress are making public statements regarding information received in a classified briefing. The department considers any unauthorized disclosure of classified information as [a] serious breach of national security,” he said in a statement.

Brian Finucane, who spent a decade in the State Department’s legal office, wonders what the true purpose behind the boat killings really is.

“If these strikes aren’t about countering fentanyl, what are they about? For the president, they’re dramatic, performative military action,” he said. “For the secretary of state, they’re another pressure tactic in a campaign aimed at regime change in Caracas.”

Harrison Mann, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official and Army officer who now works to persuade service members not to follow what he believes are illegal orders to kill non-combatants, also suspects the strikes are more about getting rid of Venezuela’s dictator, Nicolas Maduro.

“The administration’s SOUTHCOM campaign is about three things, and none have anything to do with the overdose crisis,” Mann said, referring to the military’s Southern Command responsible for South America and the Caribbean. “One, producing kill-cam videos to distract from their abject failure to improve life in America. Two, testing to what extent the military will obey what military lawyers call ‘patently unlawful’ orders like carrying out extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean. And three, indulging neocon obsessions with launching Iraq-style regime change disasters in Venezuela and beyond.”

Trump has used the hundreds of thousands of fentanyl overdose deaths in recent years to justify tariffs against China for allowing the production of precursor chemicals, Mexico for being the location of the drug’s final manufacture and Canada, even though it has virtually no role in the United States’ fentanyl problem.

Trump’s attacks on the low-level smugglers on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific seem in that regard to resemble his treatment of Canada – based on a false assertion about fentanyl. Except rather than facing tariffs, the alleged smugglers are facing violent death from the sky.

Reimagining the smugglers as war combatants rather than criminals created the absurd situation in which the U.S. Navy, after targeting a vessel with the intent of killing everyone aboard in an Oct. 16 strike in the Caribbean, fished two survivors out of the water and returned them to Colombia and Ecuador rather than turning them over to face criminal charges in the U.S.

Meaning that the pair, under Trump’s logic, were so dangerous they had to be killed rather than arrested at the time of the missile strike, but so harmless that they could be freed in their home countries just days later.

“Let’s not pretend the Trump administration cares about preventing overdose deaths while they’re cutting billions from the prevention and treatment programs that actually save lives,” Mann said, referring to the proposed budget cuts and layoffs that advocates say have dramatically hurt the country’s response to the addiction crisis.

Fentanyl has been particularly dangerous for drug users because it is far cheaper to make than heroin, which many addicts and recreational users turned to after the crackdown on pharmaceutical-quality opioids like OxyContin began more than a decade ago. It is also far more deadly because overdoses can occur with even minute quantities. Approximately 80,000 overdose deaths per a year were taking place in the United States, although the number has been falling since 2022.

“Most fentanyl found in the United States is manufactured in Mexico and smuggled across the border by U.S. citizens, with a smaller quantity made within the United States itself,” Mann said. “There is no evidence that Venezuela plays a meaningful role in synthetic opioid production, and even if that were somehow true, military action would, in the most optimistic scenario, simply shift production elsewhere.”

California Democrat Ro Khanna, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said whatever Trump’s rationale is for using military force, he still has to come to Congress.

“Trump’s strikes off the coast of Venezuela are a stain on our country’s conscience. The Constitution requires the president to come to Congress for approval. We must stand firmly against a regime change war,” he told HuffPost.

HuffPost’s Igor Bobic contributed to this report.