Janine Jackson interviewed the ACLU's Jeffrey Stein about Trump's boat attacks for the October 24, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: So here's the top of this October 20 Reuters piece:
When two alleged drug traffickers survived a US military strike last week in the Caribbean, they left the Trump administration with a decision to make: send them back home, or find a way to keep them detained.
There's already a lot going on there: “Alleged drug traffickers,” so not tried or convicted, and they "survived," which means that other people not tried or convicted of drug trafficking were killed, in a "military strike"—OK, even if they're drug traffickers, why is the US military doing the thing? And then, "in the Caribbean"? So does the US control that region?
And after all that's been transmitted without friction in a single clause, we as readers are to interest ourselves in the matter of how the Trump administration can figure out a way to sell the action, and the more like it we can presumably expect. The headline: "In Trump's Drug War, Prisoners May Be Too Much of a Legal Headache, Experts Say.”
Now this, things as they are, is not even the worst kind of piece; it poses questions, anyway. But the questions are about how the administration might use the law more skillfully to address the "complex set of legal and political problems, experts say" accrue when you kill people your country is not at war with, and who have faced no judge or jury.
Not everyone is waiting on the White House to puzzle up a new line to sell about why the US military killing unconvicted foreign people on charges they will never see is not just OK, but, as JD Vance puts it, “The highest and best use of our military.”
Jeffrey Stein is staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project; along with the Center for Constitutional Rights, they're pressing the administration for transparency on this. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Jeffrey Stein.
Jeffrey Stein: Thanks so much for having me.
JJ: Let's leap right into the moment. What is your FOIA request aimed at, specifically, and then more broadly, in terms of public awareness and potential resistance to these—let's call them “extra-legal”—Caribbean strikes?
JS: Sure. Yeah. So as you just mentioned, since early September, President Trump has ordered at least nine lethal strikes on private vessels in international waters, reportedly killing up to 37 people. President Trump has claimed, without providing any evidence at all, that the victims of these strikes are “terrorists.”
But the government's own disclosures indicate that the victims were, as you were just saying, merely suspected of drug smuggling. So put another way, the government's own disclosures demonstrate that these strikes are not lawful.
It's flagrantly illegal, under both domestic and international law, to summarily kill civilians who are suspected of committing crimes. And for this reason, members of Congress from across the political spectrum, former government officials who served in presidential administrations of both parties, international bodies and numerous civil society organizations have allagreed that these strikes constitute murder, pure and simple.
Notwithstanding this broad bipartisan consensus, however, the Trump administration is claiming that these strikes are lawful. The president sent a notice to Congress earlier this month saying that he had unilaterally determined that the United States is in a non-international armed conflict with certain gangs and drug cartels that he has also unilaterally designated as terrorist organizations. He's also claimed, again without any evidence, that the victims of these lethal strikes are “affiliated with these organizations," and are thus unlawful combatants against whom the United States may use lethal force.
The problem is that even if the victims of these strikes were affiliated with drug cartels—and, again, the government has not provided any evidence to support that claim—there's simply no plausible argument that the United States is in an armed conflict with drug cartels, and, under international law, an armed conflict between a state and a non-state actor exists only if the non-state actor is an organized armed group that's engaged in protracted armed violence against the state. And that's simply not the case here.
Jeffrey Stein: "The public should be able to read the government's legal justification right now, while there's still an opportunity to stop these illegal and dangerous strikes."
Nonetheless, according to some recent media reports, the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel, or OLC, an office whose opinions are treated as binding within the executive branch, produced a memo that reportedly authorizes lethal strikes against a secret and wide-ranging list of cartels and suspected drug traffickers, apparently including those who are not affiliated with an organization that's been designated as a terrorist organization.
And even as the Trump administration has repeatedly asserted that these lethal strikes against suspected drug traffickers are on firm legal ground, they've kept OLC’s legal reasoning secret. And we think that's a very serious problem, given the life-or-death stakes of the president's use of force.
We think that the public really deserves to know how our government is justifying these strikes as lawful. And we think that it's really imperative that this transparency comes immediately. The public should be able to read the government's legal justification right now, while there's still an opportunity to stop these illegal and dangerous strikes, and hold government officials accountable.
JJ: So why are you forced to put in a FOIA request? What's the blockage there?
JS: The government has not disclosed its legal reasoning, even though members of Congress have asked various officials within the executive branch what they think the legal authority under which they are operating is. The Trump administration has not released this secret memo that we think the American people are entitled to read. And so that's why we've submitted a FOIA request and are demanding that transparency, which we think is a necessary precondition to holding government officials accountable.
JJ: Well, absolutely. And I'll just ask you, finally—although it's too big a question to ask finally—but we've talked a lot on this show about the use of the “war on terror” and terrorism, and the vagueness of that to greenlight any and everything. If we're now going to talk about "narco terrorism." and just allow that term into the language, it seems super meaningful that this is already an elision and an expansion, but then it seems super meaningful that when, for example, a guest on CNNbrings up, Well, hey, in this context, let's talk about NSPM-7, where now the White House is saying terrorism now means folks who are anti-capitalist, and folks who are anti-whatever we say they can't be anti.
And now we know what it means to be designated a "terrorist." So it's very meaningful to focus on how they're delineating that term.
And I guess I just want to ask you, in the short time we have left, what would you ask journalists to be drilling down on and asking? Because in this case, a guest brought up, Hey, you're talking about bombing boats in the Caribbean, but this could be used in Des Moines. And the media response was Ha ha, let's go to commercial.
JS: I think that what you've said really gets to the heart of our FOIA request. We think that the public deserves insight into the full extent of the president's asserted authority to summarily kill civilians. And that insight is especially necessary, given some of the recent statements that you're alluding to by US government officials, saying that they may use lethal force against suspected drug smugglers or so-called "terrorists" in places other than on the high seas, including President Trump's statement that future strikes may occur on land, and the very concerning statements from Attorney General Pamela Bondi, saying that the Trump administration intends to take the same approach with "Antifa," which, as you're saying, the administration has called a domestic terrorist organization. So given all of this rhetoric, we really think that it's vitally important for the government to disclose its legal reasoning, and for the public to be able to interrogate that reasoning, given, really, the life-and-death stakes of these strikes.
JJ: All right, well, we'll end it there for today. Jeffrey Stein is staff attorney with the ACLU's National Security Project. Thank you so much for joining us today on CounterSpin, Jeffrey Stein.
