President Donald Trump yesterday said he had ordered a second deadly military strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat from Venezuela, killing three people in international waters. Like the attack earlier this month that killed 11 alleged drug runners, yesterday’s strike was widely condemned by legal experts, who said Trump had no authority to order extrajudicial executions of noncombatants.
Who said what
Trump said on social media the Venezuelans “narcoterrorists” had been “positively identified” before the strike, but he did not provide more information other than a video of the boat floating at sea, then exploding in flames. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that if they wanted proof the boat was carrying drugs, “all you have to do is look at the cargo — it was spattered all over the ocean — big bags of cocaine and fentanyl all over the place.”
“There were no drugs visible in the ocean in the footage released by the administration,” The Wall Street Journal said. And according to experts, “Venezuelan drug gangs don’t produce or smuggle fentanyl.” Even if drugs were aboard, The New York Times said, the administration “has not offered a detailed legal theory about why it is lawful — and not murder or a war crime — to summarily kill people who are suspected of a crime when the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard could instead have interdicted their boats.”
White House officials have claimed Trump is defending the U.S. from foreign threats and has declared certain drug cartels to be international terrorist organizations, but that designation does not authorize lethal force without a congressional declaration of war. “International lawyers uniformly found his first such attack on Sept. 2 unlawful,” Notre Dame international law professor Mary Ellen O’Connell told the Times. “All of the criticism and warning of blowback has had no impact. People are dead again in killings that violate the law.”
What next?
Trump told reporters that the first strike had reduced drug trafficking in the Caribbean, as well as fishing, and when cartels “come by land we’re going to be stopping them the same way we stopped the boats.”
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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.
