The Anti-War President Blows Up 11 People in the Caribbean in Violation of International Law

Sep 03, 2025

Donald Trump recently boasted about a U.S. airstrike against a small boat with 11 people on board, claiming that they were all “narco-terrorists” smuggling drugs to the United States. You have to read nine paragraphs into The New York Times report on this incident to get to this extraordinary paragraph:

Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.

Now we know why Pete Hegseth fired the U.S. military’s top lawyers back in February. It was to make this possible: Officials at the White House, at the Pentagon, and all the way down the military chain of command just killed 11 people, and none of them can tell you why it was not murder.

The BBC provides the analysis that the Pentagon did not:

BBC Verify reached out to a range of experts in international and maritime law, with several saying that US may have acted illegally in attacking the vessel. …
“Force can be used to stop a boat but generally this should be non-lethal measures,” Prof. Luke Moffett of Queens University Belfast said.
But he added that the use of aggressive tactics must be “reasonable and necessary in self-defense where there is immediate threat of serious injury or loss of life to enforcement officials,” noting that the US moves were likely “unlawful under the law of the sea.” …
Notre Dame Law School Professor Mary Ellen O'Connell told BBC Verify that the strike "violated fundamental principles of international law", adding: "Intentional killing outside armed conflict hostilities is unlawful unless it is to save a life immediately."

Whether the U.S. military is required to act lawfully when it kills people is not just a question for what happens outside of the United States—given that Trump is also, with equal indifference to the law, deploying troops in our own cities.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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