Trump’s legal justification for this war against Latin American drug dealers is tissue thin and easily shredded. From Daniel Larison at daniellarison.substack.com:
The administration is dressing up these crimes as a “conflict,” but there is no one fighting on the other side.
Trump has had five more civilians murdered on his orders, this time on boats in the Pacific:
The U.S. has struck two alleged drug vessels on the Pacific side of Latin America over the last two days, killing five people, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth confirmed Wednesday.
The U.S. military has now killed at least 37 people that we know of as part of the president’s ongoing and expanding murder spree. There have been nine attacks since they began last month, and the attacks are happening more frequently. While there has been some opposition to the murders in Congress, it has not been nearly enough to discourage more attacks. The president and Hegseth assume they can get away with these murders, and so far no one has given them a reason to think otherwise.
As the attacks spread to the Pacific, the U.S. is threatening the lives of citizens from every country in the region. The boat strikes have already significantly damaged relations with Colombia, and it seems likely that they will do the same thing to U.S. relations with other countries when their citizens are executed at sea. If Trump wanted to convince everyone in our hemisphere that the U.S. is a thuggish rogue state that kills because it can, he is well on his way.
In one of the earlier attacks in the Caribbean, U.S. forces captured two survivors and then the government extradited them back to their home countries. The administration didn’t want the headache of trying to figure out what to do with prisoners in their made-up “conflict,” so they sent them home. One moment, these men were deadly “narco-terrorists” who deserved summary executions, and the next they suddenly weren’t such a great threat after all. We are told that these men are the Latin American equivalent of Al Qaeda when they are being killed, but it is clear that the administration doesn’t believe their own propaganda.
These things happen when a WWE wrestling chair is elevated to the Decider?
Honk if you’re horny.