The President's Murder Spree Claims Eight More Victims

U.S. forces have deliberately killed 95 civilians at sea in the last three months.

The military has murdered eight more people on the president’s illegal orders:

The U.S. military said Monday that it attacked three boats accused of smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing a total of eight people as scrutiny over the boat strikes is intensifying in Congress.

U.S. forces have deliberately killed 95 civilians at sea in the last three months. The administration claims that the U.S. is in an armed conflict with various designated groups, but this is a lie. There is no conflict, and the men being slaughtered on these boats are not combatants.

Nothing that the administration says about its boat attacks can be trusted. They call these men members of “designated terrorist organizations,” but those designations are nonsense. The administration’s designations give them no authority to use force against anyone. Like the “conflict,” the designations are lies spun to excuse mass murder.

The president and the Secretary of Defense want the military to “kill people and break things,” and they will tell as many lies as they must to make that happen.

Perhaps the biggest lie is that there is something called “narco-terrorism” and the administration is fighting against it. There are no “narco-terrorists.” This is a propaganda term cooked up to blur the line between drug trafficking and international terrorism. Calling civilians “narco-terrorists” doesn’t make it so.

The U.S. military is currently sowing terror in the southern Caribbean and eastern Pacific with these boat attacks. The Trump administration is not combating terrorism. It is engaging in it.

Charli Carpenter stresses the need to call out the administration for all of its crimes and not just the second strike on one of the boats back in September:

Ironically, focusing too closely on the strike against survivors could end up having the effect of legitimating the administration’s wider campaign targeting maritime traffic in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. That’s why it is so important that critics of the campaign continue to consistently call into question the boat strikes themselves, and not just the targeting of survivors.

Targeting survivors in the aftermath of a strike is monstrous, but the initial strikes are just as bad. All of these strikes are crimes, and they should be condemned as such. Ideally, both Trump and Hegseth should be impeached and removed from office, but since we know that won’t happen there are some other actions that can be taken. For a start, Congress should shut off all funds supporting the lawless killing and block any further military action in the region, whether it is at sea or on land.

The president’s murder spree is a direct assault on the rule of law and our constitutional order. If nothing is done to stop it now, it is just a matter of time before the lawless killing comes home. Americans must demand an end to the killing.