The United States military has killed more than 80 people in unprecedented military attacks on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean Sea.
New revelations about the fate of the unidentified individuals have reignited debate over the legality of the unprecedented military campaign.
According to experts and legal experts, if it is true that there was a specific order to kill people clinging to the side of a damaged boat, then the Americans could be guilty of crime of guerra or murder.
The Washington Post reported last week that the Secretary of Defense gave the order to kill everyone on board the boat, and that the military carried out a double attack after the vessel was apparently damaged.
According to the WSP report, there were apparently still two survivors on board.
A CNN subsequently published this report.
What is a “double-shot” attack?
In military terms, a “double shot” can be the practice of making a second attack after a first shot.
Russia has been accused of using this practice in Ukraine to target emergency response teams.
The US military was also criticized during the administration of former President Barack Obama for using this practice with drone attacks during the war against the United States. terrorism.
White House denies wrongdoing
Trump told reporters he “wouldn’t like a second strike” and that Hegseth told him “it didn’t happen,” as described in media reports.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Monday (1) that the attacks were on Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley, commander of the US Special Operations Command.
The Sept. 2 attacks were carried out in “self-defense,” she said, as well as “in international waters and in accordance with the law of armed conflict.”
If it’s not a war crime, it could be murder
The murder of people stranded on a boat could be a crime under the law of war, international law or U.S. law, according to Daniel Maurer, a retired Army attorney general who is now an associate professor at Ohio Northern University.
“Whether they are presidentially appointed narco-terrorists or not, whether they are war criminals or not, it doesn’t matter,” Maurer told CNN.
“Killing them while they are in a shipwreck, while they are out of action — out of action — is a war crime.”
But Maurer does not believe this particular attack is a war crime, as he does not consider the US to be legally involved in an armed conflict with any narco-terrorists.
“It’s just an extrajudicial execution, which is a murder under international law, under our national law. There is no authorization to do this,” he said.
If the facts show that the attack was carried out to kill survivors, it would be the equivalent of Hegseth or Bradley approving or ordering a murder, which could implicate “everyone in the chain of command who participated in, planned and executed the attack,” Maurer said, although he doubts there would be any type of criminal liability.
Revelations about the second boat collision led even some Republicans to demand an explanation from the government. Bipartisan investigations were launched in Congress in both the House and Senate.
Kill the survivors or sink the ship?
Whatever facts are uncovered, what they reveal about Bradley’s intent in ordering the second strike will be crucial, according to Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School.
“If his intention was to destroy the rest of the boat, he was probably acting within the law of war,” Turley told Fox News.
Senator Angus King, independent from the state of Maine and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that if the attack was intended to kill survivors, it would clearly be illegal.
“This is a war crime, pure and simple. It is also murder,” King told CNN.
Why shouldn’t the US attack survivors of an attack?
Harvard professor Jack Goldsmith, who served as a lawyer at both the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel and the Department of Defense after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, has previously argued that there could be plausible legal justifications for the Trump administration’s attacks on alleged drug trafficking boats.
However, in a post in his Executive Functions newsletter, he struggled to understand how the second attack on September 2, as described in the Washington Post report, did not violate laws.
He cited the Civil War-era Lieber Code of 1863, in which President Abraham Lincoln decreed that inflicting additional wounds or killing a “totally incapacitated” enemy should be punishable by death if the offender was convicted.
The Pentagon’s current Law of War Manual and the Geneva Convention include “no truce” provisions that prohibit “conducting hostilities on the basis that there will be no survivors.”
