"Trump has now ordered more than twenty deadly strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats from Venezuela, killing an estimated eighty-three people. His Administration has yet to release the legal justification that the Pentagon is relying on for the strikes, or evidence to support its claims that those killed were, in fact, drug traffickers. Even if they were-as the Republican congressman Mike Turner, of Ohio, the former chair of the Intelligence Committee, pointed out on Thursday morning-drug dealing is not subject to the penalty of extrajudicial death by missile."
""Focusing on the shipwrecked is a distraction insofar as it suggests everything else preceding and after that strike was all legitimate," Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University and former Pentagon lawyer, told the Times. "Even under a law of armed conflict, they were all civilians, and we are not actually in armed conflict. Either way, it was all murder.""
"Nonetheless, Trump escalated his undeclared war, threatening to oust the government of Venezuela's President, Nicolás Maduro, writing on social media that the airspace over the country was "CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY" and warning that land-based strikes could begin "very soon.""
More than twenty deadly U.S. strikes on alleged Venezuelan drug-trafficking boats have killed an estimated eighty-three people, and the Administration has not released the Pentagon's legal justification or evidence that the dead were traffickers. Congressional figures emphasized that drug dealing does not justify extrajudicial killing by missile. The killing of two defenseless men left floating intensified outrage, but critics say the entire campaign treated civilians as combatants despite an absence of armed conflict. The President escalated tensions by threatening to oust Nicolás Maduro, declaring Venezuelan airspace closed and warning that land-based strikes could begin soon, reflecting a pattern of unilateral war-making.
Read at The New Yorker
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