“Eight days after the September 2 operation that inaugurated President Donald Trump’s lethal military campaign against suspected drug boats, The Intercept reported that people who survived the initial missile strike were “killed shortly after in a follow-up attack.” On Friday, The Washington Post confirmed that account, saying the commander overseeing the operation, based on an oral directive from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to “kill everybody,” ordered a second strike on “two survivors” who “were clinging to the smoldering wreck.”
If that report is accurate, Reason‘s Christian Britschgi notes, “the second strike on helpless survivors would add a degree of barbarism to the administration’s anti-drug campaign.” It also would further complicate the arguments that Trump has deployed to justify his unprecedented policy of summarily executing suspected drug smugglers, which so far has involved 21 attacks that killed 83 people in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. Even if you accept Trump’s dubious claim that the United States is engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with “narcoterrorists,” which supposedly means U.S. forces can legally attack vessels believed to be carrying illegal drugs, deliberately killing survivors would be contrary to the law of war.
“Both the giving and the execution of these orders” would “constitute war crimes, murder, or both,” the Former JAGs Working Group, which consists of lawyers who previously served in the military, said on Saturday. “If the U.S. military operation to interdict and destroy suspected narcotrafficking vessels is a ‘non-international armed conflict’ as the Trump Administration suggests, orders to ‘kill everybody,’ which can reasonably be regarded as an order to give ‘no quarter,’ and to ‘double-tap’ a target in order to kill survivors, are clearly illegal under international law. In short, they are war crimes.”The former military lawyers add that the situation is even graver “if the U.S. military operation is not an armed conflict of any kind.” In that case, they say, “these orders to kill helpless civilians clinging to the wreckage of a vessel our military destroyed would subject everyone from [the secretary of defense] down to the individual who pulled the trigger to prosecution under U.S. law for murder.””