Tag: due process

Murder for Christmas?

When Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth posted a meme of Franklin the Turtle, the amiable child’s cartoon character, in a helicopter using a military weapon to kill people in a small boat below him, and captioned it “For your Christmas wish list,” it understandably caused an uproar.

Should the secretary of defense be mocking the people his troops have killed? Should he engage a child’s cartoon character to produce this mockery? Should anyone in his right mind, who professes to understand Christianity, suggest that this killing should be on a child’s Christmas wish list? Should he be killing nonviolent boatpeople?

Here is the back story.

President Donald Trump has ordered the Department of Defense to annihilate persons in speedboats in the Caribbean Sea, 1,500 miles from the United States and elsewhere. The true targets of these killings are not the boats but the persons in the boats. We know this because the president has stated so, and because in a particularly gruesome event, two survivors of an initial attack on Sept. 2, 2025, who were clinging to the broken remains of their boat hoping to be rescued, were hit with a second attack, which obliterated them.

Based on evidence he says he has and chooses not to share, Trump has designated these folks in the speedboats as “narco-terrorists” and argued that his designation offers him legal authority to kill them. But “narco-terrorist” is a political phrase, not a legal one. There is no such designation or defined term in American law. Labeling them confers no additional legal authority.

Lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice who advise the attorney general on the meaning of the law have apparently authored a legal opinion informing her that she can tell the president what he wants to hear; that it is lawful to kill these boatpeople. This is the same office that told President George W. Bush that he could legally torture prisoners and President Barack Obama that he could legally kill unindicted Americans — including a child — overseas.

Neither the president nor the attorney general will produce this legal opinion for public scrutiny.

These killings constitute murder under federal law and under international law, and persons who use the force of government to commit murder may themselves be prosecuted for it in U.S. courts, courts of the countries from which their victims came, and in international courts. These killings constitute murder because none of the 81 dead boatpeople was engaged in any violence at the times of their deaths.

It doesn’t matter, Trump has claimed, just look at the numbers of drug deaths in the U.S., they are “way down.” Does the president believe that murder is justified by a diminution in drug deaths? Drug distribution is not a capital offence. If the police see a nonviolent person distributing dangerous drugs in an American city, can they summarily kill that person? Of course not.

Keep reading

Congress Members Fuming, Left Unsatisfied By Classified Pentagon Briefing On Drug Boat Strikes

US War Department officials don’t know the identities of the 61 people who have been extra-judicially executed in US military strikes on boats in the waters near Venezuela and in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, Politico reported on Thursday, citing House Democrats who attended a classified briefing on the campaign.

“[The department officials] said that they do not need to positively identify individuals on these vessels to do the strikes, they just need to prove a connection to smuggling,” said Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-CA). “When we tried to get more information, we did not get satisfactory answers.”

While the Trump administration has cited overdose deaths in the US related to fentanyl to justify the bombing campaign, lawmakers were told in the briefing that the boats that have been targeted were allegedly smuggling cocaine, though the Pentagon has not provided evidence to back up its claims about what the vessels were carrying.

“They argued that cocaine is a facilitating drug of fentanyl, but that was not a satisfactory answer for most of us,” Jacobs said.

The briefing on Thursday came after the Pentagon shut out Democrats from another briefing it held with Republicans a day earlier, which left Democratic senators fuming. Democrats who attended Thursday’s briefing said Pentagon lawyers were pulled from the meeting at the last minute.

“Am I leaving satisfied? Absolutely not. And the last word that I gave to the admiral was, ‘I hope you recognize the constitutional peril that you are in and the peril you are putting our troops in,’” Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) told reporters after the briefing, according to CNN.

Jacobs said that, based on what she was told, even if Congress authorized the bombing campaign, it would still be illegal. “[T]here’s nothing that we heard in there that changes my assessment that this is completely illegal, that it is unlawful and even if Congress authorized it, it would still be illegal because there are extrajudicial killings where we have no evidence,” she said.

Criticism of the US bombing campaign has also come from Republicans, most prominently from Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY). “No one said their name, no one said what evidence, no one said whether they’re armed, and we’ve had no evidence presented,” Paul said this week of the people who have been targeted. “They summarily execute people without presenting evidence to the public… so it’s wrong.”

Keep reading

Rand Paul: It’s Odd We’re Not Charging Survivors from Boat Strikes for Drug Crimes

On Wednesday’s broadcast of Newsmax TV’s “Rob Schmitt Tonight,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) stated that when there are survivors of the strikes on what the Trump administration alleges are drug boats, “we don’t try them for drug crimes or we don’t even keep them. We’ve been sending them back.” And “We have no evidence of who they are, other than an accusation that they are drug dealers.”

Paul said, “It’s interesting that, as the boats have been exploded, and as we’ve used this deadly force, when there are survivors, we don’t try them for drug crimes or we don’t even keep them. We’ve been sending them back. So, we repatriated, last week, somebody to Colombia and somebody to Ecuador. So, you would think that, when there are survivors, that they would be tried for a drug crime.”

He continued, “You would think we would be hearing evidence that they’re collecting drugs that are floating around in the water afterwards. You would think we’d hear evidence that the people were armed. So, we don’t know their names. We have no evidence of who they are, other than an accusation that they are drug dealers. But we also, in our country, haven’t typically just killed people because we accuse them of being a drug dealer.”

Keep reading

Sen. Rand Paul Slams Strikes on Boats in Caribbean as ‘Extrajudicial Killings’

Senator Rand Paul blasted President Donald Trump’s strikes on alleged drug traffickers as unconstitutional and illegal. 

“A briefing is not enough to overcome the Constitution. The Constitution says that when you go to war, Congress has to vote on it. … The drug war, or the crime war, has typically been dealt with through law enforcement,” Paul said on Fox News Sunday. “And so far they have alleged that these people are drug dealers … and we’ve had no evidence presented. So at this point we would call them extrajudicial killings.” 

So far, the Department of War has bombed ten boats it claims are smuggling narcotics into the US. Nine of the strikes have been on vessels in the Caribbean, against alleged cartels linked to Venezuela. The White House has not provided evidence that the ships were carrying drugs. 

“So far, they have alleged that these people are drug dealers. No one said their name. No one said what evidence. No one said whether they’re armed. And we’ve had no evidence presented,” Paul said.

One survivor of a strike was released by Ecuador, finding he was not engaged in wrongdoing when the boat was attacked. One family member said a victim of a US strike was a fisherman, and not working for a cartel. 

Trump has discussed expanding the strikes into Venezuela and has given the CIA approval to conduct lethal operations against cartels. Secretary of State Marco Rubio claims that Venezuelan President Maduro is the leader of a cartel designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. 

If Trump elects to expand the war, he told reporters that he will brief Congress on the plans. He went on to say he did not have to discuss the matter with the Legislator and has not sought a Declaration of War. 

The Constitution explicitly grants Congress the authority to Declare War. However, the principle of preventing the President from unilaterally declaring war has been eroded over time. Congress has not declared war since World War 2 II. The last Authorization for Use of Military Force was passed in 2002 for the Iraq War. 

Keep reading

Taking the Constitution Seriously

Last week, the President of the United States did not take the Constitution seriously. He ordered the murders of 11 people who were riding in a speedboat in the Caribbean Sea around 1,300 miles from the U.S.

Afterward he said he did so because he believed that they were members of a “narco-terrorist gang” and were delivering illegal drugs to America. He also did so, he said, as a “message” to other drug dealers who should fear a similar fate.

The boat had no ability to reach the U.S. According to the former head of drug interdiction for the Department of Justice, this so-called boat gang is not known for trafficking in illegal drugs. The crimes that the president said these folks committed did not occur in the U.S., and if they had, do not permit the imposition of the death penalty.

He offered no evidence to support his claims and didn’t even suggest that the riders in the boat posed a threat to the American military personnel who killed them. He couldn’t say if anyone in the boat was an American.

When he was asked for the legal authority for these killings, President Donald Trump replied that these folks were waging war on the U.S., and, because he is the president of the United States, he can do as he wishes to them.

These are constitutionally ignorant, morally repugnant, profoundly erroneous responses from a person who has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution.

Here is the backstory.

When British monarchs wanted to dispose of inconvenient adversaries, they often accused them of vague crimes because they were able to define the crime however they saw fit. St. Thomas More, Henry VIII’s former Lord Chancellor, was executed for his silence. The monarch’s target was given a quick trial and then often a slow and excruciating public death – to send a message.

Mindful of the tyrannical impulses of monarchs and familiar with British history, even personally aware of folks in the colonies charged with crimes in London — where they had never been — and transported there for prosecution, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the Founding Fathers most responsible for crystallizing the American ethos of natural rights and due process, crafted founding documents that articulated condemnations and prohibitions of tyranny and tyrannical behavior here.

Thus, Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence characterize human rights as the gift of the Creator, which cannot be taken away by executive decree or legislative enactment – ut only by a jury verdict.

And Madison’s words in the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment declare that “no person shall be… deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” The use of the word “person” makes it obvious that due process applies to all human beings.

Due process requires a fair jury trial, with counsel and the opportunity for confrontation of witnesses and evidence produced by the government. It also requires proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty to a neutral jury, not to the accuser. And it requires conviction prior to the imposition of a legislatively prescribed penalty.

This was novel and radical in 1791, when the Bill of Rights was ratified, but it is neither novel nor radical today. Today, due process is the foundation of American law. It is what lawyers call black-letter law: Those in government are expected to know it and understand it and abide by it.

Until now.

Keep reading

Trump Calls His Drone Strike on an Alleged Drug Boat ‘Self-Defense.’ It Looks More Like Murder.

Last week, President Donald Trump ordered a drone strike that sank a speedboat in the Caribbean Sea, killing all 11 people on board. Trump described the targets as members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua who were “at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States.” Although the men could have been intercepted and arrested, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters, the president decided their summary execution was appropriate as a deterrent to drug trafficking.

On Wednesday, The New York Times, citing unnamed “American officials familiar with the matter,” reported that the boat “appeared to have turned around before the attack started because the people onboard had apparently spotted a military aircraft stalking it.” That detail further complicates the already dubious legal and moral rationales for this unprecedented use of the U.S. military to kill criminal suspects.

The attack “crossed a fundamental line the Department of Defense has been resolutely committed to upholding for many decades—namely, that (except in rare and extreme circumstances not present here) the military must not use lethal force against civilians, even if they are alleged, or even known, to be violating the law,” Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman notes in a Just Security essay. Lederman adds that the September 2 drone strike “appears to have violated” the executive order prohibiting assassination and arguably qualifies as murder under federal law and the Uniform Code of Criminal Justice.

New York University law professor Ryan Goodman, a former Defense Department lawyer, agrees. “It’s difficult to imagine how any lawyers inside the Pentagon could have arrived at a conclusion that this was legal,” he told the Times last week, “rather than the very definition of murder under international law rules that the Defense Department has long accepted.”

As Trump told it, the attack was justified because Tren de Aragua is “a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, operating under the control of [Venezuelan President] Nicolas Maduro, responsible for mass murder, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence and terror across the United States and Western Hemisphere.” He said the strike was meant to “serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America.”

Drug cartels have “wrought devastating consequences on American communities for decades, causing the deaths of tens of thousands of United States citizens each year and threatening our national security and foreign policy interests both at home and abroad,” Trump said in a September 4 letter to Congress. “We have now reached a critical point where we must meet this threat to our citizens and our most vital national interests with United States military force in self-defense.”

U.S. forces therefore “struck a vessel” that “was assessed to be affiliated with a designated terrorist organization and to be engaged in illicit drug trafficking activities,” Trump explained. “I directed these actions consistent with my responsibility to protect Americans and United States interests abroad and in furtherance of United States national security and foreign policy interests, pursuant to my constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive to conduct United States foreign relations.”

Trump says the men whose deaths he ordered were “assessed” to be affiliated with Tren de Aragua. They also were “assessed” to be engaged in drug trafficking. Without knowing the basis for those assessments, we cannot say how accurate they were. Last week, Trump joked about the potential for deadly errors: “I think anybody that saw that is going to say, ‘I’ll take a pass.’ I don’t even know about fishermen. They may say, ‘I’m not getting on the boat. I’m not going to take a chance.'” Conveniently for Trump, summary execution avoids any need to present evidence, let alone meet the requirements of due process.

“Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military,” Vice President J.D. Vance declared in an X post on Saturday. When a commenter observed that “killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime,” Vance replied, “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”

That was too much for Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.). “Did he ever read To Kill a Mockingbird?” Paul wondered. “Did he ever wonder what might happen if the accused were immediately executed without trial or representation? What a despicable and thoughtless sentiment it is to glorify killing someone without a trial.”

Keep reading

The Problem With Pete Buttigieg’s ‘Due Process’ Sermon

Former small city Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who left quite a mess for his successor at the Transportation Department, surprised many political observers recently by bowing out of both major 2026 statewide races in Michigan. He was widely expected to run for governor or United States Senate in his brand new ‘home’ state, which was seemingly selected because he determined that voters in his actual home state were too conservative to accommodate his ambitions.  For him to move to bluer pastures, only to sidestep a pair of big opportunities, fueled new speculation that he once again has his eyes set on a larger prize.  Being the chief executive of an upper Midwest state, or one of its Senators, is apparently insufficiently small potatoes for the ex-mayor, turned failed DNC chair candidate, turned failed presidential candidate, turned part-time Transportation Secretary and full-time Democratic pundit.  

Buttigieg, who has cultivated a new, edgier algorithmic identity, has grown a beard and spiced up his signature consultant syntax with some profanity (like many Democrats these days), appears to be revving up for another shot at the presidency.  This week, he found himself in — surprise! — Iowa, where he drew applause from a partisan audience for this little sermon about due process and the rule of law.

Let me first acknowledge that he’s of course correct that no single man or politician can simply declare someone else to be a criminal.  We thankfully do have a system that rightly requires due process.  But the case to which he’s referring, that of “Maryland Father” Kilmar Abrego Garcia, isn’t about anyone’s politicized say-so.  I’ll also concede, as I have previously, that the Trump administration should not have deported Garcia to El Salvador specifically, under a standing judicial order.  The administration even admitted this error in court documents.  To rectify the mistake, I think Garcia should be returned to the US, processed, and immediately deported elsewhere.  And that’s not because President Trump, or any other individual, simply decided and asserted that Garcia is a criminal.  He is a criminal, as has been adjudicated on multiple levels, by multiple judges.  

Keep reading

Why So Many Americans Reject Legal Due Process in the Age of Covid

The policy response to the covid panic of 2020 in the United States was one of the most widespread direct attacks on fundamental human rights in decades. Overnight—and without any deliberation, debate, or checks and balances—millions of Americans were denied their basic rights to seek employment, to freely assemble, and to engage in religious practices.

Business and churches were closed, and countless Americans were ordered to stay in their homes and abandon their sources of income.

This was all done with no legal process other than the issuance of edicts from a tiny handful of politicians, usually executives such as state governors and city mayors.

Those who pressed for lockdowns and the effective confiscation of property—for that’s what a forced business closure actually is—denied that any sort of due process or “checks and balances” were necessary.

Rather, the lockdown advocates insisted that the public instead embrace unreservedly the “recommendations” of experts in government offices, who insisted that coerced lockdowns and business closures were the only reasonable response to the assumed threat of covid-19. Were one to suggest in mixed company that businesses ought to be afforded a hearing before being forcibly closed—or that an individual ought to receive some sort of due process before being deemed a “nonessential” worker—this was likely to elicit scoffing and contempt.

There’s no room for due process anymore, the official narrative tells us.

This new turn toward obedience to expert-fueled executive power didn’t appear from nowhere. Rather it is, in part, a manifestation of a long ideological process that has gradually replaced respect for legal checks and balances and due process with a deference to scientific experts. These experts, it is alleged, must not be subject to the slow and inefficient process of legal constraints on state power.

Keep reading

Biden Picks Catherine Lhamon, Enemy of Campus Due Process, To Head Civil Rights Office in Education Dept.

The White House announced today that President Biden will nominate Catherine Lhamon to serve as the Department of Education’s Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights — the same position from which she oversaw efforts to undermine the due process rights of students accused of sexual misconduct during the Obama administration.

Under Lhamon’s leadership, the Office for Civil Rights enforced guidance that gutted due process protections and violated the First Amendment. Lhamon used that guidance to pressure institutions to restrict constitutionally protected speech and disregard basic procedural protections in campus disciplinary hearings.

By putting forward Lhamon for this crucial role, President Biden has signaled that he would rather colleges go back to old, failed policies — policies that have earned rebukes from dozens and dozens of courts to date — than pursue Title IX policies that take the rights of all students into account.

Keep reading

REPUBLICANS JOIN DEMOCRATS TO PUSH FEDERAL GUN CONFISCATION BILL BY PAYING STATES TO ACCEPT IT

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) has introduced S.292 — Extreme Risk Protection Order and Violence Prevention Act of 2021, and he has garnered support from the gun-grabbing Democrats and Republicans alike. On Wednesday, this latest Red Flag gun confiscation bill, gets a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which includes notorious gun grabbers like Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Dick Durbin (D-IL).

Unlike red flag legislation on which TFTP has reported in the past which involve state laws, S.292 will apply to all states and Indian Tribes. Under the guise of a “grant program” the bill will bribe states to enact the most comprehensive red flag law we’ve ever seen.

The Assistant Attorney General shall make grants to an eligible State or Indian Tribe to assist the State or Indian Tribe in carrying out the provisions of a qualifying State or Tribal law.

S.292 is described as a bill:

To provide family members of an individual who they fear is a danger to himself, herself, or others, or law enforcement, with new tools to prevent gun violence.

However, as the Free Thought Project has reported in the past, these “tools” have failed repeatedly and pave the way for rampant abuse. Naturally, the “fact checkers” have already taken to defending the bill, claiming that it doesn’t remove due process.

However, citizens who are targeted by these laws will be deemed guilty first, and only after their guns are taken will they have a chance to defend themselves in court. This is de facto removal of due process.

Keep reading