"We have a word for that — a word for the premeditated killing of people. That word is murder.”
Trump Administration Conjures Up New ‘Terrorist’ Designation to Justify Killing Civilians
The U.S. military justified the slaughter of alleged drug traffickers by claiming links to "designated terrorist organizations."
By Nick Turse/The Intercept
October 1 2025, 4:03 PM EDT
Since beginning its lethal attacks on boats in the Caribbean last month, the Trump administration has faced a difficult question: How can the U.S. justify drone strikes against non-combatants?
In a briefing on Capitol Hill last week, the U.S. military offered up new explanations, relying on Article 2 of the constitution and hinging on the claim the suspected drug traffickers are affiliated with “designated terrorist organizations,” or DTOs, according to three sources familiar with the meeting.
The vague phrase – which has previously appeared in government publications but lacks a clear definition – was used in Trump’s two-page War Powers letter to Congress following the first boat strike on September 2 and one of Trump’s TruthSocial posts. A defense official, who did not attend the briefing and spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity, called the label “meaningless.”
Unlike at a previous briefing that excluded senior staff from House leadership and relevant committees, the military sent judge advocates general (JAGs) to last week’s briefing, ostensibly to explain the legal underpinnings of the attacks. The sources familiar with the meeting said that Congressional staffers left the Thursday gathering without answers. Military briefers repeatedly referenced a secret directive that the staffers involved have never seen, according to the government officials. The directive, reportedly signed by Trump in July, ordered the Pentagon to use military force against some Latin American drug cartels he has labeled terrorist organizations.
Experts told The Intercept that the sweeping authority asserted by the White House opens the door to even greater authoritarian overreach at home — and the possibility that President Donald Trump could order lethal strikes on supposed enemies inside the United States.
We have a word for that — a word for the premeditated killing of people. That word is murder.”
“The U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean were unlawful killings, no matter what the Trump administration’s lawyers say after the fact. There is no recognized armed conflict that magically converts alleged criminals into combatants,” said Sarah Yager, a former senior adviser on human rights to the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Inventing new labels like ‘narco-terrorists’ or 'designated terrorist organizations’ does not create legal authority where none exists. International human rights law is what governs this situation. It clearly says that lethal force is a last resort to avert an imminent threat to life and the burden is on the government to show necessity and immediacy. The Trump administration hasn’t. Dressing this up as self-defense is wordplay, not law.”
The first announced U.S. air strike on a boat in the Caribbean took place September 2 and killed 11 people, according to the Trump administration. U.S. officials have said that boat and another vessel targeted on September 16 had set out to sea from Venezuela. Three people died in the second attack, according to President Donald Trump. The U.S. military attacked a third boat on September 19, also killing three people. In each instance, Trump stated the attacks were against narco-terrorists or members of the Tren de Aragua drug cartel on their way to the United States.
The Intercept sent the Office of the Secretary of War repeated requests for a count of all strikes on boats conducted by the United States since the campaign began. The office failed to respond or say if it knows the total number.
According to email return receipts, Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson read but did not respond to repeated requests for information on the legal justification for attacks on “designated terrorist organizations,” the definition of the term and how a group is so designated.
Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is a specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war, said that the briefers’ repeated references to “designated terrorist organizations” suggested there was an undisclosed legal opinion within the administration – possibly from the Department of Justice – that makes a case that lethal force is somehow lawful against so-called DTOs under Article 2 of the Constitution.
“That might be the construct that they are using for a justification,” Finucane said. “We don’t know because the administration has not disclosed any sort of underlying legal opinions or legal memos that might provide a basis for these strikes.”
The White House did not respond to repeated requests for information about the legal authorities underpinning the attacks.
Finucane said the strikes were “part of the administration’s general lawlessness and its outright assault on the rule of law,” drawing attention to reports of the sidelining of career lawyers at the Pentagon and the disregard for legal advice prior to adopting policy. “They are consistently doing whatever they can get away with as opposed to what is lawful,” he said.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth fired the Air Force’s and Army’s top JAGs in February to avoid “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.” The next month he commissioned his personal lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, as a Navy JAG and empowered him to help overhaul the JAG corps, reportedly pursuing changes that would encourage lawyers to approve more aggressive tactics and take a more lenient approach to those who violate the law of war. Parlatore’s prior claim to fame was successfully defending Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL accused of first-degree murder in the death of a captured ISIS
fighter as well as the attempted murder of civilians in Iraq. Distinguished former JAGs and members of Congress have repeatedly spoken out about Hegseth’s efforts to undermine the independence of military legal counsel and subvert military justice.
Last month, a high-ranking Pentagon official who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity said that the initial strike in the Caribbean was a criminal attack on civilians and tied it directly to Hegseth’s kneecapping of the JAG corps.
“The U.S. is now directly targeting civilians. Drug traffickers may be criminals but they aren’t combatants,” the War Department official said. “When Trump fired the military’s top lawyers the rest saw the writing on the wall, and instead of being a critical firebreak they are now a rubber stamp complicit in this crime.”
During an unprecedented address to top military brass on Tuesday, Hegseth railed against what he called “stupid rules of engagement.” He called it his mission to “untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country.”
The boat strikes have followed a raft of authoritarian measures by the Trump administration designed to undermine the Constitution and weaken democracy, from attacks on birthright citizenship and free speech to military occupations of cities and the use of police state tactics.
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled last month that Trump’s deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles was illegal and harkened back to Britain’s use of soldiers as law enforcement officers in colonial America. He warned that Trump intends to transform the National Guard
into a presidential police force. The administration has appealed that ruling and announced on Saturday the deployment of federal forces to Portland, Oregon.
On Tuesday, Trump followed Hegseth in addressing the military’s generals and admirals and took aim at cities he claimed “are run by the radical left Democrats,” including San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. “We’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room,” he said. “That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.”
“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military,” he continued.
Last month, Trump also signed an executive order designating antifa – a loose-knit anti-fascist movement – as a “domestic terror organization.” On Thursday, he issued a directive for his government to pursue antifa and directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to compile a list of “domestic terrorist organization[s].”
If the White House claims that it has Article 2 authority to use lethal force against anyone that the President decides is part of a DTO, that is “a sweeping authority that is extraordinarily dangerous and destabilizing,” Finucane explained. “Because there’s no articulated limiting principles, the President could simply use this prerogative to kill any people he labels as terrorists, like antifa. He could use it at home in the United States.”
While the drug epidemic in America is very real, Yager cautioned that the killing of suspected drug traffickers without due process is dangerous to democracy.
“The U.S. military is being misused domestically, patrolling American streets, and now it’s being used to carry out illegal killings beyond our borders,” said Yager.
Recent reporting by The Intercept — based on court records, a study of hundreds of federal defendants, a former prosecutor and other experts — found that crews of drug smuggling boats were, in the words of one federal judge, “completely unsophisticated, desperately poor fishermen or peasants who are recruited to participate in these matters.” Prison sentences back this up. On average since a 2018 change to sentencing laws, such smugglers received an eight-year prison sentence. Now the sentence is death — even though the profiles of smugglers on the boats struck by the U.S. military appear to closely match previous defendants.
Yager noted that since 9/11, U.S. counterterrorism operations have consistently eroded respect for international law, leaving Americans inured to the idea of targeted killings by U.S. forces from Afghanistan and Iraq to Somalia and Yemen.
“Presidents have undermined and ignored the rule of law through extrajudicial killings and by killing civilians without consequence,” she said. “But they always provided some kind of legal rationale. So, if it was the U.S. military, then the Office of General Counsel or judge advocates or a spokesperson for the secretary would come out and say, ‘We took these steps
according to international law. These were not civilians; these were combatants under this legal status.’” She noted that the Trump administration has taken this a step further, conducting lethal strikes with no legal rationale whatsoever.
Finucane similarly noted that the White House was relying on rhetorical sleight of hand to pass off its summary executions as an extension of the Forever Wars. “The Trump administration is playing up the terrorism narrative and repurposing the war on terror – the rhetoric, tools, tropes and trappings – including adding a new set of enemies: narco-terrorists from
Latin America and, domestically, immigrants and political opponents, like antifa – who have been labeled as domestic terrorists,” he explained. “But what we’re seeing now is totally different from strikes on al Qaeda fighters and affiliated groups. This is something new and dangerous.”
Finucane explained that while the War on Terror has been rightly criticized, al Qaeda and armed militant groups are still fundamentally different from the organizations that the Trump administration has now branded their equivalents. “They were capable of being in armed conflict. That is not the situation we’re dealing with here,” he told The Intercept. “There’s no organized armed group with which the U.S. is in armed conflict. And the administration really hasn’t even advanced that argument. So we have lethal force employed outside of armed conflict. We have a word for that — a word for the premeditated killing of people. That word is murder.”
In a letter to the White House following the initial boat strike, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia and two dozen fellow Democratic senators said the Trump administration has provided “no legitimate legal justification” for the strike. The senators requested answers to 10 key questions regarding the facts surrounding the attack and its supposed legal underpinnings. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., also criticized the attack.
Kaine and Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., as well as Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., have introduced measures based on the War Powers Act to curtail Trump’s ability to conduct
strikes in the Caribbean.
“In addition to the War Powers Resolutions, we need further push back from Congress. And I would like to see it on a bipartisan basis. This should not be a partisan issue,” said Finucane.
Yager echoed this and called on the international community to also do more.
“Congress has a duty to rein in the president’s unlawful use of the U.S. military,” she told The Intercept. “And other countries should be publicly calling these strikes unacceptable. Normalizing them undermines the international laws that are supposed to keep us all safe.”
The U.S. military justified the slaughter of alleged drug traffickers by claiming links to "designated terrorist organizations."
By Nick Turse/The Intercept
October 1 2025, 4:03 PM EDT
Since beginning its lethal attacks on boats in the Caribbean last month, the Trump administration has faced a difficult question: How can the U.S. justify drone strikes against non-combatants?
In a briefing on Capitol Hill last week, the U.S. military offered up new explanations, relying on Article 2 of the constitution and hinging on the claim the suspected drug traffickers are affiliated with “designated terrorist organizations,” or DTOs, according to three sources familiar with the meeting.
The vague phrase – which has previously appeared in government publications but lacks a clear definition – was used in Trump’s two-page War Powers letter to Congress following the first boat strike on September 2 and one of Trump’s TruthSocial posts. A defense official, who did not attend the briefing and spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity, called the label “meaningless.”
Unlike at a previous briefing that excluded senior staff from House leadership and relevant committees, the military sent judge advocates general (JAGs) to last week’s briefing, ostensibly to explain the legal underpinnings of the attacks. The sources familiar with the meeting said that Congressional staffers left the Thursday gathering without answers. Military briefers repeatedly referenced a secret directive that the staffers involved have never seen, according to the government officials. The directive, reportedly signed by Trump in July, ordered the Pentagon to use military force against some Latin American drug cartels he has labeled terrorist organizations.
Experts told The Intercept that the sweeping authority asserted by the White House opens the door to even greater authoritarian overreach at home — and the possibility that President Donald Trump could order lethal strikes on supposed enemies inside the United States.
We have a word for that — a word for the premeditated killing of people. That word is murder.”
“The U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean were unlawful killings, no matter what the Trump administration’s lawyers say after the fact. There is no recognized armed conflict that magically converts alleged criminals into combatants,” said Sarah Yager, a former senior adviser on human rights to the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Inventing new labels like ‘narco-terrorists’ or 'designated terrorist organizations’ does not create legal authority where none exists. International human rights law is what governs this situation. It clearly says that lethal force is a last resort to avert an imminent threat to life and the burden is on the government to show necessity and immediacy. The Trump administration hasn’t. Dressing this up as self-defense is wordplay, not law.”
The first announced U.S. air strike on a boat in the Caribbean took place September 2 and killed 11 people, according to the Trump administration. U.S. officials have said that boat and another vessel targeted on September 16 had set out to sea from Venezuela. Three people died in the second attack, according to President Donald Trump. The U.S. military attacked a third boat on September 19, also killing three people. In each instance, Trump stated the attacks were against narco-terrorists or members of the Tren de Aragua drug cartel on their way to the United States.
The Intercept sent the Office of the Secretary of War repeated requests for a count of all strikes on boats conducted by the United States since the campaign began. The office failed to respond or say if it knows the total number.
According to email return receipts, Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson read but did not respond to repeated requests for information on the legal justification for attacks on “designated terrorist organizations,” the definition of the term and how a group is so designated.
Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is a specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war, said that the briefers’ repeated references to “designated terrorist organizations” suggested there was an undisclosed legal opinion within the administration – possibly from the Department of Justice – that makes a case that lethal force is somehow lawful against so-called DTOs under Article 2 of the Constitution.
“That might be the construct that they are using for a justification,” Finucane said. “We don’t know because the administration has not disclosed any sort of underlying legal opinions or legal memos that might provide a basis for these strikes.”
The White House did not respond to repeated requests for information about the legal authorities underpinning the attacks.
Finucane said the strikes were “part of the administration’s general lawlessness and its outright assault on the rule of law,” drawing attention to reports of the sidelining of career lawyers at the Pentagon and the disregard for legal advice prior to adopting policy. “They are consistently doing whatever they can get away with as opposed to what is lawful,” he said.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth fired the Air Force’s and Army’s top JAGs in February to avoid “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.” The next month he commissioned his personal lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, as a Navy JAG and empowered him to help overhaul the JAG corps, reportedly pursuing changes that would encourage lawyers to approve more aggressive tactics and take a more lenient approach to those who violate the law of war. Parlatore’s prior claim to fame was successfully defending Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL accused of first-degree murder in the death of a captured ISIS
fighter as well as the attempted murder of civilians in Iraq. Distinguished former JAGs and members of Congress have repeatedly spoken out about Hegseth’s efforts to undermine the independence of military legal counsel and subvert military justice.
Last month, a high-ranking Pentagon official who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity said that the initial strike in the Caribbean was a criminal attack on civilians and tied it directly to Hegseth’s kneecapping of the JAG corps.
“The U.S. is now directly targeting civilians. Drug traffickers may be criminals but they aren’t combatants,” the War Department official said. “When Trump fired the military’s top lawyers the rest saw the writing on the wall, and instead of being a critical firebreak they are now a rubber stamp complicit in this crime.”
During an unprecedented address to top military brass on Tuesday, Hegseth railed against what he called “stupid rules of engagement.” He called it his mission to “untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country.”
The boat strikes have followed a raft of authoritarian measures by the Trump administration designed to undermine the Constitution and weaken democracy, from attacks on birthright citizenship and free speech to military occupations of cities and the use of police state tactics.
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled last month that Trump’s deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles was illegal and harkened back to Britain’s use of soldiers as law enforcement officers in colonial America. He warned that Trump intends to transform the National Guard
into a presidential police force. The administration has appealed that ruling and announced on Saturday the deployment of federal forces to Portland, Oregon.
On Tuesday, Trump followed Hegseth in addressing the military’s generals and admirals and took aim at cities he claimed “are run by the radical left Democrats,” including San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. “We’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room,” he said. “That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.”
“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military,” he continued.
Last month, Trump also signed an executive order designating antifa – a loose-knit anti-fascist movement – as a “domestic terror organization.” On Thursday, he issued a directive for his government to pursue antifa and directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to compile a list of “domestic terrorist organization[s].”
If the White House claims that it has Article 2 authority to use lethal force against anyone that the President decides is part of a DTO, that is “a sweeping authority that is extraordinarily dangerous and destabilizing,” Finucane explained. “Because there’s no articulated limiting principles, the President could simply use this prerogative to kill any people he labels as terrorists, like antifa. He could use it at home in the United States.”
While the drug epidemic in America is very real, Yager cautioned that the killing of suspected drug traffickers without due process is dangerous to democracy.
“The U.S. military is being misused domestically, patrolling American streets, and now it’s being used to carry out illegal killings beyond our borders,” said Yager.
Recent reporting by The Intercept — based on court records, a study of hundreds of federal defendants, a former prosecutor and other experts — found that crews of drug smuggling boats were, in the words of one federal judge, “completely unsophisticated, desperately poor fishermen or peasants who are recruited to participate in these matters.” Prison sentences back this up. On average since a 2018 change to sentencing laws, such smugglers received an eight-year prison sentence. Now the sentence is death — even though the profiles of smugglers on the boats struck by the U.S. military appear to closely match previous defendants.
Yager noted that since 9/11, U.S. counterterrorism operations have consistently eroded respect for international law, leaving Americans inured to the idea of targeted killings by U.S. forces from Afghanistan and Iraq to Somalia and Yemen.
“Presidents have undermined and ignored the rule of law through extrajudicial killings and by killing civilians without consequence,” she said. “But they always provided some kind of legal rationale. So, if it was the U.S. military, then the Office of General Counsel or judge advocates or a spokesperson for the secretary would come out and say, ‘We took these steps
according to international law. These were not civilians; these were combatants under this legal status.’” She noted that the Trump administration has taken this a step further, conducting lethal strikes with no legal rationale whatsoever.
Finucane similarly noted that the White House was relying on rhetorical sleight of hand to pass off its summary executions as an extension of the Forever Wars. “The Trump administration is playing up the terrorism narrative and repurposing the war on terror – the rhetoric, tools, tropes and trappings – including adding a new set of enemies: narco-terrorists from
Latin America and, domestically, immigrants and political opponents, like antifa – who have been labeled as domestic terrorists,” he explained. “But what we’re seeing now is totally different from strikes on al Qaeda fighters and affiliated groups. This is something new and dangerous.”
Finucane explained that while the War on Terror has been rightly criticized, al Qaeda and armed militant groups are still fundamentally different from the organizations that the Trump administration has now branded their equivalents. “They were capable of being in armed conflict. That is not the situation we’re dealing with here,” he told The Intercept. “There’s no organized armed group with which the U.S. is in armed conflict. And the administration really hasn’t even advanced that argument. So we have lethal force employed outside of armed conflict. We have a word for that — a word for the premeditated killing of people. That word is murder.”
In a letter to the White House following the initial boat strike, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia and two dozen fellow Democratic senators said the Trump administration has provided “no legitimate legal justification” for the strike. The senators requested answers to 10 key questions regarding the facts surrounding the attack and its supposed legal underpinnings. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., also criticized the attack.
Kaine and Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., as well as Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., have introduced measures based on the War Powers Act to curtail Trump’s ability to conduct
strikes in the Caribbean.
“In addition to the War Powers Resolutions, we need further push back from Congress. And I would like to see it on a bipartisan basis. This should not be a partisan issue,” said Finucane.
Yager echoed this and called on the international community to also do more.
“Congress has a duty to rein in the president’s unlawful use of the U.S. military,” she told The Intercept. “And other countries should be publicly calling these strikes unacceptable. Normalizing them undermines the international laws that are supposed to keep us all safe.”
