Last week saw an escalation of the ongoing U.S. military strikes against supposed drug smugglers in international waters. The string of attacks on unidentified targets, all of whom the Trump administration has labeled “narco-terrorists,” in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean are without parallel in American military history. But the closest comparison, last decade’s campaign of drone strikes against targets in Central Asia and elsewhere against suspected terrorist cell members, serves as an ominous prelude to the current lawless enterprise.
Much like Trump’s string of extralegal killings, the signature strike program allowed the military to rain death down on its targets regardless of whether their identity was fully known.
President Donald Trump has claimed that the strikes are part of an ongoing war against drug cartels bringing fentanyl into the United States. “Every boat kills 25,000 on average — some people say more,” he claimed in September when addressing the military’s top brass. “You see these boats, they’re stacked up with bags of white powder that’s mostly fentanyl and other drugs, too.” That language is shared across the administration when defending the attacks, even as they’ve provided no evidence to back up their claims that the boats were even carrying drugs, let alone making their way to the United States.
Moreover, as The Washington Post reported last week, the routes that the U.S. has struck most frequently off the coast of Venezuela are not used to traffic fentanyl as Trump claims. Most of the synthetic drug that makes its way to America, causing an estimated 48,000 overdose deaths last year, is produced in Mexico and most often smuggled across the border by American citizens. And even if they were, as the ACLU’s Brett Max Kaufman recently noted, the bombings against these potentially innocent civilians are “extrajudicial killings that are flagrantly illegal under both domestic and international law.”
His assessment echoes those of human rights groups and others who similarly protested the Obama-era use of so-called “signature strikes” as part of the Global War on Terror. Much like Trump’s string of extralegal killings, the signature strike program allowed the military to rain death down on its targets regardless of whether their identity was fully known. Drone operators were cleared to fire at people and locations that matched up with “signature” behaviors that marked them as likely members of a terrorist cell.
President Barack Obama’s foreign policy team spent much of his two terms trying to legally justify the drone war, and signature strikes especially. New systems were developed, reviews launched, guidelines issued in the name of reducing civilian casualties and raising accountability. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) drafted internal memos, finding ways domestic laws allowed the strikes to continue apace. But the underlying nature of the program remained firmly in place, even as the criteria to be added to kill lists remained opaque or vague.
When he first took office in 2017, Trump immediately moved to loosen or outright revoke many of the rules constraining the drone program his predecessor installed. The result was a major increase in the number of drone strikes in general and a lack of clarity on how many civilians were killed as a result. President Joe Biden signed a classified policy in 2022, according to The New York Times, “limiting counterterrorism drone strikes outside conventional war zones.”
The cavalier sentiment undergirds the disgregard for the law or even accuracy that the bombing campaign is being given within the administration.
Since Trump returned to office, no similar official policy shift or similar top-level internal debate has been reported surrounding the use of force against boats far outside any official combat zone. What few military lawyers remain in place at the Pentagon with concerns about this lawlessness have reportedly been ignored or silenced. Charles Young, Trump’s nominee to be the Army’s general counsel, told the Senate earlier this month that the OLC has drawn up a memo to justify the operation, but neither the White House, Justice Department, nor Pentagon have provided any hint at how the office reached its conclusions. Instead, the administration has leaned on claims that the U.S. is acting in “self-defense,” a real international law concept that in no way applies to bombing alleged drug smugglers.
The GOP-controlled Congress doesn’t seem particularly interested in investigating those claims. Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, told reporters last week that he has no plans to hold hearings on the strikes as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. There is a vote in the Senate lined up to disapprove of the strikes and any military action towards Venezuela, where Trump has claimed many of the boats fired upon originate. Even if the resolution passes, with the House still in perpetual recess during the shutdown, and Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., unlikely to bring the matter to a vote, it may be dead in the water.
It may be a moot point, as Trump said Thursday that he doesn’t intend to seek any formal approval for these strikes, as he is constitutionally required to if this were really a “war” as he claims. “I don’t think we’re going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war,” the president said. “I think we are going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK? We are going to kill them, you know? They are going to be, like, dead.”
The cavalier sentiment undergirds the seeming disregard for the law or even accuracy that the bombing campaign is being given within the administration. There is no care for whose bodies are washing up on the shores of Trinidad, not so long as the president gets to flaunt the might of the United States against an enemy that doesn’t even know it’s being targeted.