White House defends boat strike as legal doubts mount

What happened

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Thursday described Tuesday's deadly strike on an alleged drug-trafficking speedboat off the Venezuelan coast as the first salvo in President Donald Trump's new "war" on "narcoterrorists."

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said Trump ordered the military strike "in defense of vital U.S. national interests," and it "was fully consistent with the law of armed conflict." But experts on the law of armed conflict said they saw no legal justification for summarily killing 11 noncombatants in international waters.

Who said what

Trump said the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which he designated a terrorist organization, was using the boat to smuggle drugs to the U.S. But other than a grainy black-and-white video, the administration has offered few details on the lethal strike, including the identities of the casualties and the legal underpinning of the attack.

The Pentagon was still working on "what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike," The New York Times said. Some administration officials have suggested it was "conducted under the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force" against al-Qaida, The Washington Post said. Hegseth Thursday said "a drug cartel is no different than al-Qaida, and they will be treated as such."

But Congress hasn't authorized military force against cartels, and "as a matter of law," the Times said, Trump's terrorist designation for gangs and drug cartels only allows him to "sanction such groups, including by freezing their assets," not "authorize combat activity" against them. "Frankly, I can't see how this can be considered anything other than a nonjudicial killing outside the boundaries of domestic and international law," lawyer and former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told The Wall Street Journal.

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What next?

Rubio said in Quito Thursday that Trump is designating two Ecuadorian gangs as international terrorist organizations. Rubio said the U.S. would continue unilaterally killing drug smugglers, but if "cooperative governments" agree to "help us find these people and blow them up," the Trump administration will let those "friendly governments" take the lead.