It’s become challenging to keep up the number of instances in which Donald Trump has ordered deadly military strikes against civilian targets in international waters, but as of Friday morning, the new total is 10 such operations.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed via social media that there was intelligence that supported yet another strike, which he said claimed the lives of six “narco-terrorists.” Based on the Republican administration’s tally, the president and his team have now killed 43 civilians over the last seven weeks.
We don’t know who these 43 people were, who or what they were associated with, whether they were actually trying to smuggle drugs into the United States, whether the evidence (such as it is) against them was credible, whether any innocent people were on the vessels that have been destroyed, or whether it would’ve advanced U.S. interests to detain and question them. (We don’t even know whether the official number of strikes and fatalities is accurate.)
But just as notably, we don’t know whether any of this is legal. Even John Yoo, the notorious former deputy assistant attorney general under George W. Bush, has suggested that the White House might be crossing a legal line.
It’s against this backdrop that The New York Times reported:
President Trump said on Thursday that he would bypass Congress rather than seek its approval to carry out military strikes against drug cartels that traffic narcotics to the United States, even as he vowed to expand the operation from attacks at sea to targets on land.
At a White House event, Trump effectively shrugged at the necessity of asking Congress to authorize his use of military force. “I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK?” the president told reporters. “We are going to kill them, you know? They are going to be, like, dead.”
The incumbent American president has embraced a model in which he can order deadly military strikes against civilians, at times and locations of his choosing, without congressional approval or regard for legal limits.
In September, JD Vance responded to a critic who characterized these deadly strikes as “a war crime.” Instead of trying to defend the administration’s policy, the vice president replied, “I don’t give a s— what you call it.”
The American system was designed with a series of guardrails to prevent abuses and crimes. At the top of the list is the rule of law. But when a White House has convinced itself that the ends justify the means and legal limits are niceties better ignored, the guardrails disappear and the U.S. drifts further into authoritarianism.
A separate New York Times analysis added that Trump’s claim that he can use military force in premeditated extrajudicial killings, based on unproven allegations, reflects a systemic breakdown.
Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former top Justice Department lawyer in the Bush/Cheney administration, told the Times, “Nixon tried to keep his criminality secret, and the Bush administration tried to keep the torture secret, and that secrecy acknowledged the norm that these things were wrong. Trump, as he often does when he is breaking law or norms, is acting publicly and without shame or unease. This is a very successful way to destroy the efficacy of law and norms.”
As for Congress — an institution that used to be important in this country — Sen. James Risch of Idaho, the Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said this week that he has no plans “at this time” to hold an oversight hearing on Trump’s policy of using the military to summarily kill people in international waters.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
