Assassinations, Targeted Killings, and Extrajudicial Executions

US foreign policy has a dark history of extrajudicial killings. During the Cold War, the CIA undeniably plotted to assassinate foreign leaders. During the Vietnam War, the CIA ran the Phoenix Program, an “antisubversion program” that saw over 20,000 suspected Vietcong members “neutralized” through extrajudicial killings. The CIA also gave the names of suspected Communists to the Iraqi Ba’ath Party and the Indonesian military knowing they would face torture or death.

Following revelations about CIA assassinations, President Gerald Ford promulgated an executive order banning US participation in “political assassinations.” Jimmy Carter expanded the prohibition to all assassinations. Ronald Reagan campaigned for office with a pledge to unleash the CIA. He rescinded Carter’s executive order designed to limit the intelligence community and replace it with a new order expanding their powers. Yet even though Reagan’s order was the product of “New Right” anger at checks on national security abuses, he kept the assassination ban in place. To date, it remains official US policy. All the orders failed to define assassination, and with some creative lawyering, the executive branch has been able to resume and expand the assassination business.

The United States’ history of extrajudicial killing is intertwined with its alliance with Israel. While many states have used assassinations as a tool of policy, Israel has truly been a pioneer in the practice. Though Israel’s murder of Palestinian leaders was hardly a secret, in the early 2000s, they went public with the fact that they had a program of “targeted killings.” Targeted killings is not a term defined in international law; it is clearly a euphemism designed to get around the prohibition on extrajudicial killings.

Initially the George W. Bush administration publicly opposed Israel’s targeted killings. While Democratic congressman John Conyers pointed out the US weapons were used in the attacks, urging an investigation, other Democrats took a different approach. They criticized the Bush administration’s opposition to Israeli assassinations. Future president Joe Biden was one of the congressional supporters of Israeli targeted killings. And within the Bush White House, there was at least one dissenter: Vice President Dick Cheney made clear his support for the Israeli policy.

Bush’s willingness to arm Israel’s targeted killings always made his administration’s public opposition suspect. But he also clearly warmed up to the practice. In 2008, the CIA worked directly with Israel’s Mossad to carry out an assassination of Hezbollah’s Imad Mughniyeh. The killing took place using a car bomb inside Syria. The United States reasoned Mughniyeh was an imminent threat and thus his killing did not contravene the assassination ban.

More important, after 9/11, the US adopted “targeted killings” as part of its “war on terror.” Many of these killings were conducted via unmanned drones. The Bush administration sought operational expertise from Israel on how to carry out such killings. And it sought out legal advice from Israel on how to justify the targeted killings under international law.

Bush may have started this program, but it was dramatically expanded by Barack Obama. In one of the most shockingly authoritarian acts of any US president, Obama ordered the execution via drone of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen accused of being an al-Qaeda propagandist. Under the laws of armed conflict, a propagandist is not a military target. Obama’s killing of a US citizen sparked public controversy. As a result, the administration released a highly redacted legal memo justifying the killing. One redacted section cited an Israeli court decision decreeing such targeted killings were permissible under international law.

The Bush–Obama assassination program looms large over Trump’s summary murder of alleged cartel members in the Caribbean. Although it is not mentioned in Trump’s flimsy report to Congress, much of the logic behind the killing is that during the global war on terrorism, past presidents ordered the killings of “terrorists.”

Trump has labeled Venezuelan gangs terrorists, therefore he can use force against them just as Obama carried out his drone war across borders. While we shouldn’t whitewash the drone program — it was a murderous affront to the Bill of Rights and international law — there is a key legal difference. Bush and Obama claimed the United States was in an international armed conflict with the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and “associated forces.” This conflict was the product of a congressional authorization of force against those individuals and nations who planned the September 11 attack or harbored them.

There is no international armed conflict between the US and drug runners. And Congress has not given any approval to such a military campaign. The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force was overly broad, presidents pushed it well beyond any logical interpretation of its scope, and the drone killings were assassinations, not lawful acts of self-defense. Yet Trump’s move here is an expansion of an already disturbing practice.

Trump’s terrorism designation of cartels rests on two laws, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the Immigration and Nationality Act. Since a 1995 executive order by Bill Clinton, presidents have used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose sanctions and block the financial transactions of supposed terrorists. Clinton initially applied this designation to “terrorists” who “threatened the Middle East peace process.” Although his order remains in effect, Bush expanded this framework with his own executive order against terrorists broadly. It was under this order that the Trump administration designated drug cartels as Specially Designated Global Terrorists.

In 1997, at Clinton’s urging, Congress passed the Republican-authored Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. The law amended the Immigration and Nationality Act to allow the secretary of state to unilaterally designate foreign groups as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations.” The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act also made it a crime to provide “material support” to a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.

While it is a crime under both statutes to provide a range of support or services to a blacklisted terror group, the designation itself is not the result of a criminal process. The Foreign Terrorist Organization label can only apply to foreign organizations. The designation under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act can be applied to US groups or even individuals. The first US citizen designated under the act as a terrorist was not charged with any crime until years later. And even after he was acquitted of all terrorism offenses, he remained sanctioned until a lawsuit was brought.

Under Trump’s logic, someone who is acquitted of terrorism charges could be murdered by the president just because of an abusive, broad designation. Yet the laws do not give any such power. They were a response to a mid-1990s panic that the United States’ strident First Amendment protections had made it a haven for terrorist fundraising. The laws, while broad and abusive, were not authorizations of military force but criminal prohibitions on materially supporting blacklisted groups.

War on Drugs or Regime Change?

Trump’s act of murder comes at a time of increased tensions between the United States and Venezuela, tensions the White House is responsible for. All of this is premised on claims about the Venezuelan government’s role in international drug trafficking. The administration has gone so far as to assert that Maduro is head of the “Cartel de los Soles.” All of these claims are deeply suspect, to put it mildly. Experts have not only asserted Venezuela is not a major player in drug trafficking but that the Cartel de los Soles does not even exist. This calls into question the Trump administration’s motives for the military buildup.

For nearly two decades, successive US governments have sought to undermine or overthrow the left-wing governments of first Hugo Chávez and now Nicolás Maduro. During Trump’s first term, he increased sanctions on the country, which according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research resulted in the deaths of 40,000 people. The sanctions have also helped fuel a refugee crisis, which Trump cynically exploited as part of his xenophobic demonization of migrants. During his first term, Trump also recognized an alternative Venezuelan government that had no actual political power. It then seized Venezuela’s DC embassy from the actual, existing Maduro government, giving it to the Washington-backed fictitious government.

All of this was not about drug enforcement; it was about the regime change fantasies of hard-line neoconservatives in the Trump administration like John Bolton and Elliott Abrams. Trump has had a dramatic falling out with Bolton, but one the policy’s biggest backers was then senator Marco Rubio. Rubio is now Trump’s secretary of state, and it’s clear he is still fanatical in his drive to topple Venezuela’s government.

Trump’s secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, has made clear that regime change is not off the table. If Trump’s supposed drug war does result in a full-scale effort to remove a government disfavored by Washington, it will hardly be the first US war to be started on false pretenses. Lies about a North Vietnamese attack on a US ship in the Gulf of Tonkin or about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and ties to 9/11 paved the way for two of the most disastrous US wars of the post–World War II era. And it was for the stated purpose of arresting Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, a former CIA asset whose relations with the United States soured, on drug charges that the US invaded Panama. The invasion, dubbed by the George H.W. Bush administration “Operation Just Cause,” left 3,500 Panamanians dead. The renewed effort to arrest Maduro on highly questionable drug charges accompanied by a military buildup has created a justifiable fear that the Trump administration is reviving an old playbook.

Militarism and Trump’s Threat

Whether Trump takes the United States into a wider regime change war with Venezuela or just makes the war on terror practice of targeted killings a hallmark of the war on drugs, these acts of militarism represent some of the greatest dangers of Trump’s second term. The threat of Trump is real, but it is not sui generis. It is rooted in the legacy of American militarism and a national security state that claims the right to kill without trial across borders.

Yet many of Trump’s liberal opponents have sought to resist his authoritarian tendencies while turning a blind eye to militarism. During the 2024 election, Trump sought to falsely portray himself to a war-wary public as antiwar. Instead of pointing out his lies, his opponents in the Biden and Kamala Harris campaigns presented themselves as better stewards of America’s national security leviathan. They ran ads touting how they kept arms flowing to the stalemated Ukraine-Russia war, paraded around with Liz Cheney, touted the endorsement of Dick Cheney, promised the most lethal fighting force in the world, and ignored their own base’s rightful anger at their role at facilitating a genocide in Gaza. And at no point during Biden’s four years did they seek to undo his sanctions on Venezuela, which drove a humanitarian catastrophe.

Now Trump is back in power. And he has the United States on the brink of war and is expanding the already kinglike war powers of the president. There is no antidote to his authoritarian menace that leaves the national security state untouched.