Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments.
The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.
A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.
The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.
Hegseth’s order, which has not been previously reported, adds another dimension to the campaign against suspected drug traffickers. Some current and former U.S. officials and law-of-war experts have said that the Pentagon’s lethal campaign — which has killed more than 80 people to date — is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to future prosecution.
The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., these officials and experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any of the men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign.
Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.
Trump has a history of condoning war crimes. Steve Benen reported in 2018:
On his first full day as president, Donald Trump traveled to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, spoke in front of a memorial wall, and delivered one of the strangest presidential speeches I’ve ever seen.
Trump attacked journalists, lied about the size of his inaugural crowd, assured those in attendance about how impressed he was with his intellect, reflected on the number of instances in which he appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and speculated about taking Iraqi oil.
But the Washington Post reported this week on something else that happened when the president visited the CIA and “was ushered up to the agency’s drone operations floor.”
Trump urged the CIA to start arming its drones in Syria. “If you can do it in 10 days, get it done,” he said, according to two former officials familiar with the meeting.
Later, when the agency’s head of drone operations explained that the CIA had developed special munitions to limit civilian casualties, the president seemed unimpressed. Watching a previously recorded strike in which the agency held off on firing until the target had wandered away from a house with his family inside, Trump asked, “Why did you wait?” one participant in the meeting recalled.
For those with a moral compass, such a comment is obviously jarring, especially coming from a president. But for those who’ve covered Trump’s public positions, this isn’t too surprising.
In December 2015, near the height of the race for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, then-candidate Trump endorsed torturing detainees — even “if it doesn’t work” in producing valuable intelligence — simply because he saw it as a worthwhile thing to do.
He added soon after, “[T]he other thing is with the terrorists, you have to take out their families. When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don’t kid yourself. But they say they don’t care about their lives. You have to take out their families.”
