🚤 “Kill Them All”: Trump’s New Atrocious War Crimes in the Caribbean
Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth turned a small boat off Trinidad into a floating firing squad — and then tried to rewrite the law after the fact.
As I travel back from Atlanta after being with my own mother in the hospital, I just want to thank you for your patience with me and with this work over these past few days. My wife and I are now at the age where our mothers are much more fragile than they used to be.
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The Order That Changes Everything
On September 2nd, far off the coast of Trinidad and Venezuela, the United States turned the “war on drugs” into something much darker.
The facts, as reported by The Washington Post, The Intercept, and others, are simple and horrifying:
U.S. surveillance aircraft tracked a speedboat with 11 people on board for an extended period.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive for the mission: “Kill everybody.”
A missile struck the boat, engulfing it in fire and killing nine people.
When commanders watching the live drone feed realized two men had survived and were clinging to the wreckage, a second strike was ordered to comply with Hegseth’s instructions. The survivors were blown apart in the water.
That is not a close call. That is not a tragic accident. That is a direct, premeditated order to leave no survivors.
If you’ve ever wondered how war crimes actually happen — how you go from “we’re trying to keep drugs off our streets” to “kill the men floating in the ocean” — this is it.
This Is Not War. This Is Murder.
The Trump administration wants you to believe this was a battlefield. They want you to think this was an “armed conflict” with “narco-terrorists,” where the laws of war give them cover.
But listen to the people who have spent their lives inside those laws.
Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces at the height of the U.S. “War on Terror,” told The Washington Post that killing the men on that boat “amounts to murder.” Why? Because there is no armed conflict between the United States and Venezuela. There is no declared war with the crew of a speedboat.
He went further: an order to kill everyone on board, including people who are no longer able to fight, is an order to “show no quarter.” That phrase goes all the way back to the old laws of war — it literally means no prisoners, no mercy, no survivors. Show-no-quarter orders have been recognized as war crimes for generations.
Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and expert on counterterrorism, told The Intercept something every American needs to hear:
“The U.S. president is asserting the power to engage in the premeditated killing of people outside of armed conflict.”
The Trump administration has not shown:
That there is a legitimate war here.
That these men were “combatants” under any serious legal definition.
That the boat, its cargo, or the people on board were lawful targets under the law of war.
Even a senior Pentagon official, speaking anonymously to The Intercept, called the strike a “criminal attack on civilians.” His words, not mine:
“Drug traffickers may be criminals but they aren’t combatants.”
They Could Have Arrested Them. They Chose to Kill Them.
If you still want to believe this was just the fog of war, listen to what Trump’s own people are saying on camera.
Trump bragged that he personally authorized the strike and posted an edited clip — just the first explosion — to Truth Social, calling the dead “narcoterrorists.” He offered no evidence, no names, no proof.
Then Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the quiet part out loud. He admitted that the U.S. could have handled this the way we always have in the Caribbean:
“Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, we blew it up — and it’ll happen again.”
Understand what that means. For decades, when U.S. forces suspected a drug boat, the Coast Guard would:
Hail the vessel.
Fire warning shots.
Move to board, seize any drugs, and arrest the crew.
We used to believe in trials. We used to believe in evidence. We used to believe that, even in the “war on drugs,” people deserved due process.
Trump, Hegseth, and Rubio decided that was too slow. They brought in Special Operations Command, the same people we used to send after al-Qaeda and ISIS, and turned a law enforcement mission into a covert execution squad.
How You Launder a War Crime
After the killings, the machine went to work.
The Pentagon told Congress, behind closed doors, that the second strike — what they called a “double-tap” — was just meant to sink the wreck and remove a navigation hazard. Not to kill survivors.
Ask yourself: how many times have you heard this country claim that its missiles were aimed at “infrastructure,” not people? At “weapons depots,” not families?
People who watched the unedited live feed say if the American public saw that second blast — two men in the water, then nothing — they would be horrified.
It doesn’t stop there. In the weeks after the attack, Trump informed Congress that the United States was in a “non-international armed conflict” with vaguely defined “designated terrorist organizations” in the region. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel then issued an opinion basically saying: since this is now a “war,” anyone who carried out these strikes, so long as they followed orders “consistent with the laws of war,” should be exempt from criminal prosecution.
Only there’s a problem.
You cannot retroactively declare a war to sanitize a crime. You cannot erase the murder of survivors in the water by inventing an “armed conflict” after the fact. You cannot fire the top military lawyers — which Trump did earlier this year — and then pretend your new rubber-stamp lawyers have magically turned an illegal order into a lawful one.
As Huntley said, one of the deepest problems with the law of armed conflict is this: the state using force gets to act as judge, jury, and executioner.
And in this case, they wanted to write their own acquittal before the bodies were even cold.
A Powerful Republican Finally Blinks
Here’s what’s new, and important.
The chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Roger Wicker, a Republican from Mississippi, and Sen. Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, issued a joint statement promising “vigorous oversight” of these strikes and Hegseth’s orders.
They say the committee has already sent inquiries to the Pentagon and will investigate the follow-on strikes and the decision to kill the men who survived the first blast.
I don’t suddenly believe oversight will save us. I don’t suddenly trust that the same government that cannot bring itself to stop arming genocide in Gaza is going to hold its own war criminals accountable in the Caribbean.
But this matters for one reason: once you have a powerful Republican, in a Republican-led Senate, formally probing whether Trump’s defense secretary gave an illegal “kill them all” order, the cracks are visible. The myth that so called “American warriors” can do whatever they want, wherever they want, is starting to fracture from the inside.
And make no mistake: if anyone is prosecuted years from now, it will not be the president, or the secretary, or the senator bragging on TV. It will be the pilots, the operators, the commanders who were told this was legal — who were told to pull the trigger and live with it.
“But They Were Drug Dealers, Shaun…”
I can already hear the objection.
“They were drug traffickers, poisoning our communities. They got what they deserved.”
Here’s my answer:
You do not know that. Neither do I. Neither does the Pentagon, or they would have given you names, affiliations, and evidence. They haven’t. In fact, so many families have spoken out to say their loved ones, who were fishermen, or were even being held hostage, were killed.
Rand Paul — not exactly a leftist — said it plainly: this was “a drone attack on a small speedboat over 2,000 miles from our shore without identification of the occupants or the content of the boat” and “in no way part of a declared war.” He reminded people that even our Coast Guard rules of engagement require warnings, attempts to capture, and lethal force only in self-defense or active resistance.
Even if every single man on that boat had been a trafficker, the United States does not have the right to sentence people to death without arrest, without trial, and without proof, from a drone feed in the sky.
The death penalty, from a distance, in the hands of an unaccountable executive, is not justice. It is terror.
We cannot let the same government that shields Israel as it levels entire neighborhoods in Gaza convince us that a boat of brown men in the Caribbean has to be turned into a mass grave to keep us safe.
We Have to Be the Firebreak Now
Family, if you’ve read this far, you already feel the weight of what’s happening.
As I sit on this plane coming home from Atlanta, worried sick about my own mother’s health, I’m also thinking about the mothers in Venezuela and Trinidad who never even got to bury their sons, because our government vaporized them in the ocean and called it “lawful.”
The people who were supposed to be firebreaks — the military lawyers who would say “no” — were fired. The oversight that might have stopped this was bypassed or lied to. The last barrier is us: an informed public that refuses to normalize kill orders as a tool of domestic politics.
If my work helps you see that more clearly, if it gives you language to push back in your own conversations, I’m asking you to stand with me and click here to become a member. And if you’re in a position to go a step further and hold this up at a higher level, please click here to join as a monthly, annual, or founding member.
Love and appreciate each of you.
Your friend and brother,
Shaun
Don’t Stop Here
Don’t stop with this piece. If you want to connect the dots between this kill order and the larger collapse of law and morality, I want you to read and share three free pieces:
Read them. Talk about them with your family and friends. Forward this piece to three people who still believe the United States can kill whoever it wants, wherever it wants, and still claim the moral high ground. Because if we don’t push back now, “kill them all” won’t just be one illegal order — it will be the new normal.
This is so disgusting. And I am telling you - it has EVERYTHING to do with Gaza. Because Israel and America killed people everyday in Gaza, by drones, and filmed it, and posted it - they think this is no big deal now.
imagine if you were sitting at home, minding your own business, when the government bombed you, citing that you were a drug trafficker without evidence. EVEN IF you were, the proper action would be to arrest you, not blow you up.
These are psychopathic trigger happy lunatics in office.