The United States has executed 21 people over the last month in targeted drone strikes off the coast of Venezuela. The Trump administration has so far authorized at least four strikes against people it claims are suspected “narco-terrorists.”

The strikes mark a dark shift in the administration’s approach to what it’s framing as an international drug war — one it’s waging without congressional oversight.

“There actually could be more strikes,” says Intercept senior reporter Nick Turse. This week on The Intercept Briefing, Turse joins host Akela Lacy and investigative journalist Radley Balko to discuss how the administration is laying the groundwork to justify extrajudicial killings abroad and possibly at home.

The Trump administration’s claims that it’s going after high-level drug kingpins don’t hold water, Turse says. “Trump is killing civilians because he ‘suspects’ that they’re smuggling drugs. Experts that I talk to say this is illegal. Former government lawyers, experts on the laws of war, they say it’s outright murder.”

Trump has repeated claims, without evidence, that a combination of immigration and drug trafficking is driving crime in the United States. It’s part of a story Trump has crafted: The U.S. and the international community are under siege, and it’s his job to stop it — whether by executing fishermen or deploying the National Guard on his own people. And while the latest turn toward extrajudicial killings is cause for alarm, it’s also more of the same, says Radley Balko, an investigative journalist who has covered the drug war for two decades and host of the new Intercept podcast, Collateral Damage.

“The notion of collateral damage is just that: this very idea that, when you’re in war, there are some who can be sacrificed because we have this greater cause that we have to win or this threat we have to overcome. And these people that are being killed in these incidents, they’re collateral damage from the perspective of the U.S. government because Trump clearly doesn’t care,” Balko says.

“There are a lot of parallels between what Trump is doing with immigration now and what we saw during the 1980s with the drug war. There was an effort to bring the military in,” Balko says. “This idea that Reagan declared illicit drugs a national security threat — just like Trump has done with immigration, with migrants — this idea that we’re facing this threat that is so existential and so dangerous that we have to take these extraconstitutional measures, this is a playbook that we’ve seen before. It’s a playbook we saw with drugs. It’s the same thing we’re seeing now with immigration.”

Turse adds, “Since 9/11, U.S. counter-terrorism operations have consistently eroded respect for international law, and it’s left Americans pretty much inured to the idea of targeted killings by U.S. forces from Afghanistan to Somalia. And I’m not sure that people see a difference between what’s been done for the last almost quarter-century as part of the war on terror and what we’re seeing today.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy.

The United States military attacked another boat in international waters near Venezuela, according to an announcement by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth late last week. It’s the fourth reported strike the Trump administration has authorized against alleged narco-traffickers.

Donald Trump: Combatting this sinister enemy, we have to put the traffickers and cartels on notice, and we’ve done that. And we’ve put them — a lot of them, we’ve called them a terrorist organization, which is actually a big thing to do.

DT: In recent weeks the Navy has supported our mission to blow the cartel terrorists the hell out of the water. You see that?

AL: Through these extrajudicial actions, reminiscent of the U.S.’s covert drone war, the U.S. government has killed at least 21 people. The latest escalations represent a remarkable and illegal turn in U.S. drug war policies. One in which, without evidence and due process, suspects are now simply executed.

Reporter: Are you preparing to take strikes against drug gangs in Venezuela, sir?

DT: Well see what happens with Venezuela. Venezuela has been very dangerous with drugs and with other things.

AL: Trump is not just rewriting the rules of the drug war, he’s shredding the Constitution’s most fundamental principle: the requirement that Congress, not the president, has the power to declare war.

DT: I’ve also designated multiple savage drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations along with two bloodthirsty transnational gangs…

AL: Meanwhile, over the last nine months the Trump administration has used that same rhetoric to unleash federal agents — donned in full tactical gear — on the American public to push its mass deportation agenda. And he has deployed roughly 35,000 troops across the country to support that effort.

How did we get here? Well, over the last half-century the U.S. has been fighting the so-called war on drugs that built the machinery and the legal protections for militarized police we’re now seeing the Trump administration deploy both internationally and in communities across the country.

A new podcast series from The Intercept, out this week, called Collateral Damage examines the enduring ripple effects of the war on drugs, and the devastating consequences of the bipartisan effort to build a massive war machine aimed at the public. One that is now in the hands of Donald Trump.

Joining me now is the creator and the host of the show Radley Balko, an investigative journalist who has been covering the war on drugs for more than 20 years.

Welcome back to the show, Radley.

Radley Balko: Thank you. Good to be here.

AL: We’re also joined by Intercept senior reporter Nick Turse who has been covering the Trump administration’s lethal strikes of alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and the deployment of U.S. troops across the country.

Nick, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Nick Turse: It’s great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

AL: And just a note, we’re speaking on Wednesday, October 10

Radley, we’ll start with you. The U.S. military strikes of alleged drug boats in the Caribbean that began in September appear to be the first actual formation of the Trump administration’s approach to fighting the “war on drugs.” How far of a departure are Trump’s actions when it comes to these strikes and his posture towards Venezuela compared to how the U.S. has traditionally waged its war on drugs?

RB: There are some common themes from previous foreign policy drug endeavors. The Coast Guard has long intercepted boats in international waters that they suspect of drug trafficking.

One of the episodes of Collateral Damage, of the podcast that we focus on the case of a Christian missionary and her daughter who were in a plane over Peru. The Peruvian air force in conjunction with CIA contractors shot down this plane, but they’d been doing this for years with Peru and other Latin American countries.

In this case it made international news and we had congressional hearings because the people on board were white missionaries from Michigan. But this idea of extrajudicial executions, when we’re talking about overseas anti-drug operations, that part isn’t so new. I guess in this case, it’s not Venezuela sinking these boats with the assistance of the CIA outside of Venezuela waters.

This is the U.S. military acting on its own without any input, in fact, over the vocal opposition of the country where these people are from. It’s definitely a departure. There are some common themes, but it’s definitely taking everything to a whole new level in terms of executive power and acting with impunity.

AL: Nick, let’s back up just a little bit. Can you tell us more about the strikes in the Caribbean? What do we know about the people on board and what was being transported on these boats?

NT: So the United States has carried out, as you said, at least four attacks on alleged drug carrying boats in the Caribbean in recent weeks with at least two of the vessels originating from Venezuela. There actually could be more strikes. President Trump seemed to suggest this over the weekend, but notably, the Pentagon refuses to give me a total number. It’s one of the many details they’ve tried to keep secret and I’ve been working to expose.

To be clear, these are drone strikes. They’re conducted by elite U.S. commandos. And they’re targeting supposed drug boats. The president often says that they’re carrying fentanyl. That’s likely not the case. If there are drugs on these boats. And these are the types of vessels that used to be interdicted by the Coast Guard. Our self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the fourth strike last week saying that “four male narco terrorists” — that’s a quote — were killed. But he offered no other details on exactly who they were.

And our colleague Matt Sledge actually dug into this question: Who’s on these boats? And he found that the crews of these types of drug smuggling vessels were in the words of one federal judge, “completely unsophisticated, desperately poor fishermen or peasants” who he said are recruited into the drug trade.

The prison sentences back that assessment. Since 2018, such smugglers received on average an eight-year prison sentence. So we’re obviously not talking about drug kingpins here. The difference now is that instead of eight years of prison, the sentence is death.

RB: This idea of going after very low ranking people in these organizations is also not at all uncommon. I actually talked to a federal public defender — or contract public defender a couple months ago — who’s been doing this work since the eighties, early eighties. She told me she had many, many, many clients, more than she could count, who were people who basically [were] cleaning staff or janitors in Columbia where U.S. agents — DEA [and] other U.S. officials — had gone and arrested them in their home countries, extradited them into the U.S., [and]........

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