With everything else going on, and the U.S. now waging a whole new war against Iran without congressional authorization, it’s important to note that the Trump administration is still randomly and arbitrarily murdering boaters off the coast of South America.
NBC News reported on one strike a few weeks ago, and now The New York Times reports on a new one:
The Defense Department said on Sunday that it had blown up a boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean earlier in the day, killing six people. The strike raised the death toll in the campaign by the United States against people it accuses of smuggling drugs at sea to at least 156.
The U.S. Southern Command announced the strike on social media with an 11-second video clip that showed a stationary boat, with two or three outboard engines, floating in the water and then suddenly exploding.
Legal specialists on the use of lethal force have said the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings because the military cannot deliberately target civilians who do not pose an imminent threat of violence, even if suspected of engaging in criminal acts. The Trump administration has not provided evidence of drug smuggling.
The administration has had months to offer evidence to justify these killings, but it never does. This reinforces the sense that this murder spree is just for the theater of making Trump look tough by blowing things up, and to satisfy the bloodlust of Trump’s sycophants—”for fun,” as Trump himself put it.
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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