The American military on Sunday once again blew up alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, killing 6. The death toll is now 76 or more. The United Kingdom, our closest ally, has reportedly limited intelligence sharing with the U.S. for fear that they would be complicit in the illegal killings – the UK shares intelligence with the U.S. about drug trafficking in the Caribbean.
The United Nations Human Rights Council has also determined that the strikes amount to extrajudicial murder according to international law, which the U.S. routinely cites to condemn the actions of foreign regimes.
Clearly there are two pressing questions here: do we have enough intelligence that the individuals on those boats are actually carrying drugs and destined for the US, and is it right or legal to kill them instead of just arresting them?
As for the second question, it’s clear that, given the emerging domestic and international consensus among legal experts, that even if they were trafficking drugs, they should be arrested and tried, not executed. Why, you ask? Apart from legal questions, persons have intrinsic value and dignity and should be allowed to plead their case before being blown to pieces.
With respect to the first question, it’s difficult to say because the Pentagon has refused to provide concrete evidence of their allegations, but we do have some hints that we can use to make an educated guess that I will discuss shortly.
The first question is important for several reasons. The answer to that question tells us the extent of President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s culpability. In other words, are they culpable of killing drug traffickers without a trial, or are they culpable of randomly executing people?
The former would make them law-breaking and immoral creatures while the latter would make them wicked fiends with a staggering contempt for human life – it would mean that what they are doing is equivalent to what terrorists do when they drop backpack bombs near crowded tourist areas. In both instances, ending lives, whether guilty or innocent, is a perfectly acceptable means to achieving trivial ends – neither the terrorists nor the president achieve much of anything by taking such action.
We get a hint via Admiral Alvin Holsey, commander of U.S. Southern Command and the top military official in charge of overseeing the airstrikes on the alleged drug boat, resign from his post. The New York Times, citing current and former U.S. officials, reports that Holsey, “raised concerns about the mission and the attacks on the alleged drug boats.”
It’s difficult not to conclude from this that Holsey resigned because he found the mission impermissible, which likely means that Holsey either doesn’t think we have enough justification to conclude that the boats are carrying drugs, or that even if they were, killing drug traffickers without trial is illegal.
Our second hint is much more confounding. Two alleged drug traffickers, an Ecuadorian and a Colombian who survived airstrikes on a submarine, were captured by the American military and then returned to their home countries instead of being arrested and brought to face trial. If they have enough evidence to think that it’s justified to kill them, surely they have enough evidence to convict them in court.
If I had to hazard a guess, given the submarine, it was not too difficult for the military to assume that they were trafficking drugs but even that may not have been enough to secure a conviction. We’ll probably never know for sure but it strongly suggests that under Trump and Hegseth, the military’s standards for being a proper target for murder can be satisfied quite easily.
This is an administration that is willing to kill people whether it’s legal or not or whether it’s ethical or not. It’s an administration that is contributing to the erosion of our ability to appreciate the full weight and value of personhood. They’re exploiting our disposition to use distance and country of origin to calculate the permissibility of sin.
Some may find themselves apathetic to the murder of these people. That sort of attitude commits you to barbarism: human life has no value. Did we always believe that or did our transition begin in 2016?
Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. He is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com.