of the homicide department dept
For the Trump administration, it was never enough to simply deport migrants as quickly as possible. A vast conglomerate of federal officers was unable to meet Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s quota of 3,000 arrests per day, no matter how many rights it violated. Any pretense of only going after immigrants with criminal records was rejected during Trump’s last government, even though any government spokesperson is guaranteed to repeat the lie in defense of any brutal act.
The government has been killing people in international waters for several months now. The supposed justification is that the murdered people are transporting drugs destined for the United States. Perhaps some of the dead were involved in drug trafficking, but before Trump’s second term the accepted approach was to intercept these boats and arrest their occupants.
That’s apparently unacceptable to Trump and the ex-Fox News commentator he elevated to the top position at the Defense Department, Pete Hegseth. Our country is now engaged in extrajudicial killings (more accurately, murders) in international waters under the pretext that the drug trade is the equivalent of an actual war against the United States.
Executions without due process in open water would be disturbing enough. But it’s even worse than that. The US military – led by Hegseth and Trump – is taking care of it no one survives the first attack.
The longer the American surveillance plane followed the boat, the more confident the intelligence analysts who watched from command centers became that the eleven people on board were transporting drugs.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everyone,” one of them said.
A missile screamed off the coast of Trinidad, hitting the ship and igniting a fire from bow to stern. For several minutes, commanders watched the boat burn on live drone footage. When the smoke cleared, they got a shock: two survivors clung to the smoldering wreckage.
The Special Operations commander who oversaw the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war against suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.
This is America. We kill what we don’t want to save. Land of the Free (but only for MAGA believers) and home to the people so brave that they are willing to return to kill people clinging to life after a first military strike.
If they are not war crimes, then why did war crimes arise, you might ask. No one in the administration is concerned. That’s what the regime wants to do. Nothing else matters except that it gets done.
The consolation prize in the midst of this murderous race toward authoritarianism is this: some people – even some Republicans — feel extremely uncomfortable with this operationwhich definitely shows a silhouette of war crimes.
Republican-led committees in the Senate and House of Representatives say they will intensify their investigation into the Pentagon after a Washington Post report found that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth several weeks ago issued a spoken order to kill all crew members aboard a ship suspected of smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea.
[…]
On Friday evening, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Jack Reed (Rhode Island), the committee’s top Democrat, issued a statement saying the committee “is aware of recent news reports – and the Department of Defense’s initial response – regarding alleged follow-on attacks on suspected narcotics ships.” The committee, they said, “has directed investigations to the ministry, and we will conduct vigorous monitoring to establish the facts regarding these circumstances.”
These two lawmakers have since been joined by Representative Mike Rogers (a Republican) and Representative Adam Smith (Democratic Party), who have stated their interest in a “full accounting” of Trump’s international water-based boat attack program. That aligns the House with the Senate, involving both branches of Congress involved in U.S. military oversight.
While this is a positive development (given the political beliefs of everyone involved), we won’t know what exactly this is resources until this investigation is well underway. On the one hand, these could simply be Republicans playing nice with members of the Democratic party, hoping to find a way to justify these strikes after the fact.
On the other hand, even MAGA Republicans are probably angry that they were left out of this. The administration has adamantly refused to allow congressional representatives to communicate directly with the OLC lawyers, who could not be bothered to reverse engineer a justification for extrajudicial killings until several killings had already occurred. Whether or not these Republicans agree with Trump, it’s becoming clear that they want to be considered part of the process, rather than just expected to cheer from the sidelines.
Blowing up boats that the government claims (afterwards) were filled with drug traffickers is one thing. (And what a fuck thing It is.) Sending another attack to ensure no one survives the attacks is another thing entirely. Never mind the moral obligations. The United States has done that legal obligations to survivors of military attacks, especially when it is clear (as here in the case of people clinging to wreckage) that they do not pose a threat to everyone.
A group of former military lawyers who have scrutinized the Trump administration’s military activities in Latin America released an appraisal On Saturday, he outlined the relevant international and domestic laws and said that regardless of whether the US is in an armed conflict, conducting law enforcement operations or conducting other military operations, targeting defenseless people is prohibited.
Under the circumstances The Post reported, “international law not only prohibits targeting these survivors, but also requires the attacking force to protect, rescue and, if appropriate, treat them as prisoners of war,” the group said in a statement distributed to the news media. “Violations of these obligations are war crimes, murder, or both. There are no other options.”
While this may not seem all that different from the drone/military strikes authorized by the Obama administration – some of which involved multiple passes to ensure that anyone merely injured would be completely dead – it is certainly not the same. The extrajudicial killings authorized by Obama involved people in areas where the US was already involved in military conflict. The boat attacks, on the other hand, involve people from a country we do not occupy or invade (Venezuela) and people whose government openly admits they do nothing more than move drugs from one place to another.
Claiming that these drugs are going to the US is an accusation that has no basis in fact. And killing people suspected of nothing more than actions that can only be prosecuted if the traffickers and their drugs attempt to cross the US border while still in international waters. hundreds of miles away from the United States is nothing more than just killing people just because you think you can get away with it. So far the board has done that. Maybe what happens now will put this to rest. But until that happens, the Trump administration will continue to ensure that every American has blood on their hands, whether they voted for him or not.
Filed Under: boat attacks, Department of Defense, DOJ, extrajudicial killings, jack reed, pete hegseth, roger wicker, trump administration, Venezuela, war on drugs
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