When Government Law Becomes a Mask for Murder
- Kal Inois
- Dec 27, 2025
- 6 min read
There is a point where government stops merely bending the rules and starts using 'law' as a mask for things any ordinary person would recognize as murder. That is exactly what this boat strike campaign shows (The Intercept). The U.S. government did not just make a mistake; it built an entire secret legal structure to excuse killing people it had no lawful right to kill (The Intercept).
Hors de combat: This Wasn’t War, It Was Execution
Under international law, when people are shipwrecked, wounded, or trying to surrender, they are hors de combat—out of the fight—and cannot be attacked (ICRC Casebook). That is not some obscure academic theory; it is a core rule of the Geneva Conventions and is repeated in the Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual, which explicitly says shipwrecked and helpless people may not be targeted (DoD Law of War Manual (PDF)).
In the September 2 strike, survivors were left clinging to the wreckage of their boat for around 45 minutes while U.S. commanders watched them on video and debated whether they could legally kill them again (The Intercept, The Intercept – prior report). Witnesses say the men were waving—any reasonable person would understand that as a plea for help or a signal of surrender, especially from shipwrecked survivors (The Intercept). To then decide, after legal consultation, that this did not count as a “proper” surrender and to launch a second strike is not a gray area. It is a textbook example of attacking people who are hors de combat, which is prohibited and widely recognized as a war crime (ICRC Casebook, Human Rights Watch Q&A).
Secret Memos Do Not Supercede Basic Law
The government’s defense rests on a secret directive from the president and a classified Justice Department opinion claiming that certain Latin American cartels are part of a “non‑international armed conflict” with the United States (The New York Times, The Intercept). In that invented “war,” boats, drugs, and crews become “lawful military targets,” and an execute order authorizes the U.S. military to sink boats, destroy cargo, and kill crews if they can be tied, sometimes loosely, to designated “terrorist organizations (”The Intercept, The Intercept).
But here's the core problem: you do not get to turn an entire region into a battlefield, declare a war that no one else recognizes, and then claim wartime privileges while ignoring both human rights law and the constraints of the laws of war (Human Rights Watch Q&A). Human rights law forbids extrajudicial executions in peacetime, and the laws of war forbid killing those out of combat even in wartime (Human Rights Watch Q&A, Lawfare). A secret memo signed after the strike, and a secret terror‑list, do not erase those rules; they simply document the government’s attempt to cover up an unlawful killing (The Intercept, The Intercept).
“Legal Advice” as a Weapon, Not a Guardrail
One of the most disturbing parts of this story is how legal advice is used. Before the second strike, the commander asked his staff judge advocate, his military lawyer, if he could legally attack the survivors again (The Intercept). According to those briefed, the lawyer said yes, and no one in the room objected (The Intercept).
This is fundamentally wrong. Lawyers in uniform are supposed to be a brake on illegal behavior, not a custom approval stamp for whatever the commander already wants to do (Georgetown Law analysis – Huntley). Yet the career reality is clear: a lawyer who keeps saying “no” to a powerful commander in a months‑long killing campaign will not stay in that job for long (The Intercept). Under those conditions, legal review becomes a way to claim plausible deniability—“I asked my lawyer, and they said it was fine”—rather than a genuine check on power.
When former JAGs and military justice experts look at the same facts and call this theory of “improper surrender” ridiculous and obviously unlawful, it exposes what is really going on: law is being contorted to fit the operation, not the other way around (The Intercept, Lawfare). That is not the rule of law; that is rule by lawyers in service of power (Lawfare).
Call It What It Is: Extrajudicial Killing
Strip away the jargon—“non‑international armed conflict,” “designated terrorist organizations,” “target engagement authority,” “execution orders”—and what remains is simple: the U.S. military knowingly killed shipwrecked survivors who posed no immediate threat and who appeared to be signaling for help or surrender (The Intercept, The New York Times).
Human rights groups, UN experts, and legal scholars have already called these strikes extrajudicial executions and said they violate both U.S. and international law (Human Rights Watch Q&A, Lawfare). Congress was not properly informed; some lawmakers only learned about the existence of survivors from the media, not from the executive branch supposedly accountable to them (The Intercept, Sen. Reed statement). Later strikes changed behavior—survivors were rescued or handed off instead of being killed—which is a quiet admission that the earlier choice was wrong, if not criminal (The Intercept, The Intercept).
When a government hides its legal opinions, withholds evidence, redefines war on its own, and then uses that self‑made “law” to justify killing helpless people on camera, it is not acting lawfully in any meaningful sense (The Intercept). It is breaking the law and writing memos afterward to pretend it did not (Lawfare).
If This Is “Legal,” Then Law Has Lost Its Meaning
What this episode really reveals about the U.S. government and its laws is not just that illegal things happen. It shows that:
The executive branch can unilaterally declare new “wars” against non‑state actors and export lethal force worldwide with little or no real oversight (Human Rights Watch Q&A).
Secret opinions and secret lists are used to manufacture a veneer of legality that contradicts open, binding norms like the Geneva Conventions and human rights treaties (The Intercept, Lawfare).
Military and political leaders can authorize actions that would be obvious crimes if any other country did them, and then rely on process—lawyers in the room, classified briefings, “target engagement authorities”—to shield themselves from accountability (The Intercept, New York Times).
If the law allows you to blow up shipwrecked survivors for “not surrendering correctly,” that is not law anymore in any moral or democratic sense (The Intercept). It is a script written by those in power to legitimize actions they have already decided to take (Lawfare).
That is why this is not just a policy dispute or a PR scandal. It is a clear sign that when it comes to national security and the use of force, the U.S. government has built a parallel legal universe where the most basic prohibitions—do not kill the helpless, do not execute suspects without trial—can be bypassed with a classification stamp and the right lawyer in the room (Human Rights Watch Q&A, The Intercept).
And, if that is not illegal, then the term “illegal” has been drained of any real meaning (Lawfare).
These operations, publicly boasted about by †®*mp himself and SecDef Hogsbreth, could only stem from direct White House orders (Lawfare). So much for a peacetime president who claimed to be 'against all wars' while presiding over killings any ordinary person would recognize as murder (Human Rights Watch Q&A, Lawfare).
References
DoD Office of General Counsel. (2016). Department of Defense law of war manual (June 2015, updated December 2016). U.S. Department of Defense. d
Georgetown University Law Center. (n.d.). Todd C. Huntley. Georgetown Law. https://www.law.georgetown.edu/faculty/todd-c-huntley/
Human Rights Watch. (2025, December 16). Q&A: US military operations in the Caribbean, Pacific. https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/12/16/qa-us-military-operations-in-the-caribbean-pacific
International Committee of the Red Cross. (n.d.-a). Hors de combat. ICRC Casebook. https://casebook.icrc.org/node/20452
International Committee of the Red Cross. (n.d.-b). Surrender. ICRC Casebook. https://casebook.icrc.org/a_to_z/glossary/surrender
Lawfare. (2025, December 15). The administration’s drug boat strikes are crimes against humanity. Lawfare Media. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-administration-s-drug-boat-strikes-are-crimes-against-humanity
Reed, J. (2025, December 20). Reed statement on congressional investigation of †®*mp’s boat strike campaign [Press release]. Office of Senator Jack Reed. https://www.reed.senate.gov/news/releases/reed-statement-on-congressional-investigation-of-trumps-boat-strike-campaign
Turse, N. (2025, September 10). U.S. attacked boat near Venezuela multiple times to kill survivors. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2025/09/10/u-s-attacked-boat-near-venezuela-multiple-times-to-kill-survivors/
Turse, N. (2025, October 2). †®*mp’s “non‑international armed conflict” with drug cartels. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2025/10/02/venezuela-boat-strike-justification/
Turse, N. (2025, October 17). Surviving a U.S. boat strike, then becoming a prisoner of war. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2025/10/17/caribbean-boat-strike-survivors-prisoners-war-navy/
Turse, N. (2025, November 7). †®*mp’s secret DTO list and the Venezuela boat strikes. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2025/11/07/trump-dto-list-venezuela-boat-strikes/
Turse, N. (2025, November 14). The legal immunity memo behind †®*mp’s boat strikes. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2025/11/14/boat-strikes-immunity-legality-trump/
Turse, N. (2025, November 17). †®*mp’s boat strikes have killed at least 105 civilians. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2025/11/17/trump-boat-strikes-death-toll-caribbean-pacific/
Turse, N. (2025, December 5). Boat strike survivors clung to wreckage for some 45 minutes before U.S. military killed them. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2025/12/05/boat-strike-survivors-double-tap/
Turse, N. (2025, December 23). U.S. military killed boat strike survivors for not surrendering correctly.
The New York Times. (2025, August 8). †®*mp signed secret directive to use military force against drug cartels. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/us/trump-military-drug-cartels.html
The New York Times. (2025, December 1). Hogsbreth ordered lethal boat strike but not the killing of survivors, Pentagon says. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/01/us/hegseth-drug-boat-strike-order-venezuela.html
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