The United States just crossed a dangerous line. Eleven people are dead after a U.S. military strike on a small vessel in international waters — a strike that the White House claims targeted a Venezuelan drug cartel known as Tren de Aragua. President Trump posted video of the boat exploding. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it a "lethal strike" and a message to "narco-terrorists."
Here's what's missing: any legal or moral justification.
Even a cursory analysis — the kind that took me five minutes to generate with ChatGPT — shows glaring problems:
International law prohibits the use of force against another state except in self-defense or under explicit U.N. authorization. Smuggling drugs, however odious, is not an armed attack.
U.S. law allows interdiction and arrest — not summary execution — of suspected drug traffickers at sea. The Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act and Drug Trafficking Vessel Interdiction Act are written for seizures and arrests, not missile strikes.
Humanitarian law demands distinction and proportionality. We don't know who was on that boat. Not every person on board a drug-running vessel is a trafficker. Some are coerced, some are hired hands, and some may be entirely innocent.
The Guardian raised these issues almost immediately. Experts there noted that this looks less like law enforcement and more like "a massacre of civilians at sea," with one analyst warning it could qualify as a war crime.
Contrast that with The Washington Post. Their article reported the strike and dutifully quoted official statements — but offered no legal context, no scrutiny, no urgency. This is The Washington Post, with its vast newsroom, veteran national security reporters, and access to every tool a modern journalist could want, including AI platforms like the one I used to do this analysis. And yet, nothing.
When CNN did ask Secretary Rubio directly about the legal authority for militarily targeting the cartels, his response was telling: "I'm not going to answer for the White House counsel, suffice it to say that all of those steps were taken in advance." That's not an answer — it's a deflection. And it should have been the starting point for more aggressive questioning, not the end of it.
This is not a small oversight. When the United States asserts the right to use lethal military force — outside a declared war, against people in international waters, with no due process and no evidence made public — that demands immediate and aggressive questioning by the press. Instead, the silence from some of our most trusted outlets is deafening.
If there was solid intelligence justifying this action, the administration should present it. If there wasn't, we've just normalized summary executions at sea. Either outcome is unacceptable in a country that still claims to operate under the rule of law.