Murder on the high seas
Orders to execute civilian non-combatants are obviously illegal, triggering an obligation to refuse them.
Differently edited versions of this appear in Salon, Raw Story, Windy City Times, OutSouthFlorida, Alternet, and MSN.
Trump has ordered more deadly bombings of small fishing boats, killing everyone onboard, this time off the coast of Colombia. More strikes were announced on Friday, killing six more people and bringing the number of fatalities among people Trump calls “narco-terrorists” to 43.
Not long after the bombings began, unidentified bodies with burn marks and missing limbs started washing ashore on the coast of nearby Trinidad.
Without releasing photos or any credible evidence to back it up, Trump claims that the victims’ vessels were “stacked up with bags of white powder that’s mostly fentanyl and other drugs, too.” Trump says they were “smuggling a deadly weapon poisoning Americans,” on behalf of various “terrorist organizations.”
Trump is calling the victims ‘terrorists’ so that he can treat them as enemy combatants in a war that does not exist. Domestically, we know Trump calls groups who oppose him politically “domestic terrorists.” We know he fabricated a domestic terrorist organization he calls ‘Antifa’ to sell his plan for violence. We also know his administration is lying about peaceful protestors threatening ICE agents in order to justify ICE brutality, and that ICE refuses to wear body cams without a court order.
Trump’s firehose of lies about domestic ‘terrorists’ don’t help his claims about ‘terrorists’ on the high seas.
Is Trump confusing South America with China and Mexico?
Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro has credibly accused Trump of murder. In response, instead of offering legal justification or engaging in dialogue, Trump said he was cutting off foreign aid to Colombia.
Bragging about the killings, Trump falsely claimed that every exploded shipping vessel “saves 25,000 American lives.” In the factual world, about 100,000 Americans die each year from drug overdoses, mostly by fentanyl, which does not come from Venezuela, Colombia or any South American country.
The fentanyl killing Americans comes from labs in Mexico and China. South America produces marijuana and cocaine, not fentanyl. Most of the killing fentanyl is smuggled into the country by US citizens, over land.
Legal arguments don’t hold water
The White House claims the strikes are a matter of self-defense. To get there, Trump “determined” that drug cartels like Tren de Aragua are “terrorists.” But officials say Tren de Aragua is not operating in the shipping routes under attack, and that the route Trump and Hegseth are targeting carries cocaine and marijuana to Europe and Africa, not the US.
Legal experts on the use of armed force say Trump’s campaign is illegal because the military is not permitted to target civilians who are not directly participating in hostilities. Key legal instruments prohibiting extrajudicial killings and murder include the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the Statute of the International Criminal Court, and customary international humanitarian law. The Trump administration has not publicly offered a legal theory that comports with any of these laws.
Instead, the White House has argued that the attacks fall under the law of armed conflict (LOAC), which limits methods of warfare and sets out legally required protections for noncombatants and civilians during conflict. The US is in no such conflict; we are not under attack in the US or anywhere else, and Congress has declared no war.
Designating drug cartels as “terrorist organizations” is also factually suspect. Drug cartels exist for profit; all purveyors of illicit drugs are in the business to make money. In contrast, “terrorists” by definition are motivated by ideological goals often involving politics or religion—not profit. Even if they were terrorists, international law would only allow the executive branch to respond through legal methods like freezing assets, trials and imprisonment.
Hegseth and others involved will eventually face court martial
Trump and Hegseth’s legal arguments have been universally rejected by military legal experts including former lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, who have condemned the attacks as unlawful under both domestic and international law. Undeterred, Hegseth has stated enthusiastically that the military will continue these executions.
In February, Hegseth fired the JAGs whose job was to assess the legality of military actions. He may have deliberately done so to engage in illegal conduct and later claim a ‘mistake of law’ defense, but that maneuver won’t save him. In US Servicemembers’ Exposure to Criminal Liability for Lethal Strikes on Narcoterrorists, Just Security lays it out under the Manual for Courts-Martial, and Article 118 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), concluding in the Venezuela strikes that:
“Despite the clear absence of an “imminent threat of death or serious injury” or “grave threat to life,” the U.S. Coast Guard did not interdict the alleged criminal narcotrafficking in the way this conduct has been historically (and recently) approached. These suspected criminals were not arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced through a regular course of criminal procedure and neutral adjudication in a court. They were killed extrajudicially for conduct that could not be plausibly labeled a military attack, use of force, or even threat of imminent harm to anyone in the United States or any other nation, and despite the opportunity and ability to use less-than-lethal force to stop the boats.
An extrajudicial killing, premeditated and without justification or excuse and without the legal authority tied to an armed conflict, is properly called “murder.” And murder is still a crime for those in uniform who executed the strike even if their targets are dangerous criminals, and even if servicemembers were commanded to do so by their superiors, including the President of the United States.”
Under this straightforward legal analysis, “every officer in the chain of command who … directed downward the initial order from the President or Secretary of Defense” would likely fall within the meaning of traditional accomplice liability, and could be charged for murder under Article 118.
Even if a partisan Supreme Court gave Trump criminal immunity for murder (an unsettled question), that immunity does not extend to Hegseth, or to other service members piloting the drones or firing the missiles. Orders to execute civilian non-combatants are obviously illegal, and trigger service members’ obligation to refuse them.
Those who choose to follow them should expect to follow Hegseth to court martial when this period of insanity ends.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
Trump, it would seem with a frequency that justifies saying with only slight exaggeration that "every day in at least several ways" he demonstrates his dangerous psychopatholgy. If only he was a mere grandiose egomanical narcissist who wants a gilded life with the trappings of tacky royalty. If only he was merely someone who wanted dictatorial power. He gets an intellectual and visceral thrill out of inflicting pain, fear, and even death on others. He is the worst kind of psychopath. Not only doesn't he think the rules of society apply to him assay a typical robber or fraudster, but he is a sadist. Not a mere assassin who is assigned a target for hit and dispatches the victim he is more like someone who tortures someone but not to get vitsl information but because he enjoys it. Shit, we have a vindictive fuckwad who gets pissed off at another country, Canada, because they run a TV ad. Now he must be seething because their baseball team won the first World Series game as if this is a personal insult.
That he's managed to find the 5% of the population that experts say meet the diagnosis of being psychopaths is no surprise. Of course he has a Hegseth.
I'm sorry if this isn't the most coherent comment. All of this just pisses me off and I am probably ranting. Hopefully I made more sense in my Substack from yesterday: "The ballroom, the threatening all caps posts, the blowing up men in boats, all are sideshows to the Trump damnatio ad bestias planned for main arena. This is the entire country." I asked how many of us will end up like Ignatius of Antioch? I predicted that if Trump has his way it could be all of us.
https://halbrown.substack.com/p/the-ballroom-the-threatening-all
In other words we will be like the people in the boats Trump has blown to bits. Real bombs or ravinious loins ripping our flesh off in Trump's arena or having the last semblences of democracy dissolved we seem helpless to stop this.
How long before a true Hiterlerian regime is established? How long before we can feel safe as we take our signs out and go off to a protest? How long before Sabrina and I can post a Substack? How long before YOU can even make a comment like (so far this morning) six of you already did this morning?
They've come for the immigrants. They bombed the fisherman. They're after Tish James, James Comey, John Bolton, maybe Adam Schiff. They attack universities trying to teach the truth and scientists trying to find a cure for cancer.
We should all be reminded of "First They Came" by Martin Niemöller. This is so relevant today.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
The problem with the poem's message is that it suggests that speaking might have stopped the Holocaust. In fact speaking then would have gotten you sent to a camp or worse.
Now it just gets some high profile people indicted or other countries tariffed. How long before we are not merely muzzled but murdered?
I ended up using this entire comment as part of my Substack: Trump's poop bombing protestors video is like Martin Niemöller's "First They Came" poem https://halbrown.substack.com/p/trumps-poop-bombing-protestors-video
Sabrina, what can I say that I haven't said before: 1) excellent and thorough analysis of these waterway assaults, and 2) excellent explanations of perpetrator liability. Now, WHO will act and WHEN to stop these murders.