The president bragged about murdering 11 people yesterday:
The U.S. military killed 11 people on Tuesday in a strike on a vessel from Venezuela allegedly carrying illegal narcotics, President Donald Trump said, in the first known operation since his administration's recent deployment of warships to the southern Caribbean.
According to the administration, this is just the first of many strikes that U.S. forces will carry out as part of the president’s illegal cartel war. This strike illustrates why using the military to combat drug trafficking is so dangerous and wrong. Involving the military like this is only good for killing and destroying, but the drug trade isn’t a problem that can be resolved through more violence. The cartel war will get a lot more people killed, but it will still fail on its own terms.
Maybe the people on the destroyed boat were drug traffickers as the administration claims, but it is always possible for the military to get these things badly wrong. Back in 2021, U.S. forces tracked the humanitarian relief worker Zemari Ahmadi for most of a day and wrongly concluded that he was somehow tied to a terrorist organization before murdering him and nine other civilians, including several children. The then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs celebrated it as a “righteous strike” before the horrible truth came out that they had just slaughtered ten people for no reason.
Even if the people in that boat were drug traffickers, it was wrong to kill them. Drug smuggling isn’t a capital crime in the United States. Summarily executing almost a dozen non-combatants in international waters is a crime. Try as the administration might to rebrand drug traffickers as “narco-terrorists,” they do not have a license to assassinate these people. It doesn’t matter if they are on a “drug-carrying boat” or in another country.
Two decades of the “war on terror” have desensitized Americans to these sorts of extrajudicial assassinations, but it can’t be emphasized enough that the president has no legal authority to do what he just did. Designating a cartel or gang as a terrorist organization doesn’t magically confer that authority on the president. Just because the government calls someone a terrorist, that does not give agents of the state the right to execute that person. Congress has not authorized the president to use force against any of the groups that the administration has absurdly designated as terrorist organizations.
The start of the cartel war is more evidence that we need to end the “war on terror” and dismantle the machinery of death that goes along with it. Cloaking the cartel war in the language of combating terrorism promises to repeat all of the abuses of the “war on terror. It is further routinizing the use of extrajudicial assassination as a tool of foreign policy. Our foreign policy is already overmilitarized and destructive, and the cartel war will make it even worse.
If it is not shut down quickly, the cartel war will become an excuse for more presidential power grabs here at home and overseas. An already lawless president claims the right to issue death sentences for anyone associated with the groups that he deems terrorists. That should terrify all of us. The “war on terror” has boomeranged on us and come home, and it just a matter of time before the cartel war does the same thing.