“They violate well-established maritime law that requires interdiction and detention before lethal force is used, and represent a grossly disproportionate response by the United States,” stressed Bhatia, the former president of Puerto Rico’s Senate. “Deploying an aircraft carrier and US Southern Command assets to destroy small yulas and wooden boats is not only illegal, it is an absurd escalation that undermines regional security and diplomatic stability.”
Deborah Perlstein, director of the Program on Law and Public Policy at Princeton University, said she has spoken with “military operations lawyers, international law experts, national security law scholars,” and other experts, and has yet to find anyone who believes the administration’s boat attacks are legal.
Pearlstein added that illegal strikes are “a symptom of the much deeper problem created by the purge of career lawyers on the front end, and the implicit promise of presidential pardons on the back end,” with the result that “the rule of law is losing its deterrent effect.”
Visiting Professor Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, said it was incorrect to characterize the administration’s actions as war crimes given that war, by definition, “requires a level of sustained hostilities between two organized forces that does not exist with drug cartels.”
Instead, Roth believes the administration’s policy should be classified as outright murder.
He stressed that “these killings are still murders.” “Drug trafficking is a serious crime, but the appropriate response is to intercept boats and arrest their occupants for prosecution. Rules governing law enforcement prohibit the use of deadly force except as a last resort to stop an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury, which boats do not.”
Professor of International Affairs Jacob N. Shapiro pointed to past failures in the US “War on Drugs” and predicted more of the same after Trump’s wave of boat bombings.
“In 1986, President Ronald Reagan declared a ‘War on Drugs,’ which included using the Coast Guard and the military to stop shipments through the Caribbean,” Shapiro noted. “The goal was to reduce supply, raise prices, and thus reduce use. Cocaine prices in the United States fell sharply from 1986 to 1989, then fell slowly through 2006. Traffickers moved from air and sea routes to land routes. This policy did not work, and it is unclear why this time would be different.”
The scholars’ condemnation of the boat strikes came on the same day that the United States seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela in another escalatory act of aggression aimed at exerting more economic pressure on the government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
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