A Murder Spree Without End

It bears repeating that everyone killed in these boat strikes is a murder victim.

Some of the more than 220 people murdered by our government at sea were likely not involved in drug trafficking at all:

The US military’s strikes on alleged drug boats have likely illegally killed “individuals who are not involved in narcotrafficking,” Sen. Tim Kaine told the White House on Monday, following “a careful review” of classified information he has seen so far.

“They are murder victims,” the Virginia Democrat wrote in a letter to President Donald Trump.

Sen. Kaine is right to call our attention back to the president’s ongoing murder spree. I would emphasize that the government has no right to take anyone’s life because of alleged ties to drug trafficking. It bears repeating that everyone killed in these boat strikes is a murder victim. Some of them have been fishermen, and some may have been victims of human trafficking, but they are all victims of a mindless campaign of summary executions carried out on the president’s illegal orders.

The boat strikes haven’t made a dent in the flow of drugs into this country, nor was there ever any reason to believe that they would. Combating drug trafficking was the official excuse to start the killing, but it was always just an excuse. In the last ten months, the campaign has taken on a life of its own. It makes no difference to the president or Hegseth that the campaign is a failure on its own terms. They are killing these people at least in part to show their contempt for the law and to prove that they won’t be bound by it. They are testing to see how far they can go before they encounter serious opposition.

There is no sign that the administration will stop killing civilians at sea unless it is forced to. So far, Congress has done nothing to stop the murders. Sen. Kaine’s letter is a welcome reminder of what is happening, but it is going to take a lot more than that to halt the strikes.

The administration’s justification for this lawless killing has been a rotten lie from the start. The U.S. is not engaged in an armed conflict with any of the groups it has named as terrorists. The military is dealing out death and destruction, but no one is fighting back.

Americans have become so accustomed to illegal military strikes over at least the last twenty-five years that these boat strikes have tended to fade into the background. The president and the military have both become so unaccountable for what they do overseas that it scarcely shocks us anymore when they slaughter civilians and then brag about it. We should not tolerate a status quo where the military executes civilians and then hides behind bogus claims of fighting terrorism to justify their crimes.

The president’s murder spree has been overshadowed by his criminal war against Iran, but he and his henchmen in the administration must be made to answer for these crimes. The officers responsible for executing the president’s illegal orders should also face charges for their part in carrying out these executions. The architects and the perpetrators of this murder spree should all be in prison.

The next administration will need to rescind Trump’s bogus terrorist designations. These designations don’t give the president the authority to launch attacks, but they provide a political fig leaf for the murders. As long as they can hide behind the lie that they are killing “terrorists,” that lets them dress up the executions as having something to do with national security. These strikes have absolutely nothing to do with defending the United States or any other country. They are, as one U.S. official put it, “murder for murder’s sake.”