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boat strikes
Amnesty Condemns US 'Murder' of 6 More People After Latest Trump Boat Bombing
"Human life cannot be left to the mercy of a president’s whim."
Mar 12, 2026
Amnesty International on Wednesday denounced this week's killing of six more people as US forces bombed another boat the Trump administration said—without evidence—was operated by narco-traffickers.
"Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations," US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) said Sunday on social media. "Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations. Six male narco-terrorists were killed during this action."
The US has bombed at least 40 vessels in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean since last September, killing at least 156 people, according to the Trump administration.
"Amnesty International strongly condemns these acts and reiterates that they constitute extrajudicial killings, a form of murder, prohibited under international law, and represent a grave affront to the most basic principles of humanity and legality," Amnesty said in a statement. "No circumstances justify the arbitrary deprivation of life."
The boat strikes were fraught from the start. In the first known attack, US forces killed nine people in an initial strike and then two men clinging to the boat's wreckage in a follow-up bombing. Legal experts have debated whether those strikes were a war crime or simply murder, and many argue that all of the boat bombings violate international law.
“The United States cannot claim the right to blow up boats with people on board based solely on suspicions of drug trafficking or other allegedly illicit activities," Amnesty International Americas director Ana Piquer said Wednesday. "The rest of the international community cannot normalize these extrajudicial killings, in which the United States military is judge and executioner."
"No president or military has the right to arbitrarily take life."
"Human life cannot be left to the mercy of a president’s whim," Piquer stressed. "No president or military has the right to arbitrarily take life. The level of dehumanization and cynicism reflected in these acts is deeply alarming and should be of global concern."
"It is urgent to demand accountability and immediately end these types of attacks," she added. "Due to the current acquiescence of the attorney general’s office, Congress must step in with its oversight power and investigate."
In addition to bombing boats—and 10 countries—President Donald Trump launched an invasion of Venezuela to abduct its president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, who are jailed in the US awaiting trial for dubious narco-trafficking charges.
Earlier this month, Trump also authorized a joint campaign with Ecuador to combat "narco-terrorists" in which US ground troops have been deployed in the Andean nation.
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Government by Monsters
The Trump administration sees the rest of humanity as disposable, as dots in a video game, as objects whose death is entertainment, so long as their own luxury and power are secure.
Mar 09, 2026
Across Iran and the Caribbean, President Donald Trump and his lickspittles delight in killing as if people were expendable scenery, not human beings with loved ones and families. Meanwhile, they ignore the death and destruction their fellow psychopath, Russian President Vladimir Putin, rains down on Ukraine every night.
India and America invite Iran to send an UNARMED ship to the Indian Ocean to participate in military exercises, and Trump and Whiskey Pete decided it would be fun to blow it out of the water, leaving over 100 sailors miles from shore, desperate for a rescue. Instead of saving them, as international law requires, we simply left them to drown.
Whiskey Pete called it “quiet death.” In fact, there was a lot of screaming and sobbing, although the bombers couldn’t hear it from 20,000 feet any more than Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth could in his drunken haze.
Just like they blew up a boat in the Caribbean and then, when two fishermen survived clinging to a piece of debris and were desperately waving for help, came back with an illegally unmarked plane and blew them into bits of blood and gristle. Another clear violation of international and American law.
Yeah, trauma. It’s what today’s Republicans love, so long as it happens to other people. It’s their drug of choice.
And then they bombed a girl’s school in Iran, killing at least 160 children, and then lied about it while also humble-bragging that “people will die” in their war of choice. As Stephen Nosferatu Miller gleefully announced after the little girls were slaughtered:
What you’re seeing right now… is a military under President Trump’s leadership that is not fighting politically correct. That isn’t fighting with its hands tied behind its back.
And Hegseth bragged:
No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically-correct wars.
When he was asked about the six American soldiers who were killed because Putin is helping Iran target Americans in the region, his reply was disgusting:
When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news. I get it. The press only wants to make the president look bad.
These are the ghouls who were delighted—thrilled—when masked Immigration enforcement thugs shot Renee Good in the face and Alex Pretti in the back; they then went on TV, giddy, and smeared them to the world. And killed dozens of people so far this year in their concentration camps while delighting in tearing children from their parents.
Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025 who’s gleefully overseen the firing of hundreds of thousands of federal workers, shattering their lives and families while throwing the American government into crisis, apparently gets an erection thinking of them crying themselves to sleep at night worrying about getting thrown out on the street with their children because they can’t pay the rent:
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down… We want to put them in trauma.
Yeah, trauma. It’s what today’s Republicans love, so long as it happens to other people. It’s their drug of choice.
Vought and Elon Musk’s massive cuts to the federal workforce to pay for tax cuts for billionaires—in this case, laying off thousands from the National Weather Service—meant that families in Michigan had virtually no warning that tornadoes were bearing down on them this past weekend; three people are now dead and a dozen more in the hospital clinging to life.
Of course they weren’t billionaires, so their lives don’t much matter, right? Like the millions who lost their health insurance when the Big Beautiful Bill redirected Affordable Care Act subsidies and Medicaid revenue to tax cuts for the morbidly rich. Or the pregnant women across red states who are dying at more than twice the rate of women in blue states because of misogynistic GOP anti-abortion laws.
Trump, Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, Miller, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, et al. think this sort of thing makes them seem “macho” and “tough.” Nearly 90% of Republican voters agree with them.
What it really does is reveal them as psychopaths, the very human embodiment of evil. If they’d been born in a different time or place, they’d be Ted Bundys or Charles Mansons and their GOP followers would be “good Germans” watching with a smile and a salute as the boxcars roll by.
When those six US service members were killed by Iranian retaliation, Trump refused to remove his $50 souvenir hat (available for sale on his website) or bow his head and shrugged, saying: “Sadly, there will likely be more… That’s the way it is.”
Those soldiers are just suckers and losers, after all; they should have had the good sense of the Trump men to complain about bone spurs or simply flee the country to avoid the draft, like Grandpa Drumpf did when Germany kicked him out for refusing to serve.
My dad’s Republican Party—Dwight D. Eisenhower’s and Mitt Romney’s and John McCain’s Republican Party—is long dead and gone, and in its place is a cult built on grievance, paranoia, white supremacy, and a love for authoritarian strongmen.
“War Secretary” Hegseth—with his Crusader cross and Dius Vult slogan tattoos—brags that they’ve “only just begun” putting “narco‑terrorists at the bottom of the ocean,” with no interest in who is actually on board the boats they’re striking. After all, they’re not white people and they’re not rich.
This isn’t the language of leaders reluctantly using force as a last resort; it’s the rhetoric of psychopaths who see the rest of humanity as disposable, as dots in a video game, as objects whose death is entertainment, so long as their own luxury and power are secure.
Elon Musk throws a quarter-billion dollars into the 2024 election to put Trump in the White House and in turn is given an opportunity to kill over a million Black and brown children on the other side of the planet by gutting US Agency for International Development. As Bill Gates noted, it was “the richest man in the world killing the poorest children.”
When a college Republican chat room devolved into a Nazi-loving, Black- and Hispanic-loathing festival of hate, conspiracy theories, and Hitler adoration last week it was just another Thursday. Like Musk giving the Nazi salute—twice—at a Trump rally.
My dad’s Republican Party—Dwight D. Eisenhower’s and Mitt Romney’s and John McCain’s Republican Party—is long dead and gone, and in its place is a cult built on grievance, paranoia, white supremacy, and a love for authoritarian strongmen including Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
They delight in death and destruction. They love the language of blood and gore. They’re monsters.
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Trump's ‘Slaughter at Sea Continues’ as US Military Kills 6 More in Eastern Pacific
"No telling what a military that engages in a monthslong killing spree outside the law might do," said one policy expert.
Mar 09, 2026
With the Trump administration's unprovoked war on Iran spiraling out of control, sending oil prices skyrocketing and leading to war crimes allegations against the US, the public's attention has largely shifted away from the White House's bombings of boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean—but the killings of six men on Sunday made clear that the administration has no intention of ending its deadly attacks on boats it claims, without providing evidence, are involved in drug trafficking.
US Southern Command said in a social media post Sunday evening that at the direction of Gen. Francis Donovan, it had struck a vessel "operated by designated terrorist organizations."
The announcement echoed previous communications about lethal boat strikes since last September, claiming that the vessel "was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations," but pointing to no evidence the US forces used to make that determination.
The bombing was the 42nd strike carried out by the Trump administration in six months, according to Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America.
The New York Times reported that at least 156 people have now been killed in the boat strikes, while Isacson placed the number at 158. He emphasized that the victims' "guilt for a noncapital crime" remains unknown.
Drug trafficking in the Latin America region has typically been treated as a criminal offense, with US law enforcement agencies sometimes working with the Coast Guard to intercept boats suspected of carrying illicit substances to the US, arresting those on board, and conviscating the drugs.
Under President Donald Trump's second administration, the Department of Defense has insisted boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific pose an imminent threat to the US and that an influx of drugs from Latin America qualifies as an attack on US soil.
The deadly bombings the Pentagon has carried out as a result have led legal experts to accuse Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others involved in the strikes of war crimes and murder.
Trump claimed to Congress in October that the US is in an "armed conflict" with drug cartels in Venezuela, but Congress has not authorized attacks on boats or inside Venezuela.
Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have introduced war powers resolutions to stop the attacks from continuing, but they have been voted down, with the vast majority of Republicans rejecting them. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) joined the GOP in voting down one of the resolutions in the Senate.
A day before the latest strike, Trump met with Latin American leaders at the "Shield of the Americans" summit in the Dominican Republic and urged them to join the United States' fight against drug cartels, calling them an "unacceptable threat to national security."
Forces from the US and Ecuador also joined in carrying out military operations against criminal organizations in the South American country last week.
Although Trump's claims that drugs are being trafficked to the US from Venezuela and that the country's government was participating in the criminal enterprise have underpinned the boat bombings, Venezuela has not been found to be a major source of drugs that arrive in the US. After invading the country in January, the president quickly pivoted to discussions on taking control of Venezuela's vast oil reserves.
Brian Finucane, senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, suggested Sunday that Trump's continued boat strikes show the White House is unlikely to be bound by international law as it continues to threaten countries in Latin America, such as Cuba, and carries out its war on Iran.
"The slaughter at sea continues," said Finucane. "No telling what a military that engages in a monthslong killing spree outside the law might do."
On Friday, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights is scheduled to hold its first-ever hearing on the legality of the US boat strikes, following a push for action from human rights groups.
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