The Pentagon Illegally Disguised a Military Aircraft as a Civilian Plane—and Killed 11 People in the Caribbean

Donald Trump’s bizarre campaign to attack random boats off the shore of South America is a series of war crimes nested within other war crimes. In one notorious strike, Trump’s minions committed the crime of executing shipwrecked sailors. But it turns out they did it using unmarked military planes, which is a whole other violation of the laws of war.

The New York Times reports:

The Pentagon used a secret aircraft painted to look like a civilian plane in its first attack on a boat that the Trump administration said was smuggling drugs, killing 11 people last September, according to officials briefed on the matter. The aircraft also carried its munitions inside the fuselage, rather than visibly under its wings, they said.

The nonmilitary appearance is significant, according to legal specialists, because the administration has argued its lethal boat attacks are lawful—not murders—because President Trump “determined” the United States is in an armed conflict with drug cartels.

But the laws of armed conflict prohibit combatants from feigning civilian status to fool adversaries into dropping their guard, then attacking and killing them. That is a war crime called “perfidy.” …

A U.S. Navy handbook says lawful combatants at sea use offensive force “within the bounds of military honor, particularly without resort to perfidy,” and stresses that commanders have a “duty” to “distinguish their own forces from the civilian population.”

There is a reason the Trump administration has been threatening reprisals against politicians and veterans who are reminding the U.S. military of the duty to refuse illegal orders. The administration is already issuing such orders, in clusters and on a regular basis.

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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