The President's Murder Spree Expands to the Pacific

The administration is dressing up these crimes as a “conflict,” but there is no one fighting on the other side.

Trump has had five more civilians murdered on his orders, this time on boats in the Pacific:

The U.S. has struck two alleged drug vessels on the Pacific side of Latin America over the last two days, killing five people, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth confirmed Wednesday.

The U.S. military has now killed at least 37 people that we know of as part of the president’s ongoing and expanding murder spree. There have been nine attacks since they began last month, and the attacks are happening more frequently. While there has been some opposition to the murders in Congress, it has not been nearly enough to discourage more attacks. The president and Hegseth assume they can get away with these murders, and so far no one has given them a reason to think otherwise.

As the attacks spread to the Pacific, the U.S. is threatening the lives of citizens from every country in the region. The boat strikes have already significantly damaged relations with Colombia, and it seems likely that they will do the same thing to U.S. relations with other countries when their citizens are executed at sea. If Trump wanted to convince everyone in our hemisphere that the U.S. is a thuggish rogue state that kills because it can, he is well on his way.

In one of the earlier attacks in the Caribbean, U.S. forces captured two survivors and then the government extradited them back to their home countries. The administration didn’t want the headache of trying to figure out what to do with prisoners in their made-up “conflict,” so they sent them home. One moment, these men were deadly “narco-terrorists” who deserved summary executions, and the next they suddenly weren’t such a great threat after all. We are told that these men are the Latin American equivalent of Al Qaeda when they are being killed, but it is clear that the administration doesn’t believe their own propaganda.

The Ecuadorian government declined to prosecute the man returned to them because they said they had no evidence that he had committed a crime, and so they released him. It is doubtful that our government has any more evidence than they do. Our military is executing these men on what I assume is extremely thin evidence, if they have any at all. The administration isn’t presenting evidence to support their actions because evidence has never mattered to them. The point of these strikes is to terrorize. The more random and arbitrary the attacks are, the more terrifying they become.

It was discouraging to see that the president’s murders seem to have a fair amount of support from the public. According to a recent YouGov survey, 48% of respondents approve of “the U.S. military conducting lethal strikes on boats suspected of containing drugs being smuggled from the Caribbean.” While there is significant opposition among independents (48%) and majority disapproval among Democrats (62%), Republicans are overwhelmingly in favor of using the military to murder civilians at sea (87%).

Some of the men that the president has murdered may have been drug traffickers, but there is more and more evidence that many of them had nothing to do with the drug trade. Some were fishermen who had the misfortune to end up in the Navy’s sights, and others were men traveling to return home. Now they are dead because the president wanted to “send a message.” This just drives home how random and dangerous these attacks are. Whether the victims were involved in the drug trade or not, our government had no right to take their lives.

It can’t be stressed enough that the president’s policy is completely illegal and a monstrous abuse of power. The military is carrying out the president’s illegal orders to commit crimes against civilians. The administration is dressing up these crimes as a “conflict,” but there is no one fighting on the other side. Every official excuse for these attacks is a lie.

The use of force is unjustified and unnecessary. Congress has never authorized this mission, and it is a flagrant violation of international law. The murdered men were not engaged in hostilities with our military, and they posed no threat that warranted military action. In truth, they posed no threat to the United States at all.