As of today, the Trump administration has launched missile strikes on at least nineteen boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, terminating the lives of more than seventy unnamed persons identified at the time of their deaths only as “narcoterrorists.” The administration has claimed that the homicides are legal because they are battling a DTO or “Designated Terrorist Organization” in a “non-international armed conflict,” labels which appear to have been applied for the sole purpose of rationalizing the use of deadly force beyond any declared war zone.
An increasing number of critics have expressed concern over what President Trump’s effective assertion of the right to kill anyone anywhere whom analysts in the twenty-first-century techno-death industry deem worthy of death. Truth be told, as unsavory as it may be, Trump is following a precedent set and solidified by his recent predecessors, one which has consistently been met with both popular and congressional assent.