Small boat in Carribbean being bombed to oblivion by the U.S. miltary. Courtesy Reuters
Sometimes, if you can’t stand up face-to-face with cold-blooded evil, you gotta hit ’em where it hurts, with money in their face. Or money that’s gonna fight their falsehoods tooth-and-nail with the truth, and the fiercest legal uppercut you can muster.
Public Citizen Inc. was the activist group I dropped my financial anchor with for this effort, a deadly scenario set in the Caribbean Sea. 1
Public Citizen Inc. was the activist group I dropped my financial anchor with for this effort, a deadly scenario set in the Caribbean Sea. 1
That’s the best I felt I could do as an average, outraged citizen in response to Donald Trump’s ongoing murder-spree of boats of people traveling in the Caribbean.
Time to greatly expand the Narcissist in Chief’s claim he could “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.” “Fifth Avenue” has become multiple seafaring corridors in the Caribbean.
Yes, he’s become a serial killer. Factcheeck.org reports that at least 63 people have been executed by airstrikes, without a whiff of due process. And actually Trump is crowing about his blood thirst, and promising more, not covering it up.
Not only are these attacks unsubstantiated by evidence of threat, but also done with no warnings or legal explanations. Secretary of Defense (War?) Pete Hegseth stirred great outrage by ordering the second attack on one boat, to kill off two survivors hanging on for dear life. Everybody is sensing pure “war crime,” in this instance. Does Hegseth even begin to understand the history-honored concept of “Prisoners of War”?
Not only are these attacks unsubstantiated by evidence of threat, but also done with no warnings or legal explanations. Secretary of Defense (War?) Pete Hegseth stirred great outrage by ordering the second attack on one boat, to kill off two survivors hanging on for dear life. Everybody is sensing pure “war crime,” in this instance. Does Hegseth even begin to understand the history-honored concept of “Prisoners of War”?
U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has asserted the media’s misunderstanding of the adminitration’s bombing attacks in the Caribbean as due to “the fog of war.” Courtesy Honoulou Advertiser
Who is At War, and With Whom? However, The U.S. is not at war with any of what Trump terms “narcoterrorist” entities — as most of these boats, which appear to carry no weaponry other than alleged drugs — are supposedly coming from the direction of Venezuela, the alleged primary aggressor country. According to factcheck.org, Venezuela trafficks cocaine to many locations but rarely if ever fentynal. Moreover, no attacked vessel to date was traveling directly toward the United States, rather to other South American countries or Caribbean islands.
Of course, only Congress, not the president, can declare war. UN human rights experts and other international law experts have criticized the U.S. actions, stating that the U.S. has not shown an imminent threat that would justify the use of lethal military force under international law, and that simply characterizing drug cartels as terrorist organizations does not provide a legal basis for such strikes.
Republican Senator Rand Paul and other critics have repeatedly stated that the administration has not released the identities of those killed or presented evidence linking them to specific criminal or terrorist organizations.
Republican Senator Rand Paul and other critics have repeatedly stated that the administration has not released the identities of those killed or presented evidence linking them to specific criminal or terrorist organizations.
Trump wrote on Truth Social on Oct. 18, “It was my great honor to destroy a very large DRUG-CARRYING SUBMARINE that was navigating towards the United States on a well known narcotrafficking transit route. U.S. Intelligence confirmed this vessel was loaded up with mostly Fentanyl, and other illegal narcotics. There were four known narcoterrorists on board the vessel. Two of the terrorists were killed. … The two surviving terrorists are being returned to their Countries of origin, Ecuador and Colombia, for detention and prosecution.”
Factcheck.org reached out to the White House to ask why the survivors of the boat strikes were not arrested for prosecution in the U.S., but reports “we did not receive a response.” 2
Due Process Concerns: Sen. Paul has argued that normal procedure for drug interdiction is arrest and trial, not using the military to summarily execute people without a trial or proof. He emphasized that even in a war zone, there are rules of engagement, and killing incapacitated or shipwrecked individuals is illegal.
Murdered Fishermen: Reliable reports say among those murdered point blank are fishermen simply trying to make a living, to survive. To Trump these people, who are all people of color of Latin descent, are what he calls narco-terrorsts, a horrendous tag. I call this racist homicide.
Murdered Fishermen: Reliable reports say among those murdered point blank are fishermen simply trying to make a living, to survive. To Trump these people, who are all people of color of Latin descent, are what he calls narco-terrorsts, a horrendous tag. I call this racist homicide.
If you doubt me, let’s look at the facts as they’re objectively known, to date. Some of the bes the best reportage I’ve seen to date is from The New York Review of Books, which does regular political reportage from the field and, in this instance, well-informed legal commentary. The article by David Cole, from the review’s October 23, 2025 print issue, was simply titled “Getting Away with Murder.” It was published well before the latest Hegseth obliteration of two helpless survivors, and its criticism and implicit indictments still hold up. 3
“ ‘To every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States of America,” Trump said during his speech at the UN General Assembly on September 23, ‘please be warned that we will blow you out of existence.’ ”
There was no conceivable legal authority for these killings. We are not at war with drug traffickers. The ‘war on drugs’ is a metaphor, not a legal term of art that authorizes killing the ‘enemy.’
“The human beings on these boats were civilians, and even if there were an actual war going on, the laws of war prohibit targeting civilians unless they are directly engaged in hostilities. Even if the boats’ occupants were, as the administration alleges, carrying illegal drugs, that offense would at most have authorized their arrest, trial, and, if convicted, incarceration for a period of years. It would not authorize the death penalty, much less their summary execution without trial.
“Trump has called the dead ‘narcoterrorists’ and has asserted that the eleven killed in the first strike were associated with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, a ‘foreign terrorist organization.’ But that designation authorizes only economic sanctions against the group, such as freezing their assets, and criminal penalties against Americans who do business with them. It does not authorize any use of military force, much less the intentional lethal targeting of civilians.” 4
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1. Public Citizen Inc. has done extensive legal battles with the Trump’s Administration’s flagrant authoritarian dismantling of American laws and democratic norms, the sort of things our Founding Fathers worried most about. Public Citizen has often taken the fight to Trump quite successfully. I doubt that there’s any better organization doing such work. But that’s just me, though I’m only one person in a sea of legal agreements, praise, and collabrrative efforts flowing to Public Citizen. Founded in 1971, the organization litigates public interest cases at all levels of the judiciary. Here’s their website: https://www.citizen.org/
4. David Cole is the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at Georgetown University, and former National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).