Trump administration murders six more people on a fishing boat

You know how “bad things” happen in war? What if it’s not even putatively a war, but just the US government going around murdering people randomly, because Donald Trump wants to look like a tough guy? Is that bad? And by “bad” I mean bad enough for literally anyone to do literally anything about it?

The United States killed six men aboard a boat in international waters “just off the Coast of Venezuela,” President Trump wrote on social media on Tuesday, asserting without evidence that they had been transporting drugs.

The strike was the fifth known attack by the U.S. military on such boats since Sept. 2. The military has now killed 27 people as if they were enemy soldiers in a war zone and not criminal suspects.

“Intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking narcotics, was associated with illicit narcoterrorist networks, and was transiting along a known” route for smuggling, Mr. Trump said in his social media post.

He also posted a 33-second aerial surveillance video showing a small boat floating, and then being struck by a missile and exploding. Unlike some previous announcements, the president did not identify the nationality of the people who were killed or name a specific drug cartel or criminal gang with which they were supposedly associated.

I know people hate lawyers because they love to obsess about “technicalities” and stuff, instead of being like Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson, but even if these people were in fact drug smugglers — it needs to be emphasized that the Trump administration saying they were has exactly zero evidentiary value — this would still be, legally speaking, simply murder, under both American and international law.

I don’t think it can be emphasized enough that this is a completely different situation from when a drone strike against a member of an actually certified terrorist group does some collateral damage and kills civilians. That’s also a terrible thing, but at least there’s some kind of legal argument that those deaths are somewhere within the bounds of legitimate state violence, aka lawful.

This is flat-out murder, like My Lai was flat-out murder, with the difference being that My Lai was an actual war zone, in which in some sense understandably unhinged soldiers will sometimes murder people, because “bad things happen in war.”

This by contrast is a war only in the sense that it’s a war on the very concept of legality. And that is being murdered in this country just as surely as the dozens of people who have been murdered on Venezuelan fishing boats. The law is being murdered in this country because America is morphing into a fascist dictatorship, and because Donald Trump’s feelings were hurt when a Venezuelan woman won the Nobel Peace Prize that, as this latest action illustrates, he totally deserved. Which is why these people had to die.