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ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS WHEN LAWLESS US OFFICIALS GO ON A MURDER
SPREE  
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Phyllis Bennis and Khury Petersen-Smith
December 10, 2025
Common Dreams
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_ From Venezuela to Yemen to Iran, the extrajudicial slaughter of
civilians has been allowed to continue. What we are witnessing in the
Caribbean and elsewhere today has been years in the making. Who will
put a stop to it? _

President Donald Trump attends a meeting of his Cabinet alongside
(L-R) U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, U.S. Secretary of State
Marco Rubio and U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth in the Cabinet Room
of the White House on December 02, 2025., Screenshot from You Tube
video of Fox 5 (Washington, DC) broadcast

 

It’s all good that members of Congress, mainstream headlines, and
the various talking heads are discussing something we don’t hear
about often enough—that the US is committing war crimes
[[link removed]]; how we need a new War
Powers Resolution; or why heads should roll at the Pentagon
[[link removed]] over a series of boat
bombings in the Pacific and Caribbean in recent months that are
nothing less than premeditated murder.

It is important that—after years of the Pentagon using unchecked
power to carry out violence all over the world—Congress is finally
asking questions. The debate is rising over whether the Sept. 2 murder
of two men who survived an initial US attack on their small boat in
international waters of the Caribbean, only to be killed by a second
US bombing designed specifically to eliminate them, constitutes a war
crime.

But there are three huge problems this rising debate mostly ignores.
First, some of these actions, like a president declaring unilaterally
that a war exists (when it doesn’t) and then bombing unarmed
civilian boats in international waters, are inherently illegal,
regardless of whether anyone is killed by the first, second, or tenth
bomb. That’s an act of piracy and murder, not a legal use of armed
force. Second, too few of the discussions of illegal US military
[[link removed]] actions take the issue
of accountability seriously. How far up—and down—the chain of
command does responsibility go? And third, congressional
considerations of legality, accountability, and War Powers resolutions
much too often are limited to situations in which US troops might be
put in harm’s way. The actual deaths of civilians who happen to be
Venezuelan or Yemeni or Iranian are simply not part of the calculus.

So, yes, of course, the secondary bombing of shipwrecked sailors on
Sept. 2 was illegal and should be seen for what it was: murder in cold
blood. That is because deliberately targeting and killing anyone at
sea whose boat is sinking and who is waving for help, is a crime. But
it must be said—loudly and repeatedly—that all the
kill-them-all-with-one-bomb strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the
eastern Pacific that the US has carried out since September were also
illegal. As of December 6, US forces have killed at least 87
people—Venezuelan, Colombian, Trinidadian, and Ecuadoran
victims—with US drones and bombs in the region. None of the people
or boats are alleged to have been armed or to have been transferring
weapons.

_AFTER SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, THE US DECLARED A SET OF OPEN-ENDED WARS
AND MILITARY OPERATIONS, IN WHICH CONGRESS LARGELY VOLUNTARILY
SURRENDERED ITS POWER TO DECLARE WAR AND RESPONSIBILITY TO PROVIDE
OVERSIGHT OF WARS THROUGH FUNDING DECISIONS._

A presidential pronouncement that unidentified people allegedly
committing a crime are now to be considered “narco-terrorists”
(without any evidence or legal definition) and that alleged drug
smugglers are now to be treated as “combatants” in an “armed
conflict” (which does not exist), does not make that claim true.

It’s also a classic “even if” situation. Even if we knew who was
on the boats, and even if they were actually smuggling drugs, and even
if there was a real war underway, no law, neither US nor
international, allows for the extra-judicial killing of someone
involved in a crime who does not present an immediate threat of armed
attack. Such an act is murder, pure and simple, not a legal military
act. Former President of the Philippines
[[link removed]] Rodrigo Duterte is
currently in prison for exactly such acts: he remains in detention at
the International Criminal Court
[[link removed]] in The
Hague, charged with crimes against humanity for his involvement in the
killings of thousands of people alleged to be drug dealers, killed by
police and the military during his anti-drug campaigns.

This series of killings from above does not constitute an act of war,
but rather a set of extrajudicial murders carried out on the orders of
the US government’s highest officials, namely President Donald Trump
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Defense Pete Hegseth.

As part of a lawsuit filed this week by the ACLU, Center for
Constitutional Rights, and New York Civil Liberties
[[link removed]] Union aimed
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the Trump White House [[link removed]]
to release an internal Office of Legal Council opinion being used to
justify the strikes, Jeffrey Stein, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s
National Security Project, said, “The public deserves to know how
our government is justifying the cold-blooded murder of civilians as
lawful and why it believes it can hand out get-out-of-jail-free cards
to people committing these crimes.”

The Trump administration
[[link removed]], Stein argued,
“must stop these illegal and immoral strikes, and officials who have
carried them out must be held accountable.” That is exactly right.

And so yes, it’s good that outraged opposition is rising against the
deliberate murders of the two survivors seen clinging to the sinking
boat in the Caribbean. But it’s vitally important that the
opposition, including lawmakers in Congress who are the frontlines of
holding Trump and Hegseth to account, also challenge the illegality of
every such bombing by the Pentagon. And that doesn’t seem to be
happening. As the _New York Times_
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put it, “the idea that something was bad about that particular
strike implicitly suggests the first one on that boat—and all the
other attacks on other boats—was fine. And the exercise reinforced
the premise that the situation should be thought about through the
lens of an armed conflict.” Which does not exist.

As many rights experts have pointed out, there is no “war crime”
when there is no war. These murders must be seen for what they are.

When the talk in Congress turns to whether these military operations
should trigger a new War Powers Act resolution to rein in the
out-of-control military, the debate generally focuses on whether these
attacks count as “hostilities,” which would trigger the Act. The
word isn’t defined in the Act, but US presidents have generally
defined “hostilities” very narrowly, as something that puts US
troops at risk. And too rarely has Congress challenged that position.
The result is that Venezuelan and Colombian and Ecuadoran and other
fisherfolk, other civilians, maybe some small-scale criminals, can all
be put at risk without consequence. They are being killed without
anyone having to state publicly who they are, what was in their boats,
where they were heading, even their names—let alone how we know any
of that–and apparently their lives have no significance on the
legality or illegality of their murder.

_DELIBERATELY TARGETING AND KILLING ANYONE AT SEA WHOSE BOAT IS
SINKING AND WHO IS WAVING FOR HELP, IS A CRIME._

None of this should be surprising. Three weeks after the September 2
boat attack, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth addressed almost 1000
of the military’s top brass
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summoned from all over the world to hear his talk. He said, “We also
don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of
our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies
of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of
engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality, and authority for
warfighters.”

“Maximum lethality”—without even a modicum of justice–is what
we’re seeing in all the boat attacks, not only the second strike
that has generated the most concern. “Authority for warfighters”
appears to be plentiful in the form of zero accountability for top
commanders or ordinary troops of the anti-speedboat campaign. And that
authority is visible as well in the targeting and threats against the
six congressmembers, all former military and intelligence officers,
who dared remind US troops that their oaths allow, indeed require them
to refuse to carry out illegal orders.

Of course, the boat bombings are not the only recent examples of
crimes by the military carried out without consequence.

A renewed level of outrage erupted recently when a new Pentagon
investigation found that the secretary of defense had indeed put US
troops in harm’s way during a seemingly casual, emoji-filled Signal
chat involving top military and intelligence officials, in which he
announced and discussed secret operational details of imminent US
attacks on alleged Houthi targets in Yemen
[[link removed]]. Signalgate was a huge story
back in March
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when the news first broke that several unauthorized people were on the
unsecure chat, including, apparently by mistake, the editor-in-chief
of _The Atlantic_ magazine.

Certainly, some level of alarm was justified because US troops were
indeed put at risk, because normal security regulations were ignored,
because the whole episode reeked of carelessness, and because military
rules were violated with apparent impunity. But no one seemed
concerned that the real outrage of this scheme was not the
unauthorized Signal chat, but that the US military was off doing the
job Hegseth proudly reminded them of in Quantico–“killing people
and breaking things.” As it turned out, they were killing innocent
Yemeni civilians and destroying Yemeni civilian infrastructure
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That time, it may have been a war crime, although the US was not
officially at war with Yemen. There were a number of countries
involved in military action in the Red Sea, but the US military forces
there were deployed with no regard for international law
[[link removed]] or for the US
Constitution [[link removed]], which
says only Congress can declare war. It is exactly during wartime
conditions that the Geneva Conventions and other laws of war
apply–prohibiting collective punishment, attacks on civilians,
failure to distinguish between military and civilian targets. For
Hegseth
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describing it during the Signal chat, the concern was not the
illegality of the attacks, but how to justify them to the public:
“Nobody knows who the Houthis are—which is why we would need to
stay focused on 1) Biden failed and 2) Iran funded.” It was all just
a partisan PR job. Now, of course, with the release of the latest
Pentagon report this week, Signalgate outrage is returning—but the
focus is still on how the unsecure call put US troops at risk—not on
how many Yemeni civilians, how many children
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and injured—a clear war crime.

Then there was Iran. In June, Israel launched 12 days of bombing raids
against Iran, destroying military, energy, government, media
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Iran’s government reported 935 people killed
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including 38 children; almost all of Iran’s retaliatory missiles
were intercepted by Israeli and US anti-missile systems, 28 people
were killed in Israel. The US made no effort to criticize Israel’s
use of US weapons in the initial assault, in clear violation of US
laws restricting use of weapons it provided. Instead, the US joined
Israel and launched its own attack targeting Iran’s nuclear
facilities with 30,000-pound “bunker-buster” bombs, the largest
non-nuclear bombs in the US arsenal. Trump immediately announced the
US strikes had “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s
nuclear facilities. The claim was denied within hours by his own
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, and within a
couple of days by the Defense Intelligence Agency’s finding
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that the strikes had only set back Iran’s nuclear program three to
six months.

_WE NEED TO DEMAND AN END TO ALL UNCHECKED ILLEGAL US MILITARY
ACTION..._

The public debate then focused almost entirely on which damage
assessments were more likely correct—did the US strikes actually
“obliterate” the equipment or did it only partly damage it? Was
Iran’s nuclear capacity destroyed or only set back? Few analysts and
virtually no one in Congress interrogated the illegality of both the
Israeli and the US strikes to begin with. Violations of the Geneva
Conventions’ prohibitions on collective punishment and failure to
distinguish between military and civilian targets, specific
international legal bans on targeting nuclear facilities—are all
separate war crimes. But the US was not at war with Iran, it was
Washington [[link removed]], not Tehran
[[link removed]] that withdrew from the
JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal, back in 2018. So the US attack on Iran
was illegal, and would have been illegal even if none of the Geneva
Convention’s laws of war were violated. Washington’s actions were
probably not war crimes, they may have been crimes against humanity,
they may have constituted the crime of aggression. But few
policymakers or pundits were even considering those realities.

After September 11, 2001, the US declared a set of open-ended wars and
military operations, in which Congress largely voluntarily surrendered
its power to declare war and responsibility to provide oversight of
wars through funding decisions. The US government and military became
used to killing, wounding, and destroying without even explaining, let
alone answering for their actions. Pete Hegseth deployed as an officer
in that era. He commanded troops in two places where US forces
notoriously violated the law and dehumanized people: the infamous US
prison at Guantanamo [[link removed]]
Bay, and Iraq. Now he is in charge of the entire Pentagon. The
violations that we are witnessing in the Caribbean and elsewhere today
were years in the making. We cannot be satisfied with a Congressional
challenge only on the most narrow and technical terms. We need to
demand an end to all unchecked illegal US military action—and full
accountability for the damage that it has already done.

_[PHYLLIS BENNIS is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and
serves on the national board of Jewish Voice for Peace. Her most
recent book is "Understanding Palestine and Israel" (2025). Her other
books include: "Understanding the US-Iran Crisis: A Primer" (2008) and
"Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US
Power" (2005). __@PhyllisBennis_
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_[KHURY PETERSEN-SMITH is the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow and
co-director of the __New Internationalism Project_
[[link removed]]_ at the Institute
for Policy Studies.]_

_Licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to
republish and share widely._

* murder
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* illegal orders
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* Donald Trump
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* Pete Hegseth
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* Venezuela
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* Caribbean
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* Narco-Terrorism
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* War on Terror
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* Yemen
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* Iran
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* narcotics
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* war crimes
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* war powers resolution
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* Congress
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