How Trump suck-up Marco Rubio became an international criminal

On Tuesday, the U.S. military killed 11 unidentified people on a small boat traveling in the Caribbean Sea. The assertion from the Trump administration is that those 11 people were attempting to smuggle drugs from Venezuela into the United States; there has been no evidence released so far to prove that assertion, but the world has already seen evidence that officials in the Trump administration lied outright when it asserted that random immigrants picked up off American streets and renditioned to a notorious El Salvadorian prison were supposed "terrorists" and "gang members."

The fascist American administration has proven willing to manufacture false evidence to backstop its illegal actions before, with even Donald Trump himself boosting an obviously faked photograph to claim one particular immigrant supposedly had "MS-13" tattooed on his hand. It remains to be seen whether the "evidence" of this new alleged almost-crime is any less shoddy.

But it also doesn't matter, because drug smuggling is not a capital crime, international waters are not a courtroom, and the U.S. military is not dystopian comic book antihero Judge Dredd—though Trump himself is attempting to change that. What took place was unequivocally a mass murder, and it was Trump Secretary of State Marco Rubio who clarified that.

U.S. forces could have stopped the boat that officials say was carrying illegal drugs from Venezuela to the United States on Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, but President Donald Trump chose instead to destroy it, killing 11 people on board, to send a deterrent message to traffickers.

“Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, we blew it up — and it’ll happen again,” Rubio told reporters Wednesday in Mexico City.

U.S. forces launched a “precision strike” on the vessel as it traveled through the Caribbean Sea, U.S. officials said. When asked if they warned the crew, Rubio said the vessel, like others carrying drugs, posed an “immediate threat to the United States,” giving the country the right to destroy it.

In revealing that the U.S. military could have interdicted the tiny boat and arrested the alleged smugglers but that they instead "blew it up" "on the president's orders," Rubio appears to have confirmed that Trump himself gave an illegal order and that both Rubio and the military carried it out. There is very little room to argue that the summary execution of civilians on the high seas is not a criminal act, whether in wartime or in peace, and the assertion that it was an unnecessary act performed solely to mollify a Dear Leader who demanded it removes what little wiggle room the military might have had left.

Nope, Rubio was clear: The United States military could have course intercepted the boat, but instead gave the crew no warning or opportunity to surrender because the presidential order was for summary execution. That the execution was meant to be a "deterrent" to people not actually on the boat nudges the act closer to terrorism than military or law enforcement act.

There is one very good reason why that is not a war crime: We are not at war. It is just a regular crime, carried out by a dementia-addled madman and his group of forever-groveling sedition-backing sycophants.

But the trafficking of an illegal consumer product is not a capital offense, and Congress has not authorized armed conflict against cartels.

That raises the question of whether Mr. Trump has legitimate authority to tell the military to summarily kill people it suspects are smuggling drugs — and whether the administration allowed career military lawyers to weigh in.

“It’s difficult to imagine how any lawyers inside the Pentagon could have arrived at a conclusion that this was legal rather than the very definition of murder under international law rules that the Defense Department has long accepted,” said Ryan Goodman, a New York University law professor who worked as a Pentagon lawyer in 2015 and 2016.

The first attempt to legally justify the executions was also squeaked out by Rubio, who asserted that the boat posed an "immediate threat to the United States." The world community is supposed to believe that U.S. national security is so jeopardized by eleven unidentified people on a boat that interdiction attempts were unnecessary.

We do not, in fact, even know if the idiot-infested administration even properly identified the boat they blew up. Experts have questioned why an alleged drug smuggling boat would be packed with 11 people rather than the usual minimal crew.

some officials at the Defense Department privately expressed concern on Wednesday about the administration’s shifting narratives, including where the vessel was headed. Mr. Rubio had said on Tuesday that it was going to Trinidad, while Mr. Trump said the United States. On Wednesday, Mr. Rubio changed his version, saying the drug-laden boat was bound for the United States. [...]

The former official, who has years of direct experience in fighting drug cartels, raised several other questions about the attack on the fast boat.

First, the former official said, Tren de Aragua was not known for handling large shipments of cocaine or fentanyl. Instead it was known to focus on smuggling what is known as pink cocaine — a psychedelic substance that is generally made by combining ketamine and MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy, a stimulant that can cause hallucinations.

The former official also said it was unusual to have 11 people manning a vessel that could easily be crewed by two or three, especially since traffickers are always trying to maximize the amount of cargo space devoted to carrying drugs, not human beings.

In the former official’s opinion, it was more likely that the vessel was carrying migrants on a human smuggling run. It would be impossible to know for sure, however, given that any evidence of drug smuggling was destroyed in the attack.

So it may have been cartel members headed to the United States to deliver a shipment of an illegal drug cocktail that has become increasingly popular in Silicon Valley techbro circles, and the group might have also looked to field a community baseball team after their cargo had been delivered, or it might have been a group of refugees headed to Trinidad with their only belongings.

Marco Rubio and the others are not entirely clear on the details. But, they assure the world, the boat was too dangerous and the need for sending a message of "deterrence" to world cartels too great to have seized the boat and investigated.

The reason for all of this was evident from the moment it happened. Trump has long demanded the right to murder people, and he no longer has anyone in his administration who believes our laws ought to block him from doing it.

Trump has been loud, over the years, in his insistence that the government should summarily execute accused drug dealers without trial. (In 1989 he similarly and infamously insisted on the death penalty for the supposed "Central Park 5," a group of teens who were later proven to have been innocent of the crime they were accused of—the man has long believed himself the decider of who should live and who should die.) During his first term, Trump shocked world observers by publicly backing not just the death penalty for dealers, but Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte's murderous program of street executions targeting supposed "dealers."

Duterte killed tens of thousands, often without evidence, and as a result is currently awaiting trial in The Hague for crimes against humanity. Trump, however, remains undeterred in his own commitment to similar summary executions. Tuesday's attack on a small power boat can best be understood as the United States' first such act.

It will also likely result in Marco Rubio being indicted by world courts, just as Duterte was. Rubio's public assertion that the killing was mandated by Trump policy whether the boat's crew wished to surrender or not places him in a similar position, and Rubio's assertion that it will "happen again" proves any such pattern to be premeditated. Trump's confidants are, with the help of a U.S. military chain of command now proven willing to follow illegal orders, engaging in a new campaign of international assassinations based on no position other than an already-criminal Dear Leader wanting to feel pleasure in his alleged right to kill civilians he deems unworthy of the rule of law.

It also likely marks the start of a similar campaign against U.S. citizens themselves—if, among the 11 unknown deceased, it has not already.

I don't think any of us can be surprised that Donald Trump so desperately wants to commit murders for pleasure. It is what makes up the man; he has spent his entire life in a constant state of rage over the supposed indignity of having to follow the same laws as everyone else, and his obsessive admiration of world dictators stems directly from his own desire to be set above the law, accountable to no one, able to steal or even kill without consequence. He has fantasized about it constantly, in public speeches.

The effortlessness with which Trump can convert any two-bit toady into the worst version of themselves, though—that still remains surprising. It is almost a superpower. I cannot imagine the Marco Rubio of ten years ago belligerently sneering his way through an admission of extrajudicial killings for Dear Leader's sake.

Maybe that is on me, and this hollow shell of a man had been itching to become an international criminal that whole time. Or maybe it is on him, for wanting a ceremonial position in a seditious, criminal-packed administration so badly that he willingly scooped out what remained of his brain for it.

It does not matter whether this small boat in the Caribbean was "drug smuggling." The United States military does not murder people for that. A burping nitwit staggering through the Oval Office declaring them "terrorists" does not validate it.

Even if the boat was carrying enough ketamine and psychedelics to keep Elon Musk spinning for a month, that is still neither "terrorism" nor a death penalty crime. It was just murder.

Marco Rubio, the soulless husk that he is, promises it is just the beginning. He was once somebody, you know. He was once only power-hungry and pathetic but not, to any of our knowledge, a gleeful serial murderer for the sake of pleasing a dementia-riddled has-been human shitstain.

But we all change, and some of us change more than others.