Aletho News

On the ‘Legitimate Authority to Kill’

By Laurie Calhoun | The Libertarian Institute | November 18, 2025

“I don’t think we’re gonna necessarily ask for a declaration of war. I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. Okay? We’re gonna kill them. You know? They’re gonna be like dead. Okay.”- President Donald Trump, October 23, 2025

As of today, the Trump administration has launched missile strikes on at least nineteen boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, terminating the lives of more than seventy unnamed persons identified at the time of their deaths only as “narcoterrorists.” The administration has claimed that the homicides are legal because they are battling a DTO or “Designated Terrorist Organization” in a “non-international armed conflict,” labels which appear to have been applied for the sole purpose of rationalizing the use of deadly force beyond any declared war zone.

An increasing number of critics have expressed concern over what President Trump’s effective assertion of the right to kill anyone anywhere whom analysts in the twenty-first-century techno-death industry deem worthy of death. Truth be told, as unsavory as it may be, Trump is following a precedent set and solidified by his recent predecessors, one which has consistently been met with both popular and congressional assent.

The idea that leaders may summarily execute anyone anywhere whom they have been told by their advisers poses a threat to the state over which they govern was consciously and overtly embraced by Americans in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Unfortunately, all presidents since then have assumed and expanded upon what has come to be the executive’s de facto license to kill with impunity. Neither the populace nor the congress has put up much resistance to the transformation of the “Commander in Chief” to “Executioner in Chief.” Fear and anger were factors in what transpired, but the politicians during this period were also opportunists concerned to retain their elected offices.

Recall that President George W. Bush referred to himself as “The Decider,” able to wield deadly force against the people of Iraq, and the Middle East more generally, “at a time of his choosing.” This came about, regrettably, because the congress had relinquished its right and responsibility to assess the need for war and rein in the reigning executive. That body politic declined to have a say in what Bush would do, most plausibly under the assumption that they would be able to take credit for the victory, if the mission went well, and shirk responsibility, if it did not.

Following the precedent set by President Bush, President Barack Obama acted on his alleged right to kill anyone anywhere deemed by his targeted-killing czar, John Brennan, to be a danger to the United States. The Obama administration commenced from the premise that the Authorizations for Use of Military Force (AUMFs) granted to Bush made Obama, too, through executive inheritance, “The Decider.” Obama authorized the killing of thousands of human beings through the use of missiles launched by remote control from drones in several different countries. To the dismay of a few staunch defenders of the United States Constitution, some among the targeted victims were even U.S. citizens, denied the most fundamental of rights articulated in that document, above all, the right to stand trial and be convicted of a capital offense in a court of law, by a jury of their peers, before being executed by the state.

As though that were not bad enough, in 2011, Obama authorized a systematic bombing campaign against Libya, which removed Moammar Gaddaffi from power in a regime change as striking as Bush’s removal from power of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Rather than rest the president’s case for war on the clearly irrelevant Bush-era AUMFs, Obama’s legal team creatively argued that executive authority sufficed in the case of Libya no less, because the mission was not really a “war,” since no ground troops were being deployed. Obama’s attack on Libya, which killed many people and left the country in shambles, had no more of a congressional authorization than does Trump’s series of assaults on the people of Latin America today.

It is refreshing to see, at long last, a few more people (beyond the usual antiwar critics) awakening to the absurdity of supposing that because a political leader was elected by a group of human beings to govern their land, he thereby possesses a divine right to kill anyone anywhere whom he labels as dangerous, by any criterion asserted by himself to suffice. President Trump maintains that Venezuela is worthy of attack because of the drug overdose epidemic in the United States, a connection every bit as flimsy as the Bush administration’s ersatz linkage of Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda. Operating in a fact-free zone akin to that of Bush, Trump persists in insisting that the drugs allegedly being transported by the small boats being blown up near Venezuela are somehow causally responsible for the crisis in the United States, even though the government itself has never before identified Venezuela as a source of fentanyl. In truth, Trump has followed a longstanding tradition among U.S. presidents to devise a plausible or persuasive pretext to get the bombing underway, and then modify it as needed, once war has been waged.

In the 1960s, the U.S. government claimed that North Vietnam would have to be toppled in order for Americans to remain free. The conflict escalated as a result of false interpretations of the 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident, which came to be parroted by the press and repeated by officials even after the pretext for war had been debunked. The U.S. intervention in Vietnam ended unceremoniously with the military’s retreat, and no one was made less free by the outcome, save the millions of human beings destroyed over a decade of intensive bombing under a false “domino theory” of how communist control of Vietnam would lead to the end of capitalism and the enslavement of humanity.

Beginning in 1989, the country of Colombia became the focus of a new “War on Drugs,” the result of which was, for a variety of reasons too complicated (and frankly preposterous) to go into here, an increase in the use of cocaine by Americans. In the early twenty-first century, Americans were told that the Taliban in Afghanistan had to be removed from power in order to protect the U.S. homeland and to secure the freedom of the people of Afghanistan. The military left that land in 2021, with the Taliban (rebranded as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan) once again the governing political authority. Many thousands of people’s lives were destroyed during the more than two decades of the “War on Terror,” but there is no sense in which anyone in Afghanistan was made more free by the infusion of trillions of U.S. dollars into the region.

Let these examples suffice to show (though others could be cited) that no matter how many times U.S. leaders insist that war has become necessary, a good portion of the populace, apparently oblivious to all of the previous incantations of false but seductive war propaganda, comes to support the latest mission of state-inflicted mass homicide. Among contemporary world leaders, U.S. officials have been the most flagrantly bellicose in this century, and they certainly have killed, whether directly or indirectly, many more human beings than any other government in recent history. This trend coincides with a marked rise in war profiteering, as a result of the LOGCAP (Logistics Civil Augmentation Program) scheme of the late secretary of Defense and Vice President Dick Cheney, whose policies made him arguably the world’s foremost war entrepreneur.

The general acceptance by the populace of the idea that conflicts of interest no longer matter in decisions of where, when, and against whom to wage war, has resulted in an increased propensity of government officials to favor bombing over negotiation, and war as a first, not a last, resort. Because of the sophistication of the new tools of the techno-death industry, and the establishment of a plethora of private military companies (PMCs) whose primary source of income derives from government contracts, there are correspondingly more war profiteers than there were in the past. Many apparently sincere war supporters among the populace are not profiteers but instead evince a confused amalgam of patriotism and pride, and are often laboring under the most effective galvanizer of all: fear.

The increasing influence on U.S. foreign policy of the military-industrial complex notwithstanding, it would be a mistake to suppose that the folly of war has anything specifically to do with the United States. The assumption of a legitimate authority to kill on the part of political leaders has a long history and has been embraced by people for many centuries, beginning with monarchic societies wherein the “received wisdom” was that rulers were effectively appointed to rule by God Almighty and therefore acting under divine authority. The fathers of just war theory, including St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, lived and wrote in the Middle Ages, when people tended to believe precisely that.

As a result of the remarkable technological advances made over the past few decades, the gravest danger to humanity today does not inhere, as the government would have us believe, in the possibility of havoc wreaked by small groups of violent dissidents. Instead, the assertion of the right to commit mass homicide by political leaders inextricably mired in an obsolete worldview of what legitimate authority implies has led to the deaths of orders of magnitude more human beings than the actions said by war architects to justify recourse to deadly force.

Today’s political leaders conduct themselves as though they are permitted to kill not only anyone whom they have been persuaded to believe is dangerous, but also anyone who happens to be located within the radius of a bomb’s lethal effects. This abuse of power and insouciance toward human life has been seen most glaringly since October 7, 2023, in the comportment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, under whose authority the military has ruthlessly attacked and terrorized the residents of not only Gaza, but also Lebanon, Syria, Qatar, Iran, and Iraq, on the grounds that militant Hamas members were allegedly hiding out in the structures being bombed.

Even as piles of corpses have amassed, and millions of innocent persons have been repeatedly terrorized by the capricious bombing campaigns, Zionists and their supporters reflexively bristle and retort to critics that Netanyahu’s intentions were always to save the hostages. It was certainly not his fault if Hamas persisted in using innocent people as human shields! As a result of this sophism, the IDF was able to kill on, wholly undeterred, massacring many thousands of people who posed no threat whatsoever. Throughout this savage military campaign, the IDF has ironically been shielded by the human shield maneuvers of Hamas.

The “good intentions” trope has served leaders frighteningly well and, like the so-called legitimate authority to kill, is a vestige of the just war paradigm, which continues rhetorically to inform leaders’ proclamations about military conflict, despite being based on an antiquated worldview the first premises of which were long ago abandoned by modern democratic societies. With rare exceptions, people do not believe (pace some of the pro-Trump zealots) that their leaders were chosen by God to do what God determines that they should do. Instead, modern people are generally well aware that their elected officials arrive at their positions of power by cajoling voters into believing that their interests will be advanced by their favored candidates, while fending off, by hook or by crook, would-be contenders who, too, claim that they will best further the people’s interests. Despite debacles such as the U.S. interventions in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Libya, the just war theory’s “Doctrine of Double Effect,” according to which what matter are one’s leaders’ intentions, not the consequences of their actions, continues to be wielded by war propagandists, undeterred by the sort of ordinary, utilitarian calculus which might otherwise constrain human behavior on such a grand scale.

The slaughter of hundreds of thousands and the harm done to millions more persons in Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. government was said to be justified by the architects of the War on Terror by the killing of approximately 3,000 human beings on September 11, 2001. Similarly, the Israeli government’s slaughter of many times more people than the number of hostages serving as the pretext for mass bombing was a horrible confusion, an affront to both basic mathematics and common sense. Nonetheless, it was said to be supported by the false and sophomoric, albeit widespread, notion that “our” leaders (the ones whom we support) have good intentions, while “the evil enemy” has evil intentions. That notion is, at best, delusional, for it entails that one’s own tribe has intrinsically good intentions and anyone who disagrees is an enemy sympathizer, the absurdity of which is clear to anyone who has ever traveled from one country to another. Stated simply: geographical location has no bearing whatsoever on the moral status of human beings, what should be obvious from the incontestable fact that no one ever chooses his place of birth.

Beyond its sheer puerility, the “We are good, and they are evil!” assumption gives rise to a very dangerous worldview on the part of leaders in possession of the capacity to commit mass homicide with impunity, as leaders such as Netanyahu and Trump, along with many others, currently do. Note that the same assumption was made by Hitler, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Stalin, and every other political mass murderer throughout history. Most recently, when supporters of Israel began to characterize anyone who voiced concern over what was being done to the Palestinians as “Hamas sympathizers,” they embraced the very same framework which came to dominate the U.S. military’s efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan as people who opposed the invasions were lumped together indiscriminately with the perpetrators of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and denounced as terrorists.

It is obvious to anyone rational why dissidents become increasingly angry as they directly witness the toll of innocent victims multiply. The very same type of ire was experienced by Americans when their homeland was attacked. Yet in Afghanistan and Iraq, the idea that human beings have a right to defend their homeland was seemingly forgotten by the invaders, and little if any heed was paid by the killers to the perspective of the invaded people themselves, who inveighed against the slaughter and mistreatment of their family members and neighbors, even as it became more and more difficult to deny that the U.S. government was in fact creating more terrorists than it eliminated.

Returning to 2025, President Donald Trump continues to authorize the obliteration of a series of small vessels off the shore of Venezuela and in the Pacific Ocean. It is unclear who is behind this arbitrary designation of some—not all—boats alleged to be loaded with drugs to be sunk rather than intercepted by the Coast Guard, which until now has been the standard operating procedure—and with good reason. According to Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), more than 25% of the vessels stopped and searched by the Coast Guard on suspicion of drug trafficking are found not to contain any contraband whatsoever. Senator Paul has also made an effort to disabuse citizens of the most egregious of the falsehoods being perpetrated by the Trump administration, to wit: The country of Venezuela is not now and has never been a producer of fentanyl, the primary cause of the overdose epidemic in the United States.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, a denizen of the fact-challenged Trump world, appears to delight in posting short snuff films of the Department of War missile strikes, most of which have left no survivors nor evidence of drug trafficking behind. In two of the strikes, there were some survivors, who were briefly detained by the U.S. government before being repatriated to their country of origin. The incoherence of the administration’s treatment of these persons—alleged wartime combatants, according to every press release regarding all of these missile strikes—has caught the attention of an increasing number of critical thinkers.

Senator Rand Paul has admirably attempted, on multiple occasions, to wrest control of the war powers from the executive and return it to the congress. Most recently, he drew up legislation to prevent Trump from bombing Venezuela, well beyond the scope of the AUMFs granted to George W. Bush at the beginning of the century, but the motion failed. Democratic Senator Fetterman, who voted against the bill along with most of the Republican senators, has evidently fallen under the spell of the techno-death industry propaganda according to which the president may kill anyone anywhere whom he deems even potentially dangerous to the people of the United States. Since the legislation was voted down, Trump and his team no doubt view this as a green light. The president may not have a new AUMF, but the senate, by rejecting Rand Paul’s legislation, effectively signaled that he does not need one. Fire away!

What all of this underscores is what became progressively more obvious throughout the Global War on Terror: most elected officials and their delegated advisers are not critical thinkers but base their support of even obviously anti-Constitutional practices, such as the summary execution of suspects, as perfectly permissible, provided only that the populace has been persuaded to believe that it is in their best interests. In the twenty-first century, heads of state are being advised by persons who are themselves working with analysis companies such as Palantir, which devise the algorithms being used to select targets to kill, and have financial incentives for doing so.

What began as a revenge war against the perpetrators of 9/11 somehow transmogrified into the serial assassination of persons whose outward behavior matches computer-generated profiles of supposedly legitimate targets. The industry-captured Department of War’s inexorable and unabashed quest to maximize lethality has played an undeniable role in this marked expansion of state-perpetrated mass homicide based on an antiquated view of divinely inspired legitimate authority. 

As the Trump administration prepares the populace for its obviously coveted and apparently imminent war on Venezuela, mainstream media outlets have reported a surprisingly high level of support among Americans for the recent missile strikes. According to one recent poll, 70% of the persons queried approve of the blowing up of boats involved in drug trafficking. If true, this may only demonstrate how effective the Smith-Mundt Modernization act has been since 2013, permitting the government to propagandize citizens to believe whatever the powers that be wish for them to believe. Given the government’s legalization of its own use of propaganda against citizens, we will probably never know how many of the social media users apparently expressing their exuberant support for the targeting of small boats on the assumption that they contain drugs headed for U.S. shores are in fact bots rather than persons. None of this bodes well for the future of freedom.

November 18, 2025 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, War Crimes | Latin America, Libya, Middle East, Obama, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment