The Trump administration looks ever more like a criminal enterprise – and now it seems to have added war crimes to its repertoire. Though even that may be too generous a description.

On Thursday, word came that the US military had launched yet another deadly strike on a small boat moving through international waters. This time the attack killed four people, bringing to at least 87 the number of people the US has killed in a series of 22 such strikes on what it says are drug boats – vessels carrying illicit narcotics in the Caribbean or eastern Pacific.

This has been happening for months, but the issue has only just drawn political heat thanks to a Washington Post investigation of the first such attack on 2 September. The paper reported that US forces hit the targeted boat once, then hit it again – the second strike killing two survivors clinging to the wreckage. According to the Post, the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, had issued a verbal command to “kill them all”.

Now that incident is under congressional scrutiny, with even some Republicans uneasy about what appears to be a clearcut case of a war crime. The defence department’s own Law of War manual forbids precisely this kind of action, spelling it out in black and white on page 448: “Members of the armed forced and other persons … who are wounded, sick or shipwrecked, shall be respected and protected in all circumstances.” Not that you should need a manual to tell you that. The law of the sea demands that you rescue those at risk of drowning; basic human decency demands that you don’t fire on them.

Trump loyalists have denied that Hegseth gave an explicit order that everyone on board be killed and have tried to argue that the two men in the water were legitimate targets because they had proved themselves to be still “in the fight”, perhaps by calling in help from fellow “narco terrorists” nearby. Democrats who have seen the same classified footage of the incident say that, on the contrary, the video shows the killing of men in distress, their vessel destroyed and posing no threat.

That would constitute........

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