The Trump administration murdered six more civilians in the Pacific:
The United States struck two alleged drug-carrying vessels in the eastern Pacific Ocean on Sunday, killing six people on board, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Monday, as calls mounted for investigations into the strikes.
The U.S. military has murdered more than 70 people in the Caribbean and the Pacific over the last two months. The president and the Secretary of Defense have given illegal orders to kill civilians on these boats at least 18 times and every time the orders have been carried out. The president wants to use the military as his own assassins, and it appears that no one is willing to refuse that assignment.
The government has a secret list of 24 organizations that it considers “designated terrorist organizations.” At least one of the groups, the so-called Cartel de los Soles, doesn’t really exist. Others have little to do with the drug trade. The rest are drug cartels that have nothing to do with terrorism. One thing they all have in common is that they aren’t engaged in an armed conflict with the United States. The “conflict” is completely made-up because no one is attacking or threatening to attack the U.S. or American forces in the region. The administration’s justification for the murder spree is a lie built on top of a lie built on top of another lie.
The Intercept spoke to Brian Finucane about the administration’s secret list, and he said this:
“The administration has established a factual and legal alternate universe for the executive branch,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is a specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war. “This is the president, purely by fiat, saying that the U.S. is in conflict with these undisclosed groups without any congressional authorization. So this is not just a secret war, but a secret unauthorized war. Or, in reality, a make-believe war, because most of these groups we probably couldn’t even be in a war with.”
The administration’s own briefings have confirmed that they don’t know who the people on the boats are, and they aren’t interested in finding out. Thanks to news reporting, we are slowly getting a better picture of who the president’s murder victims are. The Associated Press investigated earlier U.S. boat attacks and mostly found poor men trying to make a living:
One was a fisherman struggling to eke out a living on $100 a month. Another was a career criminal. A third was a former military cadet. And a fourth was a down-on-his-luck bus driver.
The men had little in common beyond their Venezuelan seaside hometowns and the fact all four were among the more than 60 people killed since early September when the U.S. military began attacking boats that the Trump administration alleges were smuggling drugs.
Many of these men may have been criminals, but they were at most small-time smugglers looking for ways to make a little more money for their families. They had done nothing that could possibly justify killing them, and they were no threat to the military that blew them up. To call these men “narco-terrorists” is a lie, and to murder them because of that lie is utterly despicable.
The president cannot lawfully do any of the things he has been doing with these strikes. These boats aren’t lawful targets. The men on the boats aren’t combatants. There is no conflict and no threat of armed attack. Even if there were a conflict going on, these strikes would still be war crimes. There is absolutely no legal or moral justification for these attacks. The military’s own lawyers must know this, but they have been cowed into silence by war crimes enthusiast Pete Hegseth.
This is one of the men that was murdered on the president’s orders:
A native of Güiria, a village on the southeast side of the peninsula, Robert Sánchez dropped out of school as a teenager and like many others in the region became a fisherman like his father, according to friends and relatives. The 42-year-old was considered among the peninsula’s best pilots, they said, having spent the better part of three decades mastering the area’s currents and winds, so much so he could navigate the waters at night without instruments.
As part of hired crews, the father of four spent his days fishing for snapper, kingfish and dogfish. The fisherman wanted to save enough money to buy a 75-horsepower boat engine so he could operate his own boat and not work for others. It was a dream Sánchez knew he was likely to never realize, relatives said: Most of his income — about $100 a month — went to feed his children.
Was Robert Sánchez a threat to the United States or to any other country? To ask the question is to understand how insane and vicious our government’s policy is. Of course he wasn’t a threat. He was a poor man hired to pilot a boat, and for that “offense” our military blew him up. Murdering him will have no effect on the drug trade, but it has stolen this father from his children and left them in an even worse condition than they were before.
Every time the military blows up another boat, it is executing more poor men without trial or even the slightest pretense of due process for a crime that doesn’t carry the death penalty. These men are not enemies of our country, and our government has no right to take their lives. It is crucial that we learn the names of the victims and demand that the murder spree stops. The administration is slaughtering these men in our name, and if we fail to stop them we will be letting them get away with mass murder.