\n<\/p>\n
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.<\/p>\n
The bulletins come every few days now. On Tuesday, a U.S. strike in the Caribbean Sea killed four people. On Sunday, two strikes in the Pacific Ocean killed six, and two people died in a November 4 strike. The MO rarely changes: a bellicose announcement from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Claims that the dead were involved in drug trafficking, though never much evidence to back it up. Usually a grainy image of the attack\u2014an enormous explosion engulfing a small boat, sometimes with small figures visible on board, until they\u2019re not.<\/p>\n
Since the first of these strikes, in early September, there have been 19 more that we know of. The pace has increased since last month\u201415 of them have come in that time. When the strikes began, each one got lots of attention, but the Trump administration has adopted its usual strategy of doing things over and over until the public is lulled into a sense that this is normal. News is, definitionally, something fresh; when an event happens 20 times, it loses its novelty. But repetition has not made these strikes any less troubling or any more legal, and the more the public learns about how they\u2019re conducted, the shakier the arguments for them look.<\/p>\n
Hegseth portrays the situation as simple. \u201cTo all narco-terrorists who threaten our homeland: if you want to stay alive, stop trafficking drugs,\u201d he wrote on X last week. \u201cIf you keep trafficking deadly drugs\u2014we will kill you.\u201d Nearly every part of this statement demands skepticism. First, the Pentagon has not generally provided evidence for its claims, other than to cite \u201cintelligence,\u201d and the administration\u2019s pattern of misleading and outright lying makes it hard to give it the benefit of the doubt.<\/p>\n
Second, even if the intelligence is correct, these people have not been convicted in any court, which makes their deaths extrajudicial killings. There\u2019s another, more common term for that: murder, as Rachel VanLandingham, a law professor and retired judge advocate in the Air Force, recently told CNN. (The administration doesn\u2019t seem confident about its chances at a conviction: When two men survived a strike last month, the United States handed them over to their home countries rather than attempting to try them.) Third, even if they had been found guilty, no federal law establishes the death penalty for drug trafficking. Donald Trump has previously called for instituting capital punishment for drug dealing, though he has also used his clemency power to pardon people convicted of that crime.<\/p>\n
In the absence of a clear criminal-justice rationale, the White House is playing a slippery game. On the one hand, officials argue that involving the military, which doesn\u2019t otherwise have a law-enforcement role, in these boat strikes is necessary, because drug shipments pose a direct threat to the United States; the Trump administration calls those killed \u201cunlawful combatants.\u201d On the other hand, the administration has also said that Congress has no authority to intervene under the War Powers Act, because these strikes don\u2019t rise to the level of hostilities\u2014no U.S. troops are in danger. The result is absurd: As Brian Finucane, a former State Department legal adviser, told The Washington Post, \u201cWhat they\u2019re saying is anytime the president uses drones or any standoff weapon against someone who cannot shoot back, it\u2019s not hostilities.\u201d<\/p>\n
Other warning lights are flashing. Admiral Alvin Holsey abruptly announced his resignation last month as head of the U.S. Southern Command\u2014which oversees the strikes\u2014less than a year into his posting. Although Holsey has not made any public comment about the strikes, The New York Times reports that he privately raised questions about them. Reuters reported last month that military officials involved in operations in Latin America are being asked to sign unusual nondisclosure agreements, even though national-security secrets are already restricted. And CNN reported this week that British officials have decided to stop sharing intelligence about suspected drug trafficking in the Caribbean because they believe the boat strikes are illegal. Even as the strikes become more routine, more reservations among people close to them are emerging.<\/p>\n
One useful way to understand the boat strikes might be to compare them to threatened or executed National Guard deployments in several U.S. cities. When Trump first called up Guard troops in Washington, D.C., he contended that they were needed to fight street crime\u2014even though the Guard generally isn\u2019t trained in law enforcement and has limits on policing powers. What has become clear since is that the real goal is aggressive enforcement of immigration laws.<\/p>\n
Similarly, drug interdiction may just be an excuse for broader actions in Latin America. As my colleague Nick Miroff has reported, the administration has used fentanyl as a justification for military deployments, but the Coast Guard doesn\u2019t actually encounter fentanyl in the Caribbean. Instead, the boat strikes seem to be a cover for a huge military deployment designed to oust Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, as The Atlantic reports. If this is all a prelude to regime change in Caracas, that\u2019s another reason to treat the strikes as anything but normal.<\/p>\n
Related:<\/p>\n
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:<\/strong><\/p>\n Today\u2019s News<\/strong><\/p>\n Evening Read<\/strong><\/p>\n Illustration by Tim Enthoven<\/p>\n The End of Naked Locker Rooms<\/p>\n By Jacob Beckert<\/p>\n Not long ago, after a day of work, a colleague and I met for a friendly game of racquetball at our university gym. In the newly designed locker room, I began pulling off my shirt to change when he quickly stopped me: \u201cYou can\u2019t do that here.\u201d Undressing, it turned out, was now permitted only in small private stalls\u2014which struck me as odd. This was a gym with a pool, where someone could go directly from a shirts-on locker room to a shirtless swim. But the logic was clear enough: The space had been redesigned as \u201cuniversal,\u201d for people of all genders. The locker room, once a place for casual and normative nudity, had quietly become a place where modesty was expected.<\/p>\n Read the full article.<\/p>\n More From The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n Culture Break<\/p>\n Illustration by Ben Kothe \/ The Atlantic<\/p>\n Read. Bumbling your way through any language will always be better than popping in AirPods. The literary translator Ross Benjamin writes on what we stand to lose in a world of instant translation.<\/p>\n Watch. All\u2019s Fair (out now on Hulu), which stars a hodgepodge cast including Kim Kardashian and Glenn Close, is an atrocity, Sophie Gilbert writes.<\/p>\n Play our daily crossword.<\/p>\n Explore all of our newsletters here.<\/em><\/p>\n Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.<\/p>\n When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting <\/em>The Atlantic.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. The bulletins come every few days now. On Tuesday, a U.S. strike in the Caribbean Sea killed four people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":33474,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[7248,855,85,811],"class_list":{"0":"post-33473","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-boat","9":"tag-months","10":"tag-strikes","11":"tag-u-s"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33473\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/33474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n