“the goal of disrupting and deterring drug smuggling would not justify a policy of summarily executing criminal suspects without statutory authorization or any semblance of due process. That is why Trump is trying to justify his bloodthirsty anti-drug strategy by calling his targets “combatants” in a “non-international armed conflict”—a term he has stretched beyond recognition.
Congress has not recognized that purported “armed conflict,” and it is a counterintuitive label for the unilateral violence exemplified by the September 2 attack. The boat that Bradley destroyed, which reportedly “turned around before the attack started because the people onboard had apparently spotted a military aircraft stalking it,” was not engaged in any sort of attack on American targets and offered no resistance. The same was true of the vessels destroyed in subsequent attacks on suspected drug boats
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The violence in such attacks is so one-sided that the government’s lawyers claim blowing up drug boats does not constitute “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution because U.S. personnel face no plausible risk of casualties. So we are talking about an “armed conflict” that does not involve “hostilities” yet somehow does involve enemy “combatants.”
Unless you accept that baffling premise, the attempt to justify Bradley’s second strike under the law of war is incomprehensible. “Two U.S. officials have said the military intercepted radio communications from the survivors to suspected cartel members, raising the possibility that any drugs on the boat that had not burned up in the first blast could have been retrieved,” The New York Times reports. “The military, they said, interpreted the purported distress call as meaning the survivors were still ‘in the fight’ and so were not shipwrecked.”
In reality, of course, those men were not “in the fight” to begin with, because there was no “fight.” A unilateral act of aggression by U.S. forces hardly amounts to a battle, and it is hard to see how a radio call for help qualifies as the sort of “hostile act” that the Defense Department’s manual says excludes someone from “shipwrecked” status. To illustrate that exception, the manual notes that “shipwrecked persons do not include combatant personnel engaged in amphibious, underwater, or airborne attacks who are proceeding ashore.””
“While the renewed congressional interest in the legal and moral justification for Trump’s bloodthirsty anti-drug strategy is welcome, that inquiry should not be limited to the question of whether one particular attack violated the law of war.
The details of Bradley’s defense nevertheless illustrate the outrageous implications of conflating drug smuggling with violent aggression. He argues that the seemingly helpless men in the water, who were blown apart by a second missile while clinging to the boat’s smoldering wreckage, still posed a threat because they could have recovered and delivered whatever cocaine might have remained after the first strike.
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In reality, there was no “fight” to stay in. The violence exemplified by this attack is so one-sided that the government’s lawyers claim blowing up drug boats does not constitute “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution because U.S. personnel face no plausible risk of casualties. So we are talking about an “armed conflict” that does not involve “hostilities” yet somehow does involve enemy “combatants”—who, contrary to that label, are not actually engaged in combat.
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Bradley seems to have determined that the flailing men were engaged in a “hostile act” simply by existing near a boat remnant that might have contained salvageable cocaine. As ridiculous as that position is, it is only a bit more risible than Trump’s assertion that supplying cocaine to Americans amounts to “an armed attack against the United States” that justifies a lethal military response.
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“There is a risk that the focus on the second strike and specifically the talk of ‘war crimes’ feeds into the administration’s false wartime framing and veils the fact that the entire boat-strikes campaign is murder, full stop,” Cardozo School of Law professor Rebecca Ingber, an expert on the law of war, told The New York Times. “The administration’s evolving justification for the second strike only lays bare the absurdity of their legal claims for the campaign as a whole—that transporting drugs is somehow the equivalent of wartime hostilities.””
“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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
“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.””
If reports are true, the Secretary of Defense broke the laws of war according to U.S. law by ordering killed, people in the water whose vessels had already been destroyed.
Also, because this war has not been authorized by Congress and criminal suspects are entitled to due process, not killed on suspicion, even those killed on the boat were murdered.
How the pentagon is treating reporters is more like how authoritarian governments treat reporters. Yes, we’ll talk to you and give you access, but only to select people who will eat our shit.
Some of Hegseth’s ideas were common sense. Others seem like he didn’t investigate the full consequences before announcing them to the generals and the country.
“The two Trump administrations have launched as many airstrikes at overseas targets as any other administration. Although childish and superficial, his renaming the Department of Defense as the Department of War doesn’t telegraph a love of peace. Nor does his authorized strike on a Venezuelan boat in the Caribbean. His policies in the Middle East have amounted to little more than giving Israel the greenlight to do as it pleases. Then there were his attacks on nuclear sites in Iran and his constant threats to send troops to root out cartels in Mexico.
Whether or not you agree with these policies, they don’t adhere to any principled non-interventionist philosophy. And that takes us back to Russia and Ukraine. The problem with appeasement is that it emboldens the aggressor rather than secures lasting and just peace. No serious person is calling for American troops in Ukraine, but Trump’s insistence on blaming Ukraine and not pushing Russia for serious concessions has escalated the conflict.”
“Retired General Martin France, himself an Air Force Academy graduate and former chair of the academy’s department of astronautics and engineering, views this military campus crackdown, which includes complementary work by other federal bodies, as a myopic effort to eliminate courses that encourage independence, an instinct echoed by many of the more than 20 current and former civilian and military faculty I spoke with, many of whom were granted anonymity to freely discuss the conditions of the crackdown.
“Our officers should be sentient beings who understand just war theory, the laws around conflict, the orders that they are morally obligated to disobey,” France said, arguing that the Trump administration, by contrast, wants to breed compliance rather than teach nuance. This, in turn, France alleged, forms an officer class of “flesh-and-bone drones.”
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Due to the Air Force’s highly technical mission, its service academy has an especially rich STEM program, one that rears future fighter pilots, astronauts and nuclear missile operators. As such, many of the departing civilian professors taught engineering courses. “They think that our graduates should be more comfortable with crawling through the dirt and carrying a rifle,” vented one current military professor. “We’re the Air Force, we don’t do that. We don’t fire rifles. We operate multi-billion-dollar systems and multi-billion-dollar bomber aircraft.”
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Amid this exodus of civilians, some military professors are leaving, too. The long-time military professor described a pervasive sense that the overall academic environment has been fatally compromised, dynamics he explained with a baseball metaphor: “When there’s a team with pitchers but no catchers, you can’t play ball.”
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I understood the worries of the professor in black. They were echoed throughout my interviews for this story. Still, I wondered if maybe his anonymous get-up was a bit of an overreaction.
My mind changed six days later, when it became apparent that I myself had been monitored. That morning, a Secret Service agent showed up to my parents’ door, explaining that West Point had reported me for acting suspiciously. Specifically, they alleged that I’d been asking people to speak with the president. This wasn’t true, and the service declined to discuss the intelligence undergirding the allegation. But it felt like a poetic charge in light of my reportorial focus on the military’s stifling of academic inquiry. Certainly, any reporter, as with any pupil, must be allowed, encouraged even, to ask probing questions.”