Pete Hegseth Says US Can Carry Out Assassinations In Int’l Waters

This post was originally published on this site

On Tuesday, the Trump administration carried out a strike by US forces on a boat in the Caribbean. The White House claimed to have killed 11 drug traffickers, which appears to be an assassination in international waters.

Trump said the Tren de Aragua cartel operated the boat and was carrying drugs bound for the US.

SecDef Pete Hegseth was asked about the legal authority to do so.

Q: What legal authority did the Pentagon invoke to strike that boat full of drug smugglers?

HEGSETH: We have the absolute and complete authority to conduct that. First of all, just the defense of the American people alone.

100,000 Americans were killed each year under the previous administration because of an open border and open drug traffic flood as an assault on the American people.

I said we smoked the drug boat and there’s 11 narco terrorists at the bottom of the ocean and when other people try to do that, they’re going to meet the same fate.

With this administration, I want to see proof that these were drug smugglers. You can’t rely on any word spoken by Trump and his cabinet members.

Trump wants to be an autocratic dictator so bad that he’s ordering assassinations of alleged smugglers, which has always been under the purview of the US Coast Guard.

The BBC reports:

US military’s legal advisors have previously said that the US should “act in a manner consistent with its provisions”.

Under the convention, countries agree not to interfere with vessels operating in international waters. Limited exceptions allow a state to seize a ship, such as a “hot pursuit” where a vessel is chased from a country’s waters into the high seas.

“Force can be used to stop a boat, but generally this should be non-lethal measures,” Prof Luke Moffett of Queen’s University Belfast said. But he added that the use of aggressive tactics must be “reasonable and necessary in self-defence where there is an immediate threat of serious injury or loss of life to enforcement officials”, noting that the US moves were likely “unlawful under the law of the sea”.

Just Security:

Executive Order 12333 prohibits assassinations, providing that “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” Under executive branch legal doctrine, “assassination” is understood to include the targeted killing of individuals. (The Uniform Code of Military Justice also of course criminalizes murder.)
—

Even assuming that Tren de Aragua constitutes an organized armed group (which there is reason to doubt) with which the United States is involved in a non-international armed conflict, it is far from clear that the attack on the vessel and the killing of those aboard was lawful under the law of war. The administration has not sought to explain how either the boat or its passengers were lawful military objectives.

Legal? Still working on it.

Posted in Democrat News