Trump's Drug Boat Drone Strike Shows How 'Terrorism' Makes Everyone Killable

The logic of the war on terror means infinitely expandable government power.

Vice President J.D. Vance was almost incredulous when a reporter asked him what "legal authority" the Trump administration used to blow up an alleged drug boat off the coast of Venezuela with a drone on Tuesday. "There are people who are bringing—literal terrorists—who are bringing deadly drugs into our country," Vance said. 

Why are they "literal terrorists"? Because the administration said so. President Donald Trump declared just after taking office that he would be designating drug cartels as terrorist organizations. One of them was Tren de Aragua, the organization accused of sending out the drug boat. (The administration tends to play fast and loose with labeling things Tren de Aragua; for all its criminal activities, the gang is not known to smuggle cocaine.) After the drone strike, multiple cabinet officials made sure to use the phrase "narco-terrorist organization."

What is a terrorist? According to U.S. law, it's any "subnational groups" or "clandestine agents" who use "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets." Of course, that can describe almost any rebel group, including ones that the U.S. backs, or almost any intelligence agency, including ones in the U.S. government. In practice, that means that a "terrorist" is whoever the executive branch decides to label one.

We need the power to kill the terrorists. Who are the terrorists? The people we need the power to kill. This circular logic is the basis for forever war. It can justify almost anything the government wants to do to anyone, far beyond the threats that first justified the counterterrorist measures. Legal authorities that were born out of the Oklahoma City bombing and matured during the long war against Al Qaeda are now being used to blow up suspicious boats in the Caribbean.

"[A] terrorist act is violence carried out by a terrorist. Conversely, if someone is killed, it is because they are a terrorist, because to be a terrorist means to be killable. This circularity of the definition allows the designation to justify violence against entire populations both ex-ante and ex-post," wrote journalist Jake Romm in an essay aptly titled, "Your Death Will Serve as Its Own Justification."

These authorities took many presidents to build. The term "narco-terrorism" was popularized during Plan Colombia, a U.S.-backed campaign against Colombian communist rebels during the Clinton and Bush administrations. The Bush administration, of course, also declared a "global war on terror" after the attacks by Al Qaeda on September 11, 2001, arguing that more or less anything goes in an emergency.

The Obama administration turned the extraordinary into the ordinary, running a drone assassination campaign that was out of sight, out of mind for the public. The administration chose the targets—including a teenage American citizen—through a completely secret process. Bilal Abdul Kareem, an American journalist who survived five airstrikes in Syria, found out in 2019 that it was legally impossible to challenge the "kill list" or even find out if he was on it.

In response to Abdul Kareem's lawsuit, the government's lawyers kept insisting to an increasingly frustrated Judge Rosemary Collyer that they could not "confirm or deny" whether their client was trying to kill Abdul Kareem. "If the government says we can't confirm or deny the underlying facts to prove his standing, well then all we're left with is the complaint," Collyer sighed. In the end, she allowed the state secrets privilege to triumph.

"The government explains that disclosure of whether an individual is being targeted for lethal action would permit that individual to alter his behavior to evade attack or capture and could risk intelligence sources and methods if an individual learns he is under surveillance," Collyer wrote.

In other words, even trying not to be killed is an action that could harm the war on terror. You're not allowed to know whether the government is trying to kill you, so you can't prove that the government is trying to kill you, so you have no way to oppose the government trying to kill you. A "terrorist" is guilty until proven innocent, which is impossible by design.

Trump pushed the boundaries of what can be labeled terrorism. In 2019, the first Trump administration designated a branch of the Iranian military a "foreign terrorist organization," the first time that law was ever used against a foreign government body. "Iran's actions are fundamentally different from those of other governments," the White House declared. Our terrorism is covert activity; their covert activity is terrorism.

Both the Trump and Biden administrations used that designation to seize Iranian oil tankers, because that oil was now terrorist oil. And declaring part of the Iranian government terrorists helped justify war with Iran politically, without going to Congress. The terrorist designation for Tren de Aragua seems to be another attempt to do that. Despite statements to the contrary from his own intelligence officers, Trump declared that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro runs Tren de Aragua from behind the scenes.

Amidst the military buildup in the Caribbean Sea, the administration has issued a $50 million bounty for Maduro's capture. Should the White House decide to wage a regime change war, all the pieces are already in place, without any need for public debate. Overthrowing the Venezuelan government (and more importantly, imposing a new one) would be a natural extension of this new campaign against "narco-terrorism."

A terrorist can be anyone the White House declares: an American journalist, a suspected drug smuggler, or another government. The only requirement seems to be that the terrorist is located outside of U.S. soil. President Barack Obama insisted that the government should never "deploy armed drones over U.S. soil," while he justified killing American citizens without trial, in secret, as a necessary battlefield tactic. Yet why couldn't the battlefield be America itself, if the situation called for it? Who would be able to question the President's judgment?

Deploying uniformed troops against street crime, flying (unarmed) Predator drones over protesters, blowing up suspected smugglers instead of arresting them—these images are breaking down the political distinction between the "battlefield" and the "homefront." Last week, U.S. Border Patrol agents were photographed training with mortars during live-fire exercises in Alaska. Since when do American police need artillery?

These measures alone would have been dismissed as paranoid fantasies twenty or thirty years ago. State power is built piece by piece. It starts with measures against unpopular enemies. (Al Qaeda and organized crime gangs are a genuine menace to society, after all.) People trust that it will only be used carefully. But when you outsource your judgment to an absolute ruler, you no longer get to choose how far he goes.