newrepublic.com
“Year of Murders”: Trump’s Boat Strikes Killed Hundreds of Civilians
It’s been exactly one year since the Trump administration began indiscriminately attacking small watercraft traversing the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
In that time, the U.S. military has killed at least 227 civilians in some 65 strikes, according to an analysis published Wednesday by The Intercept.
“It’s been a year of murders,” a defense official told the outlet. “The Trump administration has normalized murder.… It’s absolutely criminal.”
The White House has insisted the violence is justified, broadly accusing the boats of trafficking narcotics to the U.S. from Venezuela and Colombia. A classified opinion penned last summer by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel attempted to shield the forthcoming attacks by claiming that suspected drug boats amounted to legitimate military targets.
But U.S. lawmakers have been more than skeptical on the matter. That’s partly due to the fact that several of the targeted boats were thousands of miles away in international waters at the time that they were struck by U.S. forces. Another reason is because the vast majority of the attacks were conducted without prior investigations or interdiction, leaving little ability to gather evidence that could support or refute the government’s allegations.
The administration’s lawless behavior has even restructured foreign governments. After blaming Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro for the attacks and the alleged drug pipeline, U.S. forces stormed Caracas and abducted Maduro in the early morning hours of January 3.
The strikes themselves have been criticized as extrajudicial killings.
“There is no plausible legal justification for the strikes. They’re obviously not occurring in the context of an armed conflict and outside of armed conflict, the term for premeditated killing is murder,” Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war, told The Intercept.
