“Texas farmers have long pushed for Mexico to send more water to meet the obligations of the 81-year-old treaty that says Mexico is obligated to deliver 1.75 million acre-feet of water to the U.S. every five years. Trump also threatened sanctions and tariffs against Mexico in April, complaining then that the country had delivered less than 30 percent of the requirement over a five-year window that ended in October.
Mexico argues that climate change-driven drought has hindered its ability to send the requisite water, but officials promised to send 420,000 acre-feet to the U.S. by October.”
“Back in early September, he declared that the newly renamed Department of War would favor “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”
The secretary of war clearly meant it, judging from a story in The Washington Post. The paper reports that Hegseth issued verbal orders to the military forces striking suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean and Pacific to “kill everybody.”
When the inaugural strike in this campaign against a boat off the Trinidadian coast left two survivors clinging to the wreckage of the craft, the commander in charge of the operation, in accordance with Hegseth’s spoken directive, ordered a second strike to take them out too.
…
The administration’s officially secret legal justification for these strikes asserts that “narco-terrorists” are using the money earned from trafficking drugs to finance their war against the United States and its allies. Suspected drug smugglers are therefore, it claims, a legitimate counter-terrorism target.
Many international law experts have retorted that the boats themselves pose no imminent threat to Americans, and that the people on board the boats are not combatants but suspected criminals who one would normally expect to be arrested, not executed.
The administration’s position “can justify almost anything the government wants to do to anyone,” wrote Reason’s Matthew Petti back in September.
…
Even if one accepts the dubious idea that these strikes are legal, the second strike described in the Post report would violate the laws of war. More plainly, it would be murder.
An order to kill boat occupants no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations, told the Post.
…
The Trump administration is using the military to target people suspected of breaking criminal laws against drug trafficking. It’s choosing to kill these suspected criminals when they pose to immediate threat to anyone, instead of simply arresting them.”
Mexican cartels are using drones to drop bombs on rival cartels and police, and to intimidate civilians. Criminal organizations in many countries are using drones and have gotten good at using them in advanced ways.
“Despite Trump promising to stand “with the good people of Cuba and Venezuela,” his administration has fast-tracked deportations for victims of communism.”
“Under Milei, inflation has dropped massively. The poverty rate has gone down. Public spending has plummeted, and budget surpluses have appeared. Housing supply in Buenos Aires has totally turned around following the repeal of rent control laws.
…
But “the policy of managing the currency has become a trap,” adds The Economist. “Even after he partially floated the peso in April alongside an IMF [International Monetary Fund] bailout, he has sought to maintain its level artificially high. Defending the exchange rate has cost Argentina billions of dollars in scarce foreign-currency reserves and has pushed interest rates sky-high, creating a drag on growth. Jobs, rather than inflation, are what now worry voters the most.”
Milei had to get a credit swap from the U.S., to the tune of $20 billion (which he must pay back, though the terms of the deal have not been made clear to the public). He secured a similarly massive IMF bailout back in April. He keeps needing emergency credit lines to keep the peso strong, but it’s not clear that this policy is totally working. It makes sense why he would pursue it in the first place: Prices have historically spiraled out of control, and the central bank is not trusted by the people. In order for some of Milei’s less-popular social safety net cuts to be palatable, the people needed to feel like there was some legitimate stability and predictability in their monetary system, lest they revert to favoring Peronism.
…
“Under the exchange rate system that Milei implemented earlier this year, the peso floats freely within a band,” writes Lorenzo Bernaldo de Quirós for the Cato Institute. “When a government tries to maintain a fixed but adjustable exchange rate, it creates perverse incentives. If markets perceive that the currency is overvalued, expectations of devaluation are created, prompting speculators and citizens themselves to take their capital out of the country to avoid losses. To defend the exchange rate, the central bank must use its international reserves, but these are finite.” Reserves are limited; speculators can easily take advantage.”
“The agreement, which Argentina’s central bank announced Monday, allows for a $20 billion currency swap that’s aimed at propping up the Argentina peso ahead of crucial midterm elections that will determine the political success of President Javier Milei, a staunch ally of President Donald Trump.
…
Beyond the $20 billion of financing for Argentina through the swap, Bessent has said he’s also organizing another $20 billion in financing that will be funded by private lenders or sovereign wealth funds.”
“The New York Times, citing unnamed “American officials familiar with the matter,” reported that the boat “appeared to have turned around before the attack started because the people onboard had apparently spotted a military aircraft stalking it.” That detail further complicates the already dubious legal and moral rationales for this unprecedented use of the U.S. military to kill criminal suspects.
The attack “crossed a fundamental line the Department of Defense has been resolutely committed to upholding for many decades—namely, that (except in rare and extreme circumstances not present here) the military must not use lethal force against civilians, even if they are alleged, or even known, to be violating the law,” Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman notes in a Just Security essay. Lederman adds that the September 2 drone strike “appears to have violated” the executive order prohibiting assassination and arguably qualifies as murder under federal law and the Uniform Code of Criminal Justice.
New York University law professor Ryan Goodman, a former Defense Department lawyer, agrees. “It’s difficult to imagine how any lawyers inside the Pentagon could have arrived at a conclusion that this was legal,” he told the Times last week, “rather than the very definition of murder under international law rules that the Defense Department has long accepted.”
As Trump told it, the attack was justified because Tren de Aragua is “a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, operating under the control of [Venezuelan President] Nicolas Maduro, responsible for mass murder, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence and terror across the United States and Western Hemisphere.” He said the strike was meant to “serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America.”
…
U.S. forces therefore “struck a vessel” that “was assessed to be affiliated with a designated terrorist organization and to be engaged in illicit drug trafficking activities,” Trump explained. “I directed these actions consistent with my responsibility to protect Americans and United States interests abroad and in furtherance of United States national security and foreign policy interests, pursuant to my constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive to conduct United States foreign relations.”
Trump says the men whose deaths he ordered were “assessed” to be affiliated with Tren de Aragua. They also were “assessed” to be engaged in drug trafficking. Without knowing the basis for those assessments, we cannot say how accurate they were. Last week, Trump joked about the potential for deadly errors: “I think anybody that saw that is going to say, ‘I’ll take a pass.’ I don’t even know about fishermen. They may say, ‘I’m not getting on the boat. I’m not going to take a chance.'” Conveniently for Trump, summary execution avoids any need to present evidence, let alone meet the requirements of due process.
…
Trump’s justification for that shortcut is perverse. Although he describes the strike as an act of “self-defense,” he does not claim the alleged drug traffickers were engaged in a literal attack on the United States. To accept Trump’s framing, you have to accept the premise that transporting illegal drugs is tantamount to violent aggression. Although that would be consistent with Trump’s often expressed desire to kill drug dealers, it is not consistent with the way drug laws are ordinarily enforced.
In the absence of violent resistance, a police officer who decided to shoot a drug suspect dead rather than take him into custody would be guilty of murder. Morally speaking, this situation is no different. That much is clear even without considering the fundamental injustice of criminalizing conduct that violates no one’s rights, such as the exchange of drugs for money.
Tren de Aragua’s designation as a “terrorist organization” does not affect this analysis. Trump administration officials “admit they could have interdicted the boat and detained the people on board,” notes George Mason law professor Ilya Somin. “They did not pose any imminent threat of violence, and they were not combatants in any war against the US. Calling them ‘narco-terrorists’ does not change these obvious facts.”
As Reason’s Matthew Petti observes, the unprovoked attack on a boat allegedly carrying drugs “shows how ‘terrorism’ makes everyone killable.” But that rhetorical license to kill does not amount to a legal justification.
“The State Department designation merely triggers the government’s ability to implement asset controls and other economic sanctions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) and other statutes,” Lederman notes. “It has nothing to do with authorizing [the Defense Department] to engage in targeted killings…which is why the U.S. military doesn’t go around killing members of all designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations.”
Nor can Trump cite any other statute that transforms murder into self-defense in this context. Instead, he is relying on his “constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive” to use deadly force against civilians he perceives as a threat to “national security and foreign policy interests.”
That logic could be extended beyond drug trafficking. Since Trump frequently describes illegal immigration as an “invasion,” might he decide he has the authority to order the summary execution of people trying to enter the country without permission?”
…
even if you accept the specious equation of drug smuggling with armed aggression, it seems relevant that the alleged Tren de Aragua drug boat reportedly was turning back when the drone strike was launched. “If someone is retreating, where’s the ‘imminent threat’ then?” Rear Adm. Donald J. Guter, formerly the top judge advocate general for the Navy, asked in an interview with The New York Times. “Where’s the ‘self-defense’? They are gone if they ever existed—which I don’t think they did.”
…
Geoffrey Corn, formerly the Army’s chief adviser on the law of war, likewise does not buy the “self-defense” argument. “I think it’s a terrible precedent,” he told the Times. “We’ve crossed a line here.””
““JD “I don’t give a shit” Vance says killing people he accuses of a crime is the “highest and best use of the military.” Did he ever read To Kill a Mockingbird?” Paul wrote on X on Saturday night. “Did he ever wonder what might happen if the accused were immediately executed without trial or representation??”
…
They are looking for answers as to why the administration elected to fire on the cartel, rather than rounding them up, and some are wary the strike could expand the president’s authority to call upon his war powers. There have also been questions about details of the attack and desire for proof that the boat itself was actually what the administration says it was.
“What a despicable and thoughtless sentiment it is to glorify killing someone without a trial,” Paul said of Vance’s Saturday post.”