After President Donald Trump ordered a drone strike that killed 11 alleged drug smugglers on a speedboat in the Caribbean Sea on September 2, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the attack signaled a new approach to drug law enforcement. "Instead of interdicting it, on the president's orders, we blew it up—and it'll happen again," Rubio told reporters.
It happened again on Monday, when U.S. forces blew up another speedboat in the Caribbean, killing three people whom Trump described as "confirmed narcoterrorists from Venezuela." Although Trump frames his unprecedented use of the U.S. military to summarily execute drug suspects as "self-defense," it plainly does not fit that description. By his own account, he has unilaterally decided to impose the death penalty on alleged drug traffickers for the sake of deterrence. That policy represents a stark departure from both military norms and criminal justice principles.
As Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman noted after the September 2 drone strike, the Department of Defense previously adhered to the principle that "the military must not use lethal force against civilians, even if they are alleged, or even known, to be violating the law." Lederman added that "it's difficult to understand how it came to pass that the non-appointed military officials and enlistees involved in the operation assented to such an indefensible breach of the fundamental norm against targeting civilians."
