In Front of Our Noses: A Policy of Murder
Blowing up boats because they might have drugs on them is not justifiable, legally or morally.
For previous entries, click here.
I was going to include this essay by Tom Nichols in my tabs post, but there were several things that I think need highlighting. I will note by way of preface that the tabs post contains several other stories relevant to this one, including underscoring that Trump is lying about fentanyl being a justification for these attacks.
At any rate, I commend Nichols’ piece in full: A Rogue Nation on the High Seas. Nichols summarizes the legal context as follows.
If the boats were carrying drugs (something Trump hasn’t proved) and if the boats were full of terrorists (something Trump has asserted but without providing names or evidence) and if the boats were headed directly for a U.S. port (which Trump cannot show), then Trump would still be in the wrong to destroy them without warning.
Further, if John Yoo thinks you are going too far, perhaps people should sit up and pay attention.
The president’s actions and rationalizations flunk the smell test both for international and American law. You don’t have to take my word for it: The former George W. Bush–administration lawyer John Yoo weighed in on this a few days ago. (Yoo came up with the legal justification for using “enhanced interrogation techniques”—also called “torture”—against captured terrorists after 9/11.) “There has to be a line between crime and war,” Yoo told Politico a few days ago. “We can’t just consider anything that harms the country to be a matter for the military. Because that could potentially include every crime.”
The emphasis on that last sentence is mine. The ongoing blurring of the military’s role in law enforcement is troubling (to put it mildly).
Let’s not fall asleep to the fact that Trump and his allies keep throwing out a very broad rhetorical net over their adversaries, equating the “Radical Left” with political violence (see here, for example) and also describing specific persons he wants targeted as “the radical left.” Again, Stephen Miller called the entire Democratic Party a “domestic extremist organization” just a few weeks ago.
At any rate, back to Nichols, but to add to what I was just highlighting.
None of this seems to bother Trump or his circle. Almost two weeks ago, Vice President J. D. Vance posted on X: “Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.” (I think, having taught hundreds of them, that most military officers would say that defending America and the Constitution is their highest duty, not being the world’s most brutal vice cops.) When one X user replied that what Trump is doing is a war crime, Vance, a graduate of Yale Law School, shot back: “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”
This is a disturbingly cavalier attitude towards extrajudicial killings. Indeed, to quote Nate Berlatsky from one of the links in the tabs post,
Vance and his fans are cheering not despite the fact that their president is terrorizing innocents, but because he is. Or, to put it another way, MAGA believes that all Venezuelans, foreigners, and/or all non-white people, are by definition second class humans at best and guilty of being outsiders and traitors to MAGA at worst.
This is the logic of fascism. And while that logic is often deployed abroad, it’s also inevitably rolled out at home. Trump and Vance are making it clear that they consider it their right, and their pleasure, to murder anyone, anywhere, for any reason or for no beyond a passing whim. That’s an ugly message to Venezuelans. It’s an ugly message to the UN and to America as well.
Ugly, indeed.
Side note: if the Trump administration and its allies don’t want to be likened to fascists, then they should stop acting like fascists.
Back to Nichols.
A more worrisome problem here is that Trump’s illegal orders to kill drug smugglers could acclimate the American public to the sinister idea that the military is the president’s personal muscle and that it must do whatever he says. Earlier this week, he declared “antifa”—a loose affiliation of people who identify themselves as “anti-fascists”—to be a “major terrorist organization.” But because “antifa” isn’t a single group with a headquarters and identified leaders, Trump could apply the label to anyone he thinks opposes him. The president has now claimed he can kill terrorists at will, and he has designated many of his American opponents as terrorists.
The Supreme Court majority, in its Trump v, United States decision, didn’t seem very worried about Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s hypothetical objection that the president, bolstered by absolute immunity, could order the military to assassinate a political rival. But if he can order the Navy to operate as a presidential hit squad on the high seas, any number of grim hypotheticals could become reality sooner than Americans might expect.
This is worth noting: Trump has zero reason to fear legal retribution for ordering the killing of people on the high seas. After all, that falls within his official duties and, therefore, the immunity ruling covers him. But it is chilling to note that Sotomayor’s warning already sounds even more plausible nine months into Trump’s term. Indeed, it arguably has come to pass: Trump sees Venezuelan drug traffickers as his enemies, so he has had them killed with impunity.
But, you know, don’t call them fascists or authoritarians, right?
Do we have to wait for the return of Jesus for this madman to be stopped?
@Gregory Lawrence Brown:
Don’t hold your breath. Jesus was supposed to be here this week and blew it off.
Does this differ from the Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump Drone Not-War in the Middle East in anything other than location and method?
Kind of all seems like extra-judicial killings performed by our military outside our country’s borders to me. If anything, it sounds less worse as we aren’t violating another country’s airspace to do it, although I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that international law treats the open seas (used by the Great Nations for Shipping) as more important than the territory of smaller countries.
I’m almost curious as to what moral and legal knots John Fucking Woo contorts himself in to decide that the two scenarios are different. But, it’s John Fucking Woo, and I think he’s likely just offended that he wasn’t asked to help create legal justifications.
I’ve grudgingly and uneasily mostly kind of supported the drones in the Middle East because it represents a deescalation from our very active wars there. And I expect that our almost-certainly illegal and definitely immoral killings there are at least frequently well targeted, and appear to have disrupted terrorist networks enough that there haven’t been major terrorist attacks that would fire up the American War Machine to kill several hundred thousand people* in a foreign country.
Support might be a strong word. Accept as better than the likely alternative of a frenzy of American Blood Lust and a major war against mostly innocent people.
The War On Small Boats has none of even those awful justifications.
I hope that when all is said and done, the pilots have to answer for their crimes in a court of law. Along with the entire chain of command.
In conclusion, “America! Fuck Yeah!”
*: or more, as estimates of the dead in Iraq vary, and I’m sure we killed someone in Afghanistan, so the mid-range estimates of Iraq and Afghanistan add up to over a million.
Also, I’m surprise that we haven’t declared fentanyl a chemical weapon, being unleashed upon our populations by the evil and corrupt radical-left Venezuelans.
If this administration wasn’t snubbing John Woo, and leaving him out of their Department of Half-Assed Justifications For Why Illegal Actions Are Legal, I think we would have gotten there.
@Gustopher: I don’t have time at the moment for a longer answer, but here are a few important differences:
1. The AUMF voted on by Congress provided a legal framework that applied to those drone strikes. There is simply no such legal framework here.
2. Those strikes were at least in the context of a military action aboard.
3. As I think Nichols notes, this strikes were at least based on specific intel above specific persons. That is: there was more evidence to justify those strikes than these boat attacks.
4. Despite the name, the drug war is mostly a criminal justice operation, not a military conflict.
None of that is to defend, one way or the other, this drone strikes. But the context and legal parameters are very different.
Nichols does talk about some of this in his piece.
I would strenuously argue that we make a mistake getting too casual about making vague comparisons to past actions, even if those actions deserve criticism. Like with some of the cancel culture comparisons, it’s a trap the Trumpists are using to cover their actions (IMHO)..
It’s going to get worse before it gets better, as Trump and his enablers can’t help themselves from pushing the envelope. There’s no plausible situation where these people will decide they’ve gone so far with the “othering” to warrant dialing things back for their own political good – let alone the good of the country.
They’re going to try to extend their impunity to kill to domestic enemies.
@Sleeping Dog:
Jesus looks in.
Sighs.
Decides it’s Holy Ghost’s job for the time being.
@Gustopher:
Yes, it does differ.
Striking military targets (aka killing them) is a very different matter from pre-emptive use of lethal force in law enforcement.
Just because the enforcement is outside the purview of US domestic law is beside the point.
A possible comparison is the Royal Navy anti-slavery operations: they were not shy of using force, but always signalled suspected slavers to heave to for inspection first.
Sooner or later, this policy is going to end up killing a boatload of innocent fishermen, or a private yacht, or a tourist boat.
@Sleeping Dog:
Took one look at his old home town and changed his mind.
Calling people like James Comey “radical left Democrats” is a perfect illustration of the alternative reality which the MAGA cult has lovingly created for itself. It’s why there is no way to hold a rational conversation with members.
Rubio disclosed the rationale for murdering alleged drug couriers after the first one caused such a sensation. Yes, America has been intercepting such boats for years and indicting their occupants if drugs are found, but it “hasn’t worked”. Presumably he meant drugs were still being smuggled. Therefore in the best Hollywood vigilante cop fashion, America was going to start killing suspects in cold blood to see if that “worked”.
It’s reported today that Trump intends to order air strikes on alleged cartel operations within Venezuela. This would serve two purposes. Firstly, it would delight his base after weeks of mixed success for the regime. Secondly, it would be almost guaranteed to force some kind of Venezuelan response, enabling him to tell all those radical left judges that America was in a real shooting war with Venezuela so invoking the Enemy Aliens Act was perfectly legitimate.
Every day, I wonder what possesses the Australian government to persist with the AUKUS deal, which ties our national defence to the whims of the White House into the second half of the century.
@Ken_L:
There seems to be section of MAGA that really wants wars with Latin America, for some weird reason.
If considering war with Venezuela, it might be considered sensible to have Colombia onside.
Oops.
But what does that matter, compared to the need for kayfabe?
If the idiots have their head, the US military will end up fighting in Mexico, Venezuela, Panama, etc
Which could end up making Iraq and Afghanistan look like a Sunday school picnic.
The better course might be AUKEU; but Europe as of now simply does not have the global force projection capacity required.
The turn of America to nutcasery is catching a lot of people on the hop.
Which is a bit daft, in retrospect: Trump 2016-20 should have been clue enough.
It’s just everyone hoped that with Biden, and after, it would be back to service as normal.
Big mistake.
@JohnSF: “Sooner or later, this policy is going to end up killing a boatload of innocent fishermen, or a private yacht, or a tourist boat.”
What makes you think it hasn’t already?
@Assad K: It’s not like there aren’t any precedents.
US bomb blunder kills 30 at Afghan wedding
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jul/02/afghanistan.lukeharding
Rudd condemns air strike on Afghan boys
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-03-04/rudd-condemns-air-strike-on-afghan-boys/1966198