Murder on the high seas points to what Trump has planned for home

Last weekend, Donald Trump ordered another summary execution of people on a fishing boat off the Venezuelan coast. The administration claims the dead were engaged in drug trafficking. Despite international outcry over the violence, Trump officials have provided no intel, no intercepted communications, no photos — no evidence whatsoever — that drugs were even onboard when the strike command was given.

It was the fourth such strike by the US in as many weeks. The ship exploded on contact, bringing the death toll to 21 people killed on mere suspicion of drug trafficking.

Trump defends the strikes as countering “narco-terrorist” members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang Trump has unilaterally designated a foreign terrorist organization.

But equipment analysis rebuts his claim, because the small fishing boats could not have reached the US mainland due to distance and fuel limitations of the vessels’ small size.

Whether they were engaged in drug trafficking or not, law-abiding nations do not kill without honoring protocol and process. The United Nations condemned the strikes because “International law does not allow governments to simply murder alleged drug traffickers.” Under international law, suspected drug traffickers should be “disrupted, investigated and prosecuted in accordance with the rule of law, including through international cooperation.” Extrajudicial killings are also forbidden under the US Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Excessive force against Americans

Instead of careful introspection in the wake of what appears to be murder on the high seas, Trump’s Secretary of “War” published snuff videos bragging about the violence, offering up raw meat for MAGA fans watching Fox News. During his recent speech to officers gathered in Quantico, Virginia, Pete Hegseth made his yearning for unrestrained “lethality” known, as he and Trump push Border Patrol, ICE and the US military to escalate barbarism at home.

Trump’s unconstitutional war of brutality against Democratic-run cities has centered on LA, Chicago, D.C., and Portland, but it is just beginning. In last week’s middle-of-the-night ICE raid on a Chicago apartment building, sleeping families were jolted awake by masked strangers suddenly in their bedrooms. Children ripped from their beds were zip-tied and thrown outside, naked and screaming. Armed federal agents in military fatigues busted down doors, pulling men, women and children from nearly every apartment in the five-story building, most of them U.S. citizens. Federal agents used flashbang grenades to burst through doors, deployed drones and helicopters, and left the building trashed.

Trump is champing at the bit to do the same and worse in Portland, Oregon, where he promised this week to send troops to attack “domestic terrorists,” authorizing the use of “Full Force, if necessary.” Trump justified the command in Portland by claiming it is necessary to protect ICE facilities, which he falsely described as “under siege from attack by Antifa and other domestic terrorists.”

Brutality without restraint

Robert Arnold, “the Poet of the South,” has recorded a hauntingly beautiful rejoinder to the Trump administration’s lust for violence. After witnessing Trump and Hegseth’s shameful speeches at Quantico, where Hegseth called for lessening the rules of conflict in favor of muscular lethality, Arnold wrote “On the silence of the generals.”

Arnold’s talk is a seven-minute review of why military restraint makes nations strong, and how discipline rather than unbridled “lethality” advances humanity through peace. Every American should watch it. Arnold observes correctly that lethality without restraint is not strategy. It is butchery. As if responding to Trump’s and Hegseth’s snuff videos, Arnold notes that even during the Civil War, “General Grant, bloody and relentless, knew victory meant binding the wounds of the nation — not gloating in violence.”

Arnold rejects Hegseth’s call for weakening the rules of conflict, and noted the silence of the generals in the room at Quantico as they listened to Hegseth and Trump debase the seriousness of combat:

“Our Generals understand war is the most consequential of human actions — their decisions carry lives in the balance. They know that raw violence is a tool only to be used with precision, justification, and the dignity of restraint. They know war has consequences that echo for generations.

Hegseth does not know this.

Hegseth mistakes slogans for wisdom, violence for professionalism, brute force for strategy. He preaches lethality like a child who’s never had to carry the ghosts from a battlefield home with him. He sees the military as a weapon to be swung, not a burden to be borne.”

Heed Arnold’s warning

Arnold’s words are haunting because they are true. The US military is the most lethal force on earth, “not because it is the most violent, but because it has chosen discipline over chaos, professionalism over cruelty.”

Arnold warns correctly that the world will backslide into barbarism if Trump doesn’t stop. He stresses our nation’s “pride in knowing that we do not wage war like a third-rate regime.” If we abandon rules under the Geneva Convention and “reduce ourselves to brutality and call it strength, then the world will follow us into the pit. Other nations will cast off restraint, and humanity will slide backwards into darkness.”

Trump and Hegseth know this. They know that murdering helpless people at sea will create permanent enemies, radicalized South Americans who hate us. Arnold points this out:

“Every officer in the room at Quantico has seen insurgencies grow of careless violence. (They’ve seen) reports that turned into viral recruitment videos for radicals. (They’ve) knelt next to cots where names were written on slips of paper and learned that nothing erases a family’s grief except truth and restraint and accountability.”

The silence of the generals at Quantico reflected the arithmetic of consequence:

“For every enemy struck without care, there are 10 who will rise in hatred, and 50 children who will remember the smoke … To adopt third world cruelty is not to become stronger. It is to become smaller than what we claim to be.”

The generals who sat quietly at Quantico did not need to say this out loud. Their silence said it for them.

• Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.