Donald Trump’s administration for months now has been launching missile strikes at small boats allegedly connected to drug-smuggling operations in the Caribbean. The administration is claiming without much evidence that they are only targeting “narco terrorists,” a flimsy justification for the strikes that many believe are illegal regardless of who was on board the boats.
The administration has conducted as least 22 strikes since September, killing at least 87 people. Most of the boats have been targeted in international waters around Venezuela and the Eastern Pacific Ocean, and almost invariably consist of small vessels with up to around a dozen passengers.
Questions about the already dubiously legal strikes came to a head last week after The Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have a verbal order to “kill everybody” on a suspected drug boat off the coast of Venezuela on Sept. 2, prompting a second strike to finish off two survivors clinging to the wreckage.
Hegseth has cited the “fog of war” in defending the second strike, but experts have argued that finishing off the survivors, the video of which the Pentagon has yet to release, was illegal.
“In Iraq and Afghanistan, there were lots of situations that were very fuzzy, very unclear — actual fog of war, hard to make decisions — but this is so straightforward,” Pauline Shanks Kaurin, a former professor of military ethics at the Naval War College, tells Rolling Stone. “This is the textbook example in military training, especially in the Navy. If you’ve got shipwrecked people, it doesn’t matter who they are, you have an obligation [to aid].”
To Shanks Kaurin, the signs of Trump and Hegseth’s reckless approach to the laws of war have been visible for almost a decade.
In 2016, Trump sparred with the press over comments he made endorsing the use of torture against accused terrorists and their families by the military. They “won’t refuse,” Trump said of the possibility that members of the armed forces could refuse his orders. “They’re not going to refuse me. Believe me.”
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During Hegseth’s January confirmation hearings, lawmakers grilled him on a series of past statements indicating his disdain for the laws of war. The man now in charge of the military had once complained that the Geneva Conventions were outdated and overly restrictive documents, referred to Judge Advocate General (JAG) officers (members of the military tasked with ensuring the laws of war are respected) as “jagoffs” who were part of a “war on warriors.” In 2019, Hegseth also lobbied Trump to help secure pardons for two notorious convicted war criminals.
It shouldn’t be too shocking, then, that Trump and Hegseth are now trying to fend off war-crime allegations, as lawmakers and the public continue to dig into what led to the second strike on Sept. 2 — as well as the legality of the broader campaign to target boats. Here’s everything you need to know about the attacks taking place in the Caribbean.
The Trump administration claims that those aboard the boats are drug traffickers belonging to the Venezuelan organized crime network Tren de Aragua, which was designated a foreign terrorist organization earlier this year, and that the boats contain fentanyl-laced cocaine in transit to other nations — like nearby Trinidad and Tobago — that would eventually make its way to the United States. (Some experts say that if the boats are carrying drugs (particularly cocaine) from Venezuela, they are likely en route to Europe, and that deadly fentanyl is by and large transported across land routes through the Mexican border.)
“Please let this serve as notice to anyone even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in September. “BEWARE.”
Like many legal experts, Brian Finucane, senior U.S. adviser at the International Crisis Group, disputes the administration’s attempt to frame the strikes as counterterrorism. While some of those killed may be involved in drug running, or low-skilled criminality, they’re likely operating on a profit motive. They are not “using violence against civilians for political or ideological aims — typically what we associate with terrorism,” he says.
The Coast Guard and other law enforcement agencies have a long history of stopping vessels suspected of carrying drugs, seizing the cargo, and arresting the crew. The sharp escalation from stop-and-seizure to fiery death on the high seas is just the latest way the administration is using claims of anti-terrorism to skirt established law.
“The administration’s not just labeling the people on these boats as ‘terrorists.’ It’s also using the term to apply to Nicolas Maduro, Latin American immigrants, these guys they sent to CECOT in El Salvador — and also to domestic political opponents,” Finucane adds. When the “executive asserts a prerogative, a license to kill, outside of the law because somebody a ‘terrorist,’ that sort of prerogative can be deployed elsewhere.”
On Sept. 2, members of the administration — including Trump and Hegseth — publicly bragged about having sunk a boat carrying 11 individuals in international waters off the coast of Venezuela. The Pentagon released a video of the strike on social media that showed the craft bursting into flames after being hit.
Trump claimed in a Truth Social post that the passengers of the vessel were “positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists,” who were “operating under the control of [Venezuelan President] Nicholas Maduro.” Trump had repeatedly made this claim, despite American intelligence agencies disputing the assertion that the Maduro regime exerts control over Venezuelan-linked drug operations in the United States.
The video only showed one strike, but it later became clear the public had not been given the full story. In December, The Washington Post reported that Hegseth had issued an order to “kill everybody” onboard the vessel, as one source with knowledge put it, and that a second strike about half an hour after the first had been fired to finish off two survivors who were clinging to the wreckage of the boat. Hegseth initially claimed he watched the strike “live” before clarifying that he’d only seen the first shot, and left the room before the second.
The administration has continuously shifted its narrative about the second strike, initially denying the report before confirming a few days later that it did indeed carry out a second strike. Admiral Frank Bradley, who oversaw the strikes, told lawmakers last week that Hegseth never gave a “kill everybody” order, and that he viewed the survivors as legitimate targets.
Democrats who have viewed the video of the second strike don’t seem to agree, describing it as one of the most “disturbing” things they’ve ever seen and suggesting that the men had seemingly surrendered or were attempting to signal for help. Shanks Kaurin, the former military ethics professor, says the act is practically a textbook definition of a war crime, one that SEAL Team Six — which reportedly carried out the two-pronged strike — would be aware of.
“In a maritime context, once you’ve blown up their boat, the boat is no longer seaworthy, they have no way to survive,” she explains. “The second thing is whether the people are still a threat.… There’s no evidence that these two guys in the water posed any kind of reasonable threat, especially if what [the Americans] were using was drones.
“This is something that the lowliest just-got-on-the-ship person would have known — much less admirals and everyone in between on the chain of command,” she adds. “ They failed the intro 101 exam, essentially.”
Members of the government are asserting that the men in the boats are narcoterrorists affiliated with Latin American drug cartels, and that the drugs they are allegedly transporting are in and of themselves a weapon of war.
On Oct. 1, one month after the strikes first began, the president sent a notification of “non-international armed conflict” to Congress, essentially claiming that the U.S. is at war with the cartels and designating the alleged drug smugglers as “unlawful combatants.” The administration did not specify which cartels or entities America is at war with, giving itself broad latitude to target essentially anyone they wanted.
As Finucane puts it, the administration is attempting to apply the public “framing” of the post 9/11 War on Terror to drug-trafficking syndicates, but their actual legal rationale is not publicly available.
“One of the major problems is that we don’t actually have the official legal justification that the U.S. government is relying on,” Finucane says. “There’s a 40-something page memo from the Department of Justice that remains a secret. They haven’t disclosed it.”
In recent decades, the Pentagon has relied on memos from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel as a form of cover for military operations of dubious legality. It’s essentially the government’s way of saying “my lawyer told me this was OK, and they’re the ones who actually know the law.” The most infamous example of this were the so-called Torture Memos produced in the aftermath of 9/11, which asserted that the use of torture (or as they called it “enhanced interrogation”) was legally permissable. “It seems as though [the DOJ is] playing a similar role here,” Finucane explains, “where instead of producing a torture memo, they produce a murder memo.”
According to a description of the memo obtained by The New York Times, the document claims that “drug cartels are intentionally trying to kill Americans and destabilize the Western Hemisphere. The groups are presented not as unscrupulous businesses trying to profit from drug trafficking, but as terrorists who sell narcotics as a means of financing violence.” It also asserts that Trump has “legitimate authority” to determine if the U.S. engaged in an armed conflict, even without the approval of Congress.
“We have this rhetoric, these political justifications from the administration, which are inconsistent, not right, or factually challenged,” Finucane adds of the government’s defense of the strikes. But the public narrative being put forth by the administration could be “different than the supposed legal rationale” outlined in the DOJ’s classified memo, he adds. The government could potentially be misrepresenting or exceeding the bounds of the DOJ’s supposed authorization, and the public has no way of knowing.
Legal experts in international and military law say that’s not actually how any of this works.
“All of the strikes constitute unlawful killing,” Finucane says, explaining that outside of an established war the killing may not necessarily be a war crime, but it’s still unlawful. “There is no armed conflict, right? And outside of armed conflict, the term for premeditated killing is murder.”
There are several potential layers to the illegality.
“What is significant about the second strike on Sept. 2 is that — based on the facts that have emerged — even if you buy the administration’s bogus argument that there is a war, and armed conflict, and that the law of war somehow applies to this operation, based on the facts that we have, the re-attack does appear to be a war crime,” he adds, “even under the administration’s own bogus legal construct.”
A legal analysis by Just Security — a nonpartisan law journal focused on U.S. national security — rejects the administration’s claims of legality under the umbrella of a “non-international armed conflict” (a conflict with a nonstate entity) because past legal precedent holds that “an armed conflict can exist only between parties that are sufficiently organized to confront each other with military means.”
“Hostile action using military means has been engaged in only by the United States, not by any cartel or criminal gang against us,” Just Security writes. “The gangs and cartels are involved in criminality when they are trafficking drugs, to be sure, but they are not organized militarily to engage in military operations.”
The review adds that in the case of all the strikes conducted by the government “because there is no armed conflict, international human rights law governs the U.S. operations. The law does not allow for the use of deadly force except in situations where it is employed to safeguard life.”
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are not pleased. Despite attempted defenses from MAGA loyalists, the pressure for answers from both Trump and Hegseth is growing in and outside of Capitol Hill.
According to a draft of an upcoming Pentagon funding bill, lawmakers are planning to withhold money from Hegseth’s travel budget until the House and Senate Armed Services Committees receives “unedited” copies of strike footage.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said last week amid the administration’s shifting narrative about the “double tap” strike that Hegseth was either “lying to us … or he’s incompetent and didn’t know it had happened.”
Members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees viewed the video in a closed-door meeting with Bradley last week.
“What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service,” said Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), referring to the video of the second strike. “You have two individuals and clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, who were killed by the United States.” Himes added that “any American who sees the video that I saw will see the United States military attacking shipwrecked sailors.”
During a Cabinet meeting on Dec. 2, Hegseth reaffirmed his claim that he had nothing to do with the double-tap strike. “I did not personally see survivors,” Hegseth said, “that thing was on fire and it exploded … you can’t see anything. This is called the fog of war.”
Hegseth has also not paused the attacks on boats in the Caribbean. On Thursday, he bragged about ordering another boat be blown up on social media, telling a Turning Point USA employee fantasizing about the murders that their wish was his “command.” He also tweeted out an AI-generated cartoon of the beloved child storybook character Franklin the Turtle shooting a shoulder-fired missile at boats.
“Tweeting memes in the middle of a potential armed conflict is something no serious military leader would ever even think of doing,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said. “The only thing this tweet accomplishes is to remind the whole world that Pete Hegseth is not up to the job.”
Hegseth is scheduled to brief lawmakers in a closed-door session later this week.
Trump has repeatedly stated that he supports the strikes and would like to continue seeing supposed drug boats obliterated by the military. On Dec. 2, he indicated he was open to a public release of the video, but claimed to have never said anything of the sort on Monday.
“I didn’t say that, you said that,” he told a reporter in the Oval Office. “This is ABC fake news. Whatever Hegseth decides is OK with me … Let me just tell you, you are an obnoxious reporter. Actually, a terrible reporter.
“Every boat we knock out of the water we save 25,000 lives,” he claimed without evidence.
According to a Tuesday report from The Wall Street Journal, the reversal may have come after Hegseth personally raised concerns to the president that “tactics and intelligence methods might be compromised if the video is released.”
From Rolling Stone US
