Recent Boat Strike Sure Looks Like A War Crime

Legal Issues

from the murdering-people-and-daring-the-system-to-stop-it dept

Now that congressional members on both sides of the aisle have decided it might be worth taking a look at the Defense Department’s “murder people in boats” program, we’re finally learning more than the Trump administration has been willing to share about these extrajudicial killings.

The administration’s lawyers have cobbled together justifications for these actions — OLC (Office of Legal Counsel) memos that rely heavily on claims that trafficking drugs (whether or not those drugs ever end up in the United States) is the same thing as engaging in a conventional war against the US government and its citizens.

All that’s really happening is this: the US military is sinking boats in international waters it claims are loaded with drugs. That alone would be horrific enough, especially since drug interdiction processes have historically always involved the seizure of alleged drug boats and their occupants, not justified-after-the-fact drone strikes.

Most legal experts believe these actions are illegal. No court has ruled otherwise, which means Trump will keep doing them until (and, most likely, after) they’ve been found to be illegal.

One recent boat strike has not only undercut the Trump administration’s justifications for these attacks, but has exposed the ruling party as bloodthirsty thugs willing to cross the line into war crimes just because it can.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the U.S. military on Sept. 2 to kill all 11 people on a suspected drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean Sea because they were on an internal list of narco-terrorists who U.S. intelligence and military officials determined could be lethally targeted, the commander overseeing the operation told lawmakers in briefings this past week, according to two U.S. officials and one person familiar with the congressional briefings.

[…]

The detail that the 11 people on the boat were on an internal U.S. military target list has not previously been made public. It adds another dimension to the Sept. 2 operation that has been mired in controversy over the military’s decision to launch a second strike after the first left two survivors in the water.

It’s that last sentence that’s raising an issue here even Republican representatives are having difficulty defending. The recording of the September boat strike (which has yet to be released to the public) shows two survivors of the first strike clinging to the boat wreckage and waving their arms in hopes of being rescued.

The administration has made a couple of claims about what’s shown in this recording. First, it claims the survivors were waving to their compatriots, hoping to be rescued along with whatever drugs had survived the first strike. It also insists this “waving” is indicative of drug traffickers who wish to remain “in the fight.” In other words, the government is insisting any boat strike survivors who refuse to immediately die are only interested in delivering their drug payload, rather than simply being the byproduct of violent acts: the people who somehow manage to live through a government attack designed to kill them.

For nearly an hour, DoD personnel — including Admiral Bradley — discussed what to do with these impertinent “traffickers” who had somehow survived the initial strike. According to Bradley, he ordered a second strike. When that failed to sink the wreckage the survivors were clinging to, he ordered two more strikes, ceasing his attack only after the boat was sunk and both survivors were definitively dead.

The head of the Defense Department — Pete Hegseth — continues to claim he neither ordered the additional strikes, nor had any knowledge there had been survivors of the first strike. This simply cannot be true given his position and access to boat strike footage. Furthermore, both the administration and Hegseth himself released truncated recordings of this boat strike while bragging about their willingness to engage in extrajudicial killings in international waters.

There’s no reason to believe this boat strike program is legal. Pretty much everyone outside of the administration and Trump’s MAGA gravitational pull have stated as much. The administration itself is still struggling to generate legal rationale for these strikes. What it has produced so far is just as incoherent as its defense of this “double tap” attack that targeted shipwreck survivors, including its absurd claim that the less threatening these alleged traffickers appear to be, the more the administration is justified in killing them and removed the obligation for Trump to approach Congress to ask permission to continue the extrajudicial killings.

But there’s nothing that justifies the actions witnessed here:

It is considered a war crime to kill shipwrecked people, which the Pentagon’s law of war manual defines as people “in need of assistance and care” who “must refrain from any hostile act.” Although most Republicans have signaled support for President Donald Trump’s broader military campaign in the Caribbean, the secondary strike on September 2 has drawn bipartisan scrutiny — including, most consequentially, a vow from the Senate Armed Services Committee to conduct oversight.

While the laws surrounding the executive branch deployment of military force have been significantly diluted since 2001 (the current Authorization of Use of Military Force [AUMF] is still in effect, 25 years later but was only supposed to be in response to terrorists connect to the 9/11 attacks), the administration can’t simply wave away literal war crimes by claiming people just trying to survive the sinking of their boat constituted a clear and present threat to the United States that demanded three additional US military strikes to ensure they were dead and their boat was completely destroyed.

And if you still think none of the above is persuasive, there’s also this fact: the boat hit by four military strikes wasn’t even headed towards the United States. It was headed to another South American country that usually serves as a transport point for drugs headed away from the US.

The alleged drug traffickers killed by the US military in a strike on September 2 were heading to link up with another, larger vessel that was bound for Suriname — a small South American country east of Venezuela – the admiral who oversaw the operation told lawmakers on Thursday, according to two sources with direct knowledge of his remarks.

[…]

US drug enforcement officials say that trafficking routes via Suriname are primarily destined for European markets. US-bound drug trafficking routes have been concentrated on the Pacific Ocean in recent years.

It’s immediately apparent that this boat strike program has nothing to do with deterring trafficking and everything to do with the administration’s desire to destroy anything and anyone coming from countries south of our southern border. I mean, it’s already made it clear it won’t prosecute military troops or officials for engaging in illegal activities related to its boat strike program.

With that deterrent removed, the only constraint left is the consciences of those asked to carry out the administration’s orders. And anyone with a functional sense of right and wrong will find themselves out of a job during the next Trump administration purge cycle until there’s no one left to refuse to do Trump’s dirty work.

Filed Under: boat strikes, crimes against humanity, defense department, doj, donald trump, extrajudicial killings, frank bradley, murder, pete hegseth, trump administration, war crimes, war on drugs