“Somewhere off the coast of Venezuela, a speedboat with 11 people on board is blown to smithereens. Vice President J.D. Vance announces that “killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.”
When challenged that killing citizens without due process is a war crime, the vice president responded that he “didn’t give a shit.”
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But over 20,000 people are murdered in the U.S. each year, and yet somehow we find a way to a dispassionate dispensation of justice that includes legal representation for the accused and jury trial.
Why? Because sometimes the accused is actually not guilty.
As passions subside, a civilized people should ask: To be clear, the people bombed to smithereens were guilty, right?
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The administration has maintained that the people blown to smithereens were members of Tren de Aragua and therefore narcoterrorists.
Certainly, then, if we know they belong to a particular gang, then someone must surely have known their names before they were blown to smithereens?
At the very least, the government should explain how the gang came to be labelled as terrorists. U.S. law defines a terrorist as someone who uses “premeditated, politically motivated violence…against non-combatants.” Since the U.S. policy is now to blow people to smithereens if they are suspected of being in a terrorist gang, then maybe someone could take the time to explain the evidence of their terrorism?
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Few independent legal scholars argue the strikes are legal. Even John Yoo—a former deputy assistant attorney general under President George W. Bush, who infamously authored the Bush administration’s legal justification for “enhanced interrogation techniques”—has criticized the Trump administration’s justification for the strikes, saying: “There has to be a line between crime and war. We can’t just consider anything that harms the country to be a matter for the military. Because that could potentially include every crime.””