‘Kill Everybody’

Plus: War with Venezuela looms, a National Guard member shot in D.C. dies, and Sean Duffy wants you to stop flying in your pajamas.

The secretary of war clearly meant it, judging from a story in The Washington Post. The paper reports that Hegseth issued verbal orders to the military forces striking suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean and Pacific to “kill everybody.”

Some 80 people have reportedly been killed to date in the U.S. military’s current anti-drug campaign.

The administration’s officially secret legal justification for these strikes asserts that “narco-terrorists” are using the money earned from trafficking drugs to finance their war against the United States and its allies. Suspected drug smugglers are therefore, it claims, a legitimate counter-terrorism target.

Many international law experts have retorted that the boats themselves pose no imminent threat to Americans, and that the people on board the boats are not combatants but suspected criminals who one would normally expect to be arrested, not executed.

The administration’s position “can justify almost anything the government wants to do to anyone,” wrote Reason‘s Matthew Petti back in September.

These criticisms haven’t stopped the Trump administration from carrying out its anti-drug campaign. A resolution that would have required congressional authorization for any military action against Venezuela failed in a close 49–51 vote in the U.S. Senate in early November.

Even if one accepts the dubious idea that these strikes are legal, the second strike described in the Post report would violate the laws of war. More plainly, it would be murder.

An order to kill boat occupants no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations, told the Post.

Over the weekend, the armed services committees in the House and Senate announced they would conduct investigations into the first boat strike.

Trump himself has said that the first boat strike was “very lethal, it was fine,” but that he would not have wanted a second strike.

In a lengthy X post on Friday, Hegseth accused the Post of “fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting” but did not directly address the allegation about the second strike.

“Our current operations in the Caribbean are lawful under both U.S. and international law, with all actions in compliance with the law of armed conflict,” he said.

The increasingly granular debates about the legality of the boat strikes nevertheless feels somewhat tiresome and trivial, given the already established context of these attacks.

The Trump administration is using the military to target people suspected of breaking criminal laws against drug trafficking. It’s choosing to kill these suspected criminals when they pose to immediate threat to anyone, instead of simply arresting them.

The justification for killing the suspected drug smugglers relies on an incredibly broad view of the executive power and on circular logic about who is a worthy target of military force.

The Post story highlights how murderous this whole operation is. That it is murderous is something we already knew.

Trump talks with Maduro. While the U.S. wages a quasi-war against suspected drug boats departing from Venezuela, it’s also inching closer to fighting an actual war against that country. A phone call between Trump and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has done little to defuse tensions.

Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that the presidents held a phone call the week prior to discuss a possible meeting between the two leaders. Trump confirmed on Sunday that the call took place but offered no details about what was discussed.

The Miami Herald reports that Maduro was told on the call that he could save himself and his family from U.S. intervention if he agreed to immediately leave Venezuela and turn control of the country over to the opposition.

According to the Herald, Maduro demanded he be given global amnesty. He allegedly also demanded that his regime retain control of the armed forces in exchange for allowing new elections.

According to the Herald‘s anonymous source, the Trump administration rejected these demands.

Since that call, the U.S. has declared Venezuelan airspace closed. Washington had already moved warships to the waters off the South American country, as well as declaring Maduro and members of his government members of a terrorist organization and putting a $50 million bounty on the Venezuelan president’s head.

Scenes from D.C.: One of the two West Virginia National Guard members shot in D.C. last week has died, and another remains in critical condition.

Twenty-year-old Sarah Beckstrom died on Thanksgiving Day after being shot in a close-quarters ambush outside a metro station in downtown D.C., just a few blocks from the White House. The other injured guardsman, Andrew Wolfe, remains hospitalized.

The suspect, 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is an Afghan national who had been a member of a CIA-organized counterterrorism unit. He came to the United States in 2021 under a Biden administration program that admitted Afghan allies following the country’s fall to the Taliban. He travelled from Washington state, where he’d settled, to D.C., where he allegedly shot the two Guard members.

QUICK HITS

• Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy longs for a lost age of air travel where people didn’t fly in their pajamas.
• Works in Progress publishes a lengthy history of the West’s turn against dense development.
• Minnesota officials push back on Trump after he called Gov. Tim Walz “seriously retarded” in a social media post that also decried the impact of Somali immigration on the state.
• Hong Kong has arrested 13 people as part of an investigation into an apartment fire that left at least 151 people dead.
• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has requested a pardon in his ongoing corruption trial.

Reporter, Reason

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