The boat had turned around

The more that comes out about the decision to blow up the Venezuelan boat, the worse it looks, and it was ugly from the outset:

A Venezuelan boat that the U.S. military destroyed in the Caribbean last week had altered its course and appeared to have turned around before the attack started because the people onboard had apparently spotted a military aircraft stalking it, according to American officials familiar with the matter.

The military repeatedly hit the vessel before it sank, the officials added, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. President Trump has said he authorized the strike and claimed the boat was carrying drugs.

The disclosures provide new details about a military operation that was a startling departure from using law enforcement means to interdict suspected drug boats. Legal specialists who have called it a crime to summarily kill suspected low-level smugglers as if they were wartime combatants said the revelations further undercut the administration’s claim that the strike was legally justified as self-defense.

Repeatedly, Marty Lederman has a post examining the administration’s War Powers Act report, and the bottom line is that the legal authority is just as lacking as it appeared on its face:

Now that the President has submitted the required War Powers Resolution report to Congress, we can begin to take stock of just how extraordinary and significant last Tuesday’s lethal strike in the Caribbean Sea was. As I will try to explain below, it’s likely that the President lacked any affirmative domestic authority to order the strike, and the strike itself appears to have violated several legal prohibitions. Those legal transgressions, however, aren’t necessarily the most significant thing about the strike. As I’ll discuss at the end of this piece, regardless of which laws might have been broken, what’s more alarming, and of greater long-term concern, is that U.S. military personnel crossed a fundamental line the Department of Defense has been resolutely committed to upholding for many decades—namely, that (except in rare and extreme circumstances not present here) the military must not use lethal force against civilians, even if they are alleged, or even known, to be violating the law.

Although it’s easy to imagine how President Donald Trump and his aides and appointees might have decided to approve and order the strike, it’s difficult to understand how it came to pass that the non-appointed military officials and enlistees involved in the operation assented to such an indefensible breach of the fundamental norm against targeting civilians. At the end of this piece, I speculate on three possible ways in which supervisory officials might have persuaded (or cajoled) military personnel into violating that norm. Each of those three possibilities is deeply troubling, including the one that is the most likely explanation—namely, that the military accepted an implausible presidential determination that the United States is engaged in an armed conflict with Tren de Aragua, and that therefore the U.S. military can summarily kill alleged members of that criminal gang based solely upon their membership in that organization.

The whole thing is worth reading if you’re current on your blood pressure meds.