Legal Questions Abound Over Trump’s Lethal Strikes Against Venezuelan Boats

CIA personnel running the Airbridge Denial Program, a drug-interdiction operation in Peru between 1995 and 2001, wanted to avoid catastrophic mishaps, such as, they said, shooting down “a planeload of nuns.” Then they shot down a family of American missionaries.According to Tim Weiner in “The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century,” all 15 shootdowns by CIA operatives and Peruvian allies between 1995 and 2001 violated explicit presidential rules about identifying and warning planes suspected of carrying drugs.Are there any rules regarding today’s “lethal kinetic strikes” on boats driven by “narco-terrorists” who are “poisoning” Americans? This language is from the self-designated secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, on X, where he notifies narco-terrorists: “We will kill you.” The tattooed tough guy is waging war. Yet not “hostilities.” Read on.Terrorism is indiscriminate violence intended to sow fear, thereby advancing political objectives. Drug trafficking is for-profit commerce. “Narco-terrorists” is a self-contradictory neologism coined to turn crime (drug trafficking) into war, thereby enabling lethal kinetic stuff by the war secretary.America’s military has been using lethal force against ships allegedly ferrying illegal drugs. Getty ImagesThe Obama administration, pursuing regime change, assured Congress that American participation in NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya’s civil war involved “non-kinetic support” (intelligence, logistics, refueling). There also were, however, some kinetic-seeming attacks on Libyan air defenses and other targets.When two people survived an October 16 boat strike, they were not taken into American custody. They were sent to their home countries, Ecuador and Colombia. Strangely, or perhaps not, they were not detained for extensive interrogations that might have confirmed, or not, Trump administration suppositions about who is doing what with the boats. Also, a boat farther from an American shore than Miami is from Philadelphia would need to refuel numerous times getting there. How would that work? The vessels allegedly are carrying fentanyl. Strange. Most of this comes to America overland from Mexico. South America, the boats’ origin, produces cocaine.Andrew Harnik/Pool via APChanneling his inner Humpty Dumpty (“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – nothing more nor less’”), President Trump has decided that this hypothetical fentanyl from Venezuela might be a “chemical weapon” (like mustard gas or sarin?). An odd one, that Americans pay for and ingest.If the boats are, as American intelligence sources supposedly know, carrying drugs (intelligence sources knew Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction existed), they are pulled to America by the demand for drugs by Americans who poison themselves. The national tragedy of 80,000 American fatal overdoses last year is not ameliorated by, it is deepened by, terminological obfuscations that erase the agency of drug users.The president says each boat strike prevents 25,000 overdose deaths. Reason’s Jacob Sullum says this means he already has saved 350,000 lives, six times the number of American lives lost in Vietnam. Then again, Attorney General Pam Bondi has said that Mr. Trump, in his first 100 days in office, has saved “258 million lives” (75 percent of the American population) by intercepting fentanyl shipments.Attorney General Bondi on June 27, 2025 in the briefing room of the White House. AP/Jacquelyn MartinThe United States Coast Guard specializes in at-sea interdictions. And using Reaper drones and Hellfire missiles against boats is (as a former American ambassador to Venezuela told the Economist) like “trying to cook an egg with a blowtorch.” One wonders: Is this what American pilots and drone operators enlisted to do?Administration lawyers say the boat strikes do not involve American armed forces in “hostilities,” as that term is used in the 1973 War Powers Act, which involves Congress in uses of military force. President Ford’s administration said “hostilities” occur when American forces are “actively engaged in exchanges of fire.” So, are “hostilities” happening when American service members are not endangered while executing strikes on unarmed boats?The president has “determined” — presidential determinations are formal and consequential — that the ongoing boat strikes constitute an armed conflict. Although only one side is armed. A Trump administration briefing for senators on the boat strikes excluded Democrats. A reasonable surmise: The administration invited only members of the Republican caucus because most of its members consider questioning the president’s judgment an act of lèse-majesté.Secretary of State Marco Rubio is puzzled: “We have deployed U.S. assets and interests all over the planet, but when we do it in our own hemisphere … everyone sort of freaks out.” (“Freaks out.” Imagine such teenager-talk from other secretaries of state — say, John Quincy Adams or Dean Acheson.) What is the antecedent of Mr. Rubio’s pronoun “it”? Deploying “assets and interests”? Hardly “everyone,” but some people have questions about activities antiseptically described as “lethal kinetic strikes.”The Washington Post

Legal Questions Abound Over Trump’s Lethal Strikes Against Venezuelan Boats

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