The non-fog of non-war

It took 41 minutes for JSOP to decide to kill survivors of an attack who were clearly both defenseless and in no position to call for help:

The two men killed as they floated holding onto their capsized boat in a secondary strike against a suspected drug vessel in early September did not appear to have radio or other communications devices, the top military official overseeing the strike told lawmakers on Thursday, according to three sources with direct knowledge of his congressional briefings.

As far back as September, defense officials have been quietly pushing back on criticism that killing the two survivors amounted to a war crime by arguing, in part, that they were legitimate targets because they appeared to be radioing for help or backup — reinforcements that, if they had received it, could have theoretically allowed them to continue to traffic the drugs aboard their sinking ship.

Defense officials made that claim in at least one briefing in September for congressional staff, according to a source familiar with the session, and several media outlets cited officials repeating that justification in the last week.

But Thursday, Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley acknowledged that the two survivors of the military’s initial strike were in no position to make a distress call in his briefings to lawmakers. Bradley was in charge of Joint Special Operations Command at the time of the strike and was the top military officer directing the attack.

The initial hit on the vessel, believed to be carrying cocaine, killed nine people immediately and split the boat in half, capsizing it and sending a massive smoke plume into the sky, the sources who viewed the video as part of the briefings said. Part of the surveillance video was a zoomed-in, higher-definition view of the two survivors clinging to a still-floating, capsized portion, they said.

For a little under an hour — 41 minutes, according to a separate US official — Bradley and the rest of the US military command center discussed what to do as they watched the men struggle to overturn what was left of their boat, the sources said.

That this is an atrocity is self-evident, but as the experts surveyed by Charlie Savage and Julian Barnes argue [gift link] we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that these are all murders of people who are not military targets by any recognizable definition:

There have been shifting narratives emerging from the Pentagon, each resetting the analysis. But all of the scenarios consist of analogizing the actions of suspected drug runners to traditional combat activities. The comparisons are strained at best, legal experts say, because the laws of war were not written for and do not fit a drug smuggling situation.

“Debate over when a shipwrecked crew member loses protection from attack misses the point,” said Geoffrey S. Corn, who was formerly the Army’s senior adviser for law-of-war issues. “The real problem here is the dubious and legally overbroad assertion that the United States is justified in using wartime authority against a criminal problem.”

As a matter of plain reality, an unarmed speedboat, even if it is carrying cocaine, is not a warship. And none of the 11 people aboard — not merely the two initial survivors, but also the nine people the U.S. military killed in its first strike — were fighting anyone.

The Sept. 2 boat attack was the first in Mr. Trump’s policy of directing the military to summarily kill people who are suspected of smuggling drugs at sea as if they are enemy soldiers on a battlefield. The military has gone on to attack 21 more such boats, killing 87 people in all, according to the administration.

The conversation about whether that campaign amounts to murder has largely taken place among experts in laws governing the use of armed force.

The United States has long handled the problem of maritime drug smuggling by using the Coast Guard to intercept boats and to arrest people. That echoes how it works on land: Police officers who believe people are dealing drugs arrest them, and if they are convicted, they serve time in prison. They are not executed.

It would be a crime if officers instead simply gunned down suspected drug dealers in the street. Similarly, a military force is not allowed to target civilians, and being a suspected criminal does not make someone lose civilian status. In peacetime, targeting a civilian is murder. In an armed conflict, targeting a civilian is a war crime.

Pundits who sanewashed Trump as the Peace Candidate have even more blood on their hands as pundits who sanewash RFK Jr.