Going Straight for the Extrajudicial Kill*
Trump Summarily Executes 11 People on a Speed Boat in International Waters and Expands His Use of the Military for Conventional Law Enforcement
Trump has stepped up his rhetoric on Venezuela’s Maduro and increased the U.S. military presence in the Caribbean. Trump’s prior efforts to overturn an election, his growing unpopularity, and his repeated comments about being a dictator and going to war as a justification to cancel elections — in recognition that he and his party would lose — reveal at least some of what may be behind his recent aggression toward Venezuela, his efforts to provoke Maduro, and now his unquestionable violation of U.S. and international law on human rights.
Rachel Maddow reminds her viewers, “watch what they do and not what they say.” Understanding the administration requires viewing everything it does through the prism of consolidating power in Trump — and holding onto that power. As Tim Weiner explains in his latest book, The Mission, The CIA in the 21st Century, “The United States is governed by a man who admires dictators and despots, aspires to rule as an autocrat, despises civil liberties, and threatens to imprison his opponents. Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that presidents cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed in office, they can abuse their power freely.”
Phillip Allen Lacovara explains:
“President Trump has just made perhaps his most dangerous assault on the rule of law. He proudly announced that he directed the U.S. military to kill 11 alleged drug smugglers in their boat on the high seas of the Caribbean, excitedly showing a video of the lethal strike.
“The DEA, Customs and Border Protection and other federal agencies working with their local counterparts have properly treated drug smuggling as a law enforcement issue, not a military challenge. Conventional law enforcement must address the drug problem aggressively — without looking for easy but unacceptable answers.
“With brazen candor, Secretary of State Marco Rubio conceded that U.S. authorities could have ‘interdicted’ the alleged smugglers’ boat, but, on Trump’s orders, ‘we blew it up … And it’ll happen again.’ All this ‘to send a message.’ . . .
“What the president ordered — and military commanders carried out — is . . . known in international law as ‘extrajudicial killing’ and is universally condemned as a crime, including under federal law.”[i]
The administration claimed the 11 people it summarily executed off the coast of Venezuela in international waters were members of Tren de Aragua, a “designated narco-terrorist organization,” which is not an exception to the established right to life principles in international law. Cramped with 11 people and purportedly transporting drugs to the United States, the boat was off the coast of Venezuela, which is 1729 miles from Florida, and appeared headed to Trinidad, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. News outlets reasonably questioned the veracity of the administration’s claim that the boat was carrying drugs. Eleven people sardined into a speed boat left no room for any quantity of drugs to traffic.
Lacovara asks: “How do we know that all 11 men who were slaughtered were in fact ‘guilty?’ Intelligence estimates? Surveillance? Anyone aware of the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam or Iraq recognizes that even bona fide estimates by intelligence experts may be wrong.”
And the fact that no one can trust anything the administration says as factual and must look behind the curtain to find the truth.
According to J.D. Vance on social media, “Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.” A political commentator responded, “killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime.” Vance retorted, “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”
U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), weighed in:
“JD ‘I don’t give a shit’ Vance says killing people he accuses of a crime is the ‘highest and best use of the military.’
“Did he ever read To Kill a Mockingbird?
“Did he ever wonder what might happen if the accused were immediately executed without trial or representation??
“What a despicable and thoughtless sentiment it is to glorify killing someone without a trial.”
Even Senator Paul understands that the extrajudicial killing is “the use of deadly force by agents of a government absent the ordinary criminal process — most basically a trial at which guilt is adjudicated by a fair tribunal” which is “an essential element of our constitutional system.” Extra-judicial military killing is not a legitimate answer to drug trafficking (Phillip Allen Lacovara, The Hill, September 6, 2025).
What we do know as intimated by Rand Paul is that Trump’s obliteration of the boat and killing its occupants was a violation of international and maritime law. In her September 4, 2025 essay in The Conversation, Mary Ellen O’Connell, Professor of Law and International Studies at University of Notre Dame, explained:
“ . . . [J]ustifying its lethal destruction of a boat suspected of transporting illegal drugs in the Caribbean as an attack on ‘narco-terrorists . . . goes nowhere. Even if, as the U.S. claims, the 11 people killed in the Sept. 2, 2025, U.S. Naval strike were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, it would make no difference under the laws that govern the use of force by state actors. . . .
“Domestic U.S. legal issues aside — and concerns have been raised on those grounds, too — the killings in the Caribbean violated the human right to life, an ancient principle codified today in leading human rights treaties.
“Killing in war and peacetime
“The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is one such treaty to which the United States is a party. Article 6 of the covenant holds: ‘Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life.’
“Through rulings of human rights and other courts, it has been well established that determining when a killing has been arbitrary depends on whether the killing occurred in the context of peace or armed conflict.
“Peace is the norm. And in times of peace, government agents are only permitted to use lethal force to save a life immediately. The United Nations’ Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials reinforce this peacetime right-to-life standard, noting ‘intentional lethal use of firearms may only be made when strictly unavoidable in order to protect life.’
“The principle is also supported by the fact the U.S. has bilateral treaties regarding cooperation in drug interdiction. The Coast Guard has a series of successful Maritime Law Enforcement Agreements — known as Shiprider Agreements — with nations in the Caribbean and elsewhere. They commit U.S. authorities to respecting fundamental due process rights of criminal suspects. Such rights obviously do not include summary execution at sea. . . .
“Flouting international law
“In armed conflict, intentionally targeting an enemy vessel with lethal force is permitted, so long as the attack complies with international humanitarian law. . . . In international law, armed conflict exists when two or more organized armed groups engage in intense fighting lasting at least a day. The U.S. started ignoring the definition of armed conflict when it began targeted killings of terrorism suspects with drones and other military means in 2002. . . . The killings in Caribbean on Sept. 2 are a worse violation — they had links to no hostilities. . . .
“And while some armed groups waging war against governments do deal in drugs to pay for their participation in conflict, there is no evidence the gang that President Donald Trump purportedly targeted is such a group.
See also US strike on ‘Venezuela drug boat’: What do we know, and was it legal? (Matt Murphy & Joshua Cheetham, BBC, September 3, 2025).
This is the next chapter in the country’s ugly history of extrajudicial maltreatment of perceived enemies or bad actors.[ii] Trump deported hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to an inhumane prison in El Salvador — in direct violation of a court order — on the pretext that Venezuela had invaded the United States and the deportees, alleged members of Tren de Aragua, were Maduro’s foot soldiers. We know how that went. Even a conservative Supreme Court conceded the immigrants must be afforded due process to challenge the government’s claim they are members of the notorious gang.
Without verification by reliable news sources, no one should trust that the Venezuelan 11 were in the process of transporting drugs to the United States. Killing them and bragging about it helped Trump in his efforts to change the subject on the day before a small fraction of the Epstein/Maxwell victims held a news conference at the Capitol. It also advanced his false narrative to gain political support for military action against Maduro as a pretext to start a war — and consolidate and retain power in himself.
Why should we care whether the administration correctly assessed the conduct and intentions of the Venezuelan 11? Whether its reporting is factual? Whether the summary executions were in violation of U.S., international, and maritime law? Whether the extrajudicial killings were an expansion of the use of the military for conventional law enforcement? And whether it was done, as Secretary Rubio declared, “to send a message”?
Because the actual message it sends to the international community is that the United States is not a country that can be trusted, is not a country of laws, does not honor or respect its treaties and alliances, does not respect constitutional due process, and has zero regard for human or civil rights.
*Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, the talented fiction writer and novelist, is my brother. He deserves considerable credit for offering both substantive and technical suggestions to my blog. His second novel, The Contortionists, which Rob himself narrates for the audio version, is a psychological page-turner about a missing child in a predominantly Mormon community. It is a literary masterpiece.
[i] Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law:
“Section 242 of Title 18 makes it a crime for a person acting under color of any law to willfully deprive a person of a right or privilege protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States.
“For the purpose of Section 242, acts under ‘color of law’ include acts not only done by federal, state, or local officials within their lawful authority, but also acts done beyond the bounds of that official’s lawful authority, if the acts are done while the official is purporting to or pretending to act in the performance of his/her official duties. Persons acting under color of law within the meaning of this statute include police officers, prisons guards and other law enforcement officials, as well as judges, care providers in public health facilities, and others who are acting as public officials. It is not necessary that the crime be motivated by animus toward the race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status or national origin of the victim.
“The offense is punishable by a range of imprisonment up to a life term, or the death penalty, depending upon the circumstances of the crime, and the resulting injury, if any.”
[ii] After 9/11, the United States through the CIA created black sites in countries throughout the world where it renditioned “enemy combatants” for the purpose of gathering intelligence in the war on terror and attempting to do so in ways it could never have done under the laws of the United States. The CIA engaged in torture, in violation of the UN Convention against Torture, which investigations later determined gathered no meaningful intelligence. The CIA also destroyed video evidence of the torture to obstruct future investigations. See Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program (December 9, 2014); see also 15 Facts about the CIA Torture Program (The Center for Victims of Torture, Last updated November 27, 2023); Portraits in Oversight: Congress Investigates the Torture and Mistreatment of War Detainees (Levin Center); CIA director Gina Haspel’s Thailand torture ties (BBC, May 3, 2018).