glad this is getting attention now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t-_m16y25o
https://twitter.com/RandPaul/status/1964494191783714933
"International law is like a playground. ... Sometimes there are no rules."
Re: U.S. Detains 2 Survivors of Latest Military Strike in Caribbean
42The capture of prisoners presents a major new set of legal and policy problems for the Trump administration in its escalating campaign. [i.e. shits about to get real...]
By Eric Schmitt and Charlie Savage
Reporting from Washington
Oct. 17, 2025
The U.S. Navy has rescued two survivors of an American military strike on a semi-submersible vessel suspected of smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea and is holding them aboard a Navy ship there, two U.S. officials said on Friday.
The Navy for now is detaining the two people aboard a warship in international waters, marking the first time the military has found itself holding prisoners from President Trump’s six-week-old campaign of targeting suspected drug runners as if they were combatants in a war.
The Trump administration now faces a dilemma about whether to release the two people, claim it can hold them as indefinite wartime detainees, or transfer them to civilian law enforcement officials for prosecution — a major and messy set of new legal and policy problems that could bring judicial scrutiny to the legally contested basis for its unfolding military campaign.
Since early September, the U.S. military has attacked at least six vessels that the Trump administration has said, without putting forward evidence, were carrying drugs. The first five were speedboats, but the most recent strike targeted a submersible vessel, the officials said.
The latest strike, on Thursday, killed two other people aboard the vessel, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters. But after the attack, surveillance video showed that there were survivors in the water.
A Navy search-and-rescue helicopter retrieved the two survivors and flew them to one of the eight Navy warships that had been dispatched to the region. The Trump administration has been building up firepower in the Caribbean Sea amid its escalating campaign against drugs and mounting pressure on the government of Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s authoritarian president.
The five strikes Mr. Trump has acknowledged killed 27 people, so the death toll has now reached at least 29. The nationalities of the two survivors is unclear.
The Trump administration did not immediately announce the latest strike. By contrast, for each of the five previous known boat attacks since early September, Mr. Trump boasted of the operations, declared how many people they had killed, and swiftly posted surveillance videos showing the vessels in the sea being blown up.
The fact of the attack and the existence of survivors was earlier reported by Reuters. Asked about the matter while speaking to reporters on Friday at the start of a White House meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, Mr. Trump confirmed Thursday’s strike.
“We attacked a submarine and that was a drug-carrying submarine built specifically for the transportation of massive amounts of drugs,” he said. “Just so you understand, this was not an innocent group of people. I don’t know too many people that have submarines.”
Mr. Trump did not specifically address questions about any survivors and their fate.
For now, said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and a specialist in the laws of armed conflict, the administration will have to wrestle with how long the prisoners can be held aboard the Navy vessel before they must be transferred somewhere. He noted that the Pentagon tends to be institutionally opposed to the headaches of detainee operations.
But if the administration wants to continue holding them, that would raise the question of how to do so — including whether to hand them off to civilian law enforcement authorities or claim a right to hold them as military prisoners.
If it does hold them in continued military custody, which would be in keeping with its claim to be at war with drug cartels, it might take the two detainees to the American prison at the Navy base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The base could be an attractive choice for policymakers in terms of its physical capacity to hold the two people. It already has the infrastructure — prison cells, a guard force, medical staff and other logistical support — to hold wartime detainees in longer-term detention without trial.
But that carries broader legal risks.
To legally justify his administration’s shift from having the Coast Guard interdict and search boats suspected of drug smuggling to attacking them and summarily killing the people aboard them, President Trump has informed Congress that the United States is engaged in a formal “armed conflict” with drug cartels his team has labeled terrorist organizations and that suspected smugglers for such groups are “unlawful combatants.”
A broad range of legal specialists in domestic and international law governing the use of force have contested the legitimacy of that claim. Congress has not authorized an armed conflict, and the administration has not explained how trafficking in an illicit consumer product counts as a use of armed force that could trigger a legal state of war.
But to date, there has not been a basis for federal courts to address whether the administration or its critics are correct. That could change if the Trump administration has the people taken to Guantánamo.
Litigation over terrorism detainees brought there by the Bush administration has established that U.S. courts have jurisdiction to hear lawsuits challenging the basis of holding detainees in military detention there.
That means if the Trump administration brings the survivors there, lawyers could file a habeas corpus lawsuit on their behalf in federal court raising the question of whether there really is an armed conflict, for legal purposes, between the United States and drug cartels.
Any judicial ruling that there is not really an armed conflict would not only mean the U.S. military would have to release the survivors. It would also undercut the administration’s argument that its entire recent spate of summary killings of suspected drug smugglers was lawful.
Mr. Finucane also noted that holding the two detainees as wartime detainees would mean having to give the International Committee of the Red Cross access to them, as a matter of both domestic and international law.
The administration could also try to prosecute the two. There is a military commissions system at Guantánamo. But its jurisdiction is limited to members of Al Qaeda and its affiliates, not unrelated drug cartel suspects. Moreover, drug smuggling is not a war crime.
Alternatively, the administration could transfer the detainees to civilian law enforcement for eventual prosecution.
But it is not clear whether there is any courtroom-admissible evidence that the survivors of the attack engaged in criminal wrongdoing. Even if their vessel was carrying drugs, the evidence may have been destroyed in the attack.
That problem might be solved if the survivors confess to a crime under interrogation. But trying to get such confessions would raise another issue: whether to use law enforcement procedures, like giving them access to defense lawyers, to ensure that anything they might say would be admissible in court.
By Eric Schmitt and Charlie Savage
Reporting from Washington
Oct. 17, 2025
The U.S. Navy has rescued two survivors of an American military strike on a semi-submersible vessel suspected of smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea and is holding them aboard a Navy ship there, two U.S. officials said on Friday.
The Navy for now is detaining the two people aboard a warship in international waters, marking the first time the military has found itself holding prisoners from President Trump’s six-week-old campaign of targeting suspected drug runners as if they were combatants in a war.
The Trump administration now faces a dilemma about whether to release the two people, claim it can hold them as indefinite wartime detainees, or transfer them to civilian law enforcement officials for prosecution — a major and messy set of new legal and policy problems that could bring judicial scrutiny to the legally contested basis for its unfolding military campaign.
Since early September, the U.S. military has attacked at least six vessels that the Trump administration has said, without putting forward evidence, were carrying drugs. The first five were speedboats, but the most recent strike targeted a submersible vessel, the officials said.
The latest strike, on Thursday, killed two other people aboard the vessel, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters. But after the attack, surveillance video showed that there were survivors in the water.
A Navy search-and-rescue helicopter retrieved the two survivors and flew them to one of the eight Navy warships that had been dispatched to the region. The Trump administration has been building up firepower in the Caribbean Sea amid its escalating campaign against drugs and mounting pressure on the government of Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s authoritarian president.
The five strikes Mr. Trump has acknowledged killed 27 people, so the death toll has now reached at least 29. The nationalities of the two survivors is unclear.
The Trump administration did not immediately announce the latest strike. By contrast, for each of the five previous known boat attacks since early September, Mr. Trump boasted of the operations, declared how many people they had killed, and swiftly posted surveillance videos showing the vessels in the sea being blown up.
The fact of the attack and the existence of survivors was earlier reported by Reuters. Asked about the matter while speaking to reporters on Friday at the start of a White House meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, Mr. Trump confirmed Thursday’s strike.
“We attacked a submarine and that was a drug-carrying submarine built specifically for the transportation of massive amounts of drugs,” he said. “Just so you understand, this was not an innocent group of people. I don’t know too many people that have submarines.”
Mr. Trump did not specifically address questions about any survivors and their fate.
For now, said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and a specialist in the laws of armed conflict, the administration will have to wrestle with how long the prisoners can be held aboard the Navy vessel before they must be transferred somewhere. He noted that the Pentagon tends to be institutionally opposed to the headaches of detainee operations.
But if the administration wants to continue holding them, that would raise the question of how to do so — including whether to hand them off to civilian law enforcement authorities or claim a right to hold them as military prisoners.
If it does hold them in continued military custody, which would be in keeping with its claim to be at war with drug cartels, it might take the two detainees to the American prison at the Navy base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The base could be an attractive choice for policymakers in terms of its physical capacity to hold the two people. It already has the infrastructure — prison cells, a guard force, medical staff and other logistical support — to hold wartime detainees in longer-term detention without trial.
But that carries broader legal risks.
To legally justify his administration’s shift from having the Coast Guard interdict and search boats suspected of drug smuggling to attacking them and summarily killing the people aboard them, President Trump has informed Congress that the United States is engaged in a formal “armed conflict” with drug cartels his team has labeled terrorist organizations and that suspected smugglers for such groups are “unlawful combatants.”
A broad range of legal specialists in domestic and international law governing the use of force have contested the legitimacy of that claim. Congress has not authorized an armed conflict, and the administration has not explained how trafficking in an illicit consumer product counts as a use of armed force that could trigger a legal state of war.
But to date, there has not been a basis for federal courts to address whether the administration or its critics are correct. That could change if the Trump administration has the people taken to Guantánamo.
Litigation over terrorism detainees brought there by the Bush administration has established that U.S. courts have jurisdiction to hear lawsuits challenging the basis of holding detainees in military detention there.
That means if the Trump administration brings the survivors there, lawyers could file a habeas corpus lawsuit on their behalf in federal court raising the question of whether there really is an armed conflict, for legal purposes, between the United States and drug cartels.
Any judicial ruling that there is not really an armed conflict would not only mean the U.S. military would have to release the survivors. It would also undercut the administration’s argument that its entire recent spate of summary killings of suspected drug smugglers was lawful.
Mr. Finucane also noted that holding the two detainees as wartime detainees would mean having to give the International Committee of the Red Cross access to them, as a matter of both domestic and international law.
The administration could also try to prosecute the two. There is a military commissions system at Guantánamo. But its jurisdiction is limited to members of Al Qaeda and its affiliates, not unrelated drug cartel suspects. Moreover, drug smuggling is not a war crime.
Alternatively, the administration could transfer the detainees to civilian law enforcement for eventual prosecution.
But it is not clear whether there is any courtroom-admissible evidence that the survivors of the attack engaged in criminal wrongdoing. Even if their vessel was carrying drugs, the evidence may have been destroyed in the attack.
That problem might be solved if the survivors confess to a crime under interrogation. But trying to get such confessions would raise another issue: whether to use law enforcement procedures, like giving them access to defense lawyers, to ensure that anything they might say would be admissible in court.
Re: I guess we are just bombing speedboats now
43front page of the washington post gets behind the mood at the cia today...
nakashima, strobel and horton wrote: President Donald Trump and his top White House aides pushed for lethal strikes on Western Hemisphere drug traffickers almost as soon as they took office in January, and in the past 10 months have repeatedly steamrolled or sidestepped government lawyers who questioned whether the provocative policy was legal, according to multiple current and former officials familiar with the debates....
“There is no actual threat justifying self defense — there are not organized armed groups seeking to kill Americans,” said one person familiar with the legal debate, who like others interviewed for this report spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution and because of the matter’s sensitivity.
Though the hand behind covert actions is supposed to be hidden, Miller and his team wanted to publicize any strikes on what Trump has deemed “narcoterrorists,” including through videos of drug labs or boats being blown up, one person familiar with the matter said.... [as i said]
by summer, the NSC’s entire full-time legal staff of about half a dozen was gone. Some left when their details ended and others — including the shop’s top lawyer, former Pentagon general counsel Paul Ney — were let go in a May staff shake-up, three former officials said. Ney had been among the lawyers who had raised concerns about the legality of lethal strikes, the former officials said....
in early September, military special operators struck an alleged drug boat that Trump said was carrying “Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists … operating under the control of Nicolás Maduro.”
Two family members of the 11 killed did not deny they had been taking marijuana and cocaine from Venezuela to Trinidad, but denied they had worked for the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua. U.S. intelligence agencies have determined that the Venezuelan government does not direct the group....
“The question is, is it legal just to kill the guy if he’s not threatening to kill you and you’re outside an armed conflict? There are people who are simply uncomfortable with the president just declaring we’re at war with drug traffickers,” said a former senior official familiar with the debate....
Concerns extend to the Americas and Counternarcotics Mission Center, according to current and former officials. “There’s just so much nervousness in the office,” said a second former official. “The mood is, we don’t even know if what we’re doing is legal.”...
Re: I guess we are just bombing speedboats now
44NYT wrote:U.S. Attacked Boat With Aircraft That Looked Like a Civilian Plane
Even accepting the Trump administration’s claim that there is an armed conflict with suspected drug runners, the laws of war bar “perfidy.”
Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, John Ismay and Julian E. Barnes reported from Washington; Riley Mellen and Christiaan Triebert reported from New York.
Jan. 12, 2026
The Pentagon used a secret aircraft painted to look like a civilian plane in its first attack on a boat that the Trump administration said was smuggling drugs, killing 11 people last September, according to officials briefed on the matter. The aircraft also carried its munitions inside the fuselage, rather than visibly under its wings, they said.
The nonmilitary appearance is significant, according to legal specialists, because the administration has argued its lethal boat attacks are lawful — not murders — because President Trump “determined” the United States is in an armed conflict with drug cartels.
But the laws of armed conflict prohibit combatants from feigning civilian status to fool adversaries into dropping their guard, then attacking and killing them. That is a war crime called “perfidy.”
Retired Maj. Gen. Steven J. Lepper, a former deputy judge advocate general for the United States Air Force, said that if the aircraft had been painted in a way that disguised its military nature and got close enough for the people on the boat to see it — tricking them into failing to realize they should take evasive action or surrender to survive — that was a war crime under armed-conflict standards.
“Shielding your identity is an element of perfidy,” he said. “If the aircraft flying above is not identifiable as a combatant aircraft, it should not be engaged in combatant activity.”
The aircraft swooped in low enough for the people aboard the boat to see it, according to officials who have seen or been briefed on surveillance video from the attack. The boat had turned back toward Venezuela, apparently after seeing the plane, before the first strike.
Two survivors of the initial attack later appeared to wave at the aircraft after clambering aboard an overturned piece of the hull, before the military killed them in a follow-up strike that also sank the wreckage. It is not clear whether the initial survivors knew that the explosion on their vessel had been caused by a missile attack.
The military has since switched to using recognizably military aircraft for boat strikes, including MQ-9 Reaper drones, although it is not clear whether those aircraft got low enough to be seen. In a boat attack in October, two survivors of an initial strike swam away from the wreckage and so avoided being killed by a follow-up strike on the remnants of their vessel. The military rescued them and returned them to their home countries, Colombia and Ecuador.
U.S. military manuals about the law of war discuss perfidy at length, saying it includes when a combatant feigns civilian status so the adversary “neglects to take precautions which are otherwise necessary.” A U.S. Navy handbook says lawful combatants at sea use offensive force “within the bounds of military honor, particularly without resort to perfidy,” and stresses that commanders have a “duty” to “distinguish their own forces from the civilian population.”
Questions about perfidy have arisen in closed-door briefings of Congress by military leaders, according to people familiar with the matter, but have not been publicly discussed because the aircraft is classified. The public debate has focused on a follow-up strike that killed the two initial survivors, despite a war-law prohibition on targeting the shipwrecked.
The press office for the U.S. Special Operations Command, whose leader, Adm. Frank M. Bradley, ran the operation on Sept. 2, declined to comment on the nature of the aircraft used in the attack. But the Pentagon insisted in a statement that its arsenal has undergone legal review for compliance with the laws of armed conflict.
“The U.S. military utilizes a wide array of standard and nonstandard aircraft depending on mission requirements,” Kingsley Wilson, the Pentagon press secretary, said in response to questions from The New York Times. “Prior to the fielding and employment of each aircraft, they go through a rigorous procurement process to ensure compliance with domestic law, department policies and regulations, and applicable international standards, including the law of armed conflict.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
It is not clear what the aircraft was. While multiple officials confirmed that it was not painted in a classic military style, they declined to specify exactly what it looked like.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comme ... t/ncuuoee/
Amateur plane-spotting enthusiasts posted pictures on Reddit in early September of what appeared to be one of the military’s modified 737s, painted white with a blue stripe and with no military markings, at the St. Croix airport in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Regardless of the specific aircraft at issue, three people familiar with the matter acknowledged that it was not painted in the usual military gray and lacked military markings. But they said its transponder was transmitting a military tail number, meaning broadcasting or “squawking” its military identity via radio signals.
Several law-of-war experts said that would not make the use of such an aircraft lawful in these circumstances since the people on the boat probably lacked equipment to pick up the signal.
Among the legal specialists who said the use of a military transponder signal would not solve a perfidy problem was Todd Huntley, a retired Navy captain who formerly deployed with the Joint Special Operations Command as a judge advocate general, or JAG, and directed the Navy’s national security law division.
Captain Huntley said he could think of legitimate uses for such an aircraft that would make it lawful to have in the arsenal for other contexts, including a hostage rescue scenario in which munitions might be needed for self-defense but were not intended for launching offensive attacks.
The Trump administration kept planning for the boat attacks operation closely held, excluding many military lawyers and operational experts who would normally be involved. Moreover, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has sought to undercut the role of military lawyers as an internal check, including by firing the top service JAGs in February.
The U.S. military operates several aircraft that are built on civilian airframes — including modified Boeing 737s and Cessna turboprops — and can launch munitions from internal weapons bays without visible external armaments. Such aircraft are usually painted gray and have military markings, but military and plane-spotting websites show that a few are painted white and have minimal markings.
The U.S. military has killed at least 123 people in 35 attacks on boats, including the Sept. 2 strike.
A broad range of specialists in laws governing the use of force have said the orders by Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth to attack the boats have been illegal and the killings have been murders. The military is not allowed to target civilians who pose no imminent threat, even if they are suspected of crimes.
The administration has argued that the strikes are lawful and the people on the boats are “combatants” because Mr. Trump decided the situation was a so-called noninternational armed conflict — meaning a war against a nonstate actor — between the United States and a secret list of 24 criminal gangs and drug cartels he has deemed terrorists.
The legitimacy of that claim is widely disputed. Still, it has put attention on ways particular attacks might have violated the laws of war.
Like General Lepper and Captain Huntley, Geoffrey Corn, a retired lieutenant colonel JAG officer who was the Army’s senior adviser for law-of-war issues, said he does not believe that the Sept. 2 attack took place in an armed conflict. He is now a law professor at Texas Tech University.
But he noted that the United States considers perfidy to be a crime in noninternational armed conflicts: It charged a Guantánamo detainee before a military commission with that offense over Al Qaeda’s 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole, in which militants in a small boat floated a hidden bomb up to the side of the warship while waving in a friendly manner.
Professor Corn said an assessment of whether the Sept. 2 attack counted as perfidy would turn on whether the military was trying to make the people on the boat think the aircraft was civilian to “get the jump” on them.
“The critical question is whether there is a credible alternative reason for using an unmarked aircraft to conduct the attack other than exploiting apparent civilian status to gain some tactical advantage,” he said.