[Salon] The new pirates of the Caribbean

There’s a name for attacks on civilian ships on the high seas: Piracy. That’s also an unfortunately plausible description of the Trump administration’s bombings of vessels around South America that it says are carrying drugs.

On Tuesday, the U.S. military announced it had struck four vessels and killed 14 people in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Dozens have now been slain in at least 10 attacks there and around the Caribbean. “These narco-terrorists have killed more Americans than Al-Qaeda, and they will be treated the same,” said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Such bravado raises more questions than answers.

Was everyone in each targeted ship smuggling drugs? Were the drugs that were allegedly on board deadly opiates or substances such as marijuana and cocaine? Were the drugs headed toward the United States, or other countries? The answers might vary depending on the strike, and the Trump administration has not made public evidence verifying its claims.

But those details are independent from the legality of these killings. U.S. forces are not attacking military vessels. They are attacking civilian vessels, whether those aboard are engaged in crime or not. And the Trump administration is not even claiming the boats posed an imminent threat of violence, or that capturing them would have been infeasible.Follow

It’s true that the executive branch has wide latitude to label groups as “foreign terrorist organizations.” The Trump administration has done so for some Latin American gangs. Congress created that designation to trigger financial sanctions, not to authorize the killing of suspected members on sight. When two men survived a U.S. attack earlier this month, the administration did not take them prisoner but returned them to their home countries. After Monday’s operation, Hegseth said, Mexican authorities launched a mission to rescue a survivor from one of the boats.

Drug abuse takes a tremendous toll on American society, and curtailing smuggling is an admirable objective of Trump’s border policy. But not every social scourge is an act of war that allows the executive to deploy military force. If Congress authorized the use of military force against drug traffickers, the way it authorized the use of force against al-Qaeda and its accomplices in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, that would be a different story.

Trump hasn’t bothered seeking Congress’s approval for these attacks, probably because a majority wouldn’t approve of the intentional killing of noncombatants. The made-for-social-media boat explosions will likely continue, but they should be called what they are.