Terror on The High Seas

In the latest migration of a term with lethal consequences, "terrorism" is a pretext for murdering 11 people in international waters

Edited by Sam Thielman

BALTIMORE: I'll be talking REIGN OF TERROR and IRON MAN at Red Emma's for the Baltimore Book Festival at noon on Saturday, Sept. 13. It's free, and you can RSVP here. Come through, hang out!  Someone bring me the vinyl of the new End It LP and I'll pay you. 

I DON'T HAVE to do too much with this one to get my point across, right? 

REIGN OF TERROR deals extensively with how useful the imprecision of the term "terrorism" is. While there will be earnest people who attempt rigorous definitions, centering on political violence inflicted on civilians and straining for agnosticism about the merits of the causes motivating such violence, such efforts are academic and not something that interests those who wield power. I write in the book that "Trump had learned the foremost lesson of 9/11: the terrorists were whomever you said they were." 

Like, for instance, eleven people, allegedly smuggling drugs, whom the Trump administration wiped off the face of the earth by ordering a U.S. Navy strike in international waters. 

If you're reading this newsletter, I don't need to tell you what language the Trump administration is using to portray the strike as righteous. Having seeded the bed by declaring Tren de Aragua a terrorist organization and lying that Venezuela is using it to invade the United States, Trump has now applied the War on Terror to the waters near Venezuela. Trump used permutations of the word "terror" five times in a brief Tuesday post boastfully announcing this criminal act, with "11 Terrorists killed in action" being a typical pronouncement. The post included a video of the killings.

The next day, Vice President J.D. Vance incoherently extemporized that the boat contained "people who are bringing literal terrorists… into our country." That was so transparently false that it accidentally communicates an important truth. Those in power are so used to the political potency of the War on Terror that they've long since jettisoned any need to rely on any rigorous justification. The Washington Post figured that the White House made "an apparent reference to the 2001 authorization for the use of military force enacted by Congress after the 9/11 terrorist attacks that year." That was the Post's best guess, the result of parsing the administration's declarations while presuming that surely they were grounded in something. I don't know how many times I've written over the years that as long as the AUMF exists, it will include ever more bloodshed unrelated to 9/11 under its aegis. 

But here's the next one: an attempt at provoking a conflict with oil-rich Venezuela, whose socialist government the Trump administration tried to coup in its first term, as then-national security adviser John Bolton later admitted. There is currently a Navy buildup of eight warships—including the big-deck amphib USS Iwo Jima, whose role as a helicopter platform is to get Marines close enough to take a beach, and the destroyers USS Gravely, Jason Dunham and Sampson—and even a submarine off the coast of Venezuela. (One of the ships is the USS Minneapolis-Saint Paul, a rare impending-combat deployment of the littoral combat ship that the Navy used to consider its future.) 

There is no need to give an administration that lies effortlessly the slightest benefit of the doubt. Killing the crew of that boat was unambiguously a war crime. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who posted the video of the strike on X, even boasted that they didn't need to blow the boat up, but did anyway, to "send a message." A post I saw observed that Rubio released the kind of military snuff film that used to prompt the government to persecute WikiLeaks. The Navy commander responsible for the strike executed an illegal order, which, once it goes unpunished, enables a command environment for the military to follow such orders frictionlessly. There’s a relevant quote in the upcoming Zeteo column I mentioned in Tuesday's edition—a bit of invective by Steve Bannon against involvement in foreign wars. However MAGA may deceitfully posture as hostile to foreign wars, it sure has no such antipathy to war crimes. 

Daniel Larison wrote yesterday:

The start of the cartel war is more evidence that we need to end the “war on terror” and dismantle the machinery of death that goes along with it. Cloaking the cartel war in the language of combating terrorism promises to repeat all of the abuses of the “war on terror. It is further routinizing the use of extrajudicial assassination as a tool of foreign policy. Our foreign policy is already overmilitarized and destructive, and the cartel war will make it even worse.

TODAY IN NEW YORK is the first day of the school year. After I took my kids to school, I kept thinking about this recent piece in Gothamist about whether immigrant parents should consider schools safe from the threat of ICE kidnappings. Terrorism has many slippery definitions. But deterring the education of a disfavored population with the threat of masked goons stealing your children—that is state terror.

DEFEND Chicago. As I learned when I reported on Homan Square, its local newspapers won't. 

IF ONLY ONE in four Palestinians from Gaza detained by Israel during the genocide are "identified as fighters by Israel’s military intelligence," as Yuval Abraham and my respected former colleague Emma Graham-Harrison report, then these people are not detainees. They are hostages.