Trump is using the 9/11 playbook to illegally kill drugs gangs

The US president has authorised attacks on boats off the coast of Venezuela that have killed at least 27 people. Trump claims they are drug dealers – but these anonymous executions are deeply inhuman, writes Eric Lewis

It looks like a video game, blue water so calm and clear that it seems computer-generated. A tiny boat is seen from the air moving quickly through the water – and is then vaporized from above. Five boats have been destroyed so far off the coast of Venezuela, killing at least 27 people. Who are these people? Where were they going? What were they carrying?

Nothing to worry about here, we are assured by President Trump and his cabinet. The boats were carrying drugs. “Every boat kills about 25,000 people,” Trump claimed, adding that the proverbial “some people” tell him the figures are even higher. He said that “bags of fentanyl and cocaine” were floating in the Caribbean, but provided no photos or videos.

The president said that the men killed were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, which he has designated as a terrorist organization. He has also said this gang is as bad as Al Qaeda; Secretary of State Marco Rubio says it is worse. Pete Hegseth, the newly retitled secretary of state for war, insisted, also without providing evidence, that the intelligence "without a doubt" confirmed the vessel was carrying drugs and that all the people on board were "narco-terrorists."

Commentators have spilled endless digital ink as to whether it is legal to shoot boats out of the water on the high seas. It clearly is not under international law, but according to a CNN report, there is a secret memo from the Department of Justice purporting to authorize these strikes because the cartels pose an “imminent threat” to Americans. Almost anything that a government wants to do can be justified by compliant lawyers; this administration has many.

Donald Trump speaking at the White House (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

While Trump may advertise an anti-drug agenda – although fentanyl mainly comes from China through Mexico not Venezuela – there is speculation his main underlying purpose is to effect regime change and force a genuine election-stealer, Nicholas Maduro, from office.

The Trump Administration appears to be reusing the 9/11 playbook, this time against Venezuelans. Drug dealers and gangs are as bad as Al Qaeda. Boats leaving Venezuela are no doubt carrying drugs. Therefore, the logic goes, the boats are weapons of war and their passengers can be treated as terrorists. If terrorists are at war with the United States, they are outside the ambit of criminal law and the rule of law is irrelevant; they are enemy combatants. And the rules of engagement in war are for woke sissies.

Now anything goes, including blowing civilian crafts (and civilians) out of the water on the High Seas. Apparently, various lawyers within the Defense Department have raised questions about this opinion and the Department of Justice has refused requests by Congress to see the advice

There are so many flaws in this reasoning that it is hard to unpack, but there can be little doubt that the Trump Administration does not view itself as bound by international law including the Geneva Conventions, and US courts are unlikely to hear any cases brought challenging these actions.

But there are lessons from the global war on terror as well as in its Global War on Migrants. First, there is the question of whether this is a criminal justice matter or a military matter. Narcotics trafficking has always been treated as a criminal matter and prosecuted in US courts. If the Trump Administration knows where the boats are and who the people are on the boats and what they are carrying, it can track them and board them at any time, presumably when they get close to drop off points in the Southeastern United States.

Then there will be defendants and evidence. There will be trials and guilty verdicts and long prison sentences. Drugs cartels are a scourge, but they are not enemies under the Laws of War.

Second, the government is neither omnipotent or omnicompetent, especially this one. How do we know who or what are on those boats? The short answer is that the government has disclosed nothing to dispel the view that, once again, the Trump Administration has no idea.

The Trump Administration assures us that they are only targeting the “worst of the worst,” just as we were assured that the migrants shipped to El Salvador and Sudan and other countries to which they have no attachments were murderers and rapists. But it turns out that the bulk of the migrants had not committed criminal acts; their only sin was entering the United States without permission, including countless children. We cannot and should not take these new representations at face value.

More than twenty-five years ago, nearly 800 men were taken to Guantanamo under the same rubric, then spouted by Donald Rumsfeld, that the United States had captured the “worst of the worst.” Within a few months, senior military officers running Guantanamo told the Pentagon it wasn’t true. The overwhelming majority were nobodies who were never charged and never convicted. Many were detained for more than a decade, but at least they were not killed. Ultimately, they were sent home or had their day in court.

Maybe the men on these ships were drug kingpins, although senior narco-terrorists usually do not make the trip up from South America. They usually send drug mules or crew looking for some work and some money. And sometimes boats cruising the Caribbean are just boats cruising the Caribbean.

The people who have already been killed will never have the chance to argue that a mistake was made. They have not been identified by the Trump Administration and never will be. We have not seen any drugs.

None of the people at the bottom of the sea would have been eligible for the death penalty. It is possible that none of them would have been guilty of anything at all. But it does not matter, because we are beyond law or facts. Anonymous executions not only subvert the law; it is deeply inhuman. We are playing with real people’s real lives; it is not a video game.

Eric Lewis is a human rights lawyer who sits on the board of The Independent