The September 2 Attack in the Caribbean

The administration of cult leader, convicted felon, and failed President Donald Trump is lawless both domestically and internationally. During Trump's second term, the rule of law within the United States has almost completely been destroyed. When it comes to international law, the United States, regardless of the administration, has never paid much heed. For instance, the United States is one of only seven countries to vote against the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court. Trump has gone so far as to impose sanctions on the ICC and individual ICC judges. Given this attitude, it is no surprise that the United States, at Trump's behest, now routinely flouts international law, including the law of war. As the public has learned more about the September 2 U.S. attack on a boat in the Caribbean that is alleged to have been smuggling drugs, the more it is apparent that this attack violated multiple international laws as well as several domestic laws. It was already known that two occupants of the boat survived the initial attack, but were then killed in a follow-up strike. Now we have learned that the aircraft that conducted the attack was painted in a manner so as to resemble a civilian airplane. These both represent violations of the law of war and suggest that there may have been more involved in this attack than the Trump administration has so far admitted.

The September 2 attack was the first of what would ultimately be dozens of strikes against boats in both the Caribbean Sea and the Eastern Pacific Ocean. It is important to state that nothing about these attacks is legal. Despite claims by Trump, the U.S. was not engaged in armed conflict with Venezuela — the country said to have been the origin of the boats — at the time. Even if the boats were smuggling drugs, their occupants deserved due process. Furthermore, convicted drug smugglers are not punished by the death penalty. Simply put, these have been illegal extrajudicial murders. Any further legal violations, of which there appear to be multiple, are in addition to the initial illegal actions.

Moreover, Trump has consistently lied about the attacks. He has repeatedly claimed that the boats being attacked were smuggling fentanyl into the United States. This has been an absurd claim from the get-go. Very little fentanyl is produced in Venezuela, and the boats do not have the range to reach the United States. After the U.S. military intervened in Venezuela and arrested Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the indictment issued by the Department of Justice did not even mention fentanyl. Instead, it accused Maduro of being involved in the cocaine trade. Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, the commander who oversaw the September 2 attack, would later tell Congress that the boat was smuggling cocaine and that it was headed to the South American country of Suriname. The remains of destroyed watercraft that have washed up on nearby shores have sometimes shown that the drugs being smuggled were marijuana.

I wrote about the September 2 attack in early December, highlighting the illegal nature of the follow-up attack that killed the two survivors. As I noted, killing survivors is one of the most widely acknowledged war crimes and puts U.S. personnel at risk of prosecution under both U.S. and international laws. It is likely that members of the military were given illegal orders to conduct this operation. When Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate released a video in which they reminded military personnel that they do not have to follow illegal orders, they may have had attacks of this sort in mind. The surprise resignation in October of Admiral Alvin Holsey, who had been the head of the U.S. Southern Command which oversees the area in which the attacks have taken place, may have resulted from his discomfort with the orders he was being given.

On Monday, the New York Times reported that the "Pentagon used a secret aircraft painted to look like a civilian plane" during the September 2 attack. Moreover, the aircraft carried its munitions inside its body so that the weapons were not visible from the outside. This constitutes another war crime. It is a violation of the law of war for combatants to be disguised as civilians in order to fool adversaries. Doing so is a war crime called "perfidy." The Times article quotes several experts on the law of war as saying that this was likely a case of perfidy and, therefore, a war crime.

Both of the actions that appear to be war crimes could have extremely negative ramifications. If the U.S. does not display concern for survivors of an attack, it can hardly expect its adversaries to do so either. Therefore, U.S. military personnel who survive future attacks may well be killed rather than rescued. The use of an aircraft painted to look like a civilian airplane could endanger civilian aircraft if they are wrongly believed to be military planes in disguise.

For reasons that have not been explained, the U.S. appears to have stopped both of these practices after the first attack. In a subsequent strike in which there were survivors, the military rescued them and returned them to their home countries. As far as the public is aware, following attacks were conducted by military drones or other military aircraft that were identifiable as such. The September 2 attack appears to have been an outlier.

For me, the September 2 attack raises a number of questions. Given that this was the first attack, might the administration have been planning to hide its responsibility? Probably not, given that the New York Times report says that the aircraft's transponder was transmitting a military tail number. That wouldn't have helped the boat's occupants since they had no way to receive that signal, but would have revealed the aircraft's military nature to those who did. Perhaps this was a test of the aircraft that was involved? Furthermore, could a desire for secrecy explain why the survivors were killed? Another strange aspect of this attack is that the boat had 11 occupants. That is a very high number for smuggling drugs because smugglers would rather use the limited space for drugs rather than people. After the attack, several analysts suggested that this might have been a case of human trafficking rather than drug smuggling. Obviously, I don't have the answers, but something seems extremely fishy about the attack.

An operation with unusual details that was ordered by leaders who are known liars and who have impressed exactly nobody with their competence raises a lot of questions. When the answers to such questions are hidden, the result is often unfounded speculation and conspiracy theories. In the case of the September 2 attack, the initial justification asserted by Trump has turned out to be almost entirely false. A plane whose use nobody has adequately explained was employed, and the only survivors were killed in violation of well-known rules of combat. It is not a stretch to assume that something unusual was going on here, and it is easy to believe that whatever that might have been was nefarious. Regardless was going on, as far as we know, it has not been repeated.