Two alleged Narcos captured at sea expose DHT’s latest excess and its danger to us all.
When two men were pulled alive from the wreckage of a U.S. naval strike in the Caribbean this month, they became proof of a problem the Trump administration has tried to keep tucked below the horizon.
Their boat, a semi-submersible “narco-sub” described by the White House as part of a “narco-terrorist network,” had been hit by a Navy destroyer operating under a direct presidential order. The October 16 attack occurred in international waters approximately 150 nautical miles south of Venezuela. Earlier U.S. raids in the same southern Caribbean zone had left only bodies; this time, there were survivors.
The two men, citizens of Colombia and Ecuador, were taken aboard the U.S. warship and, within forty-eight hours, quietly flown home. No photographs. No names. No public record of interrogation or trial.
That abrupt hand‐off has turned a headline-grabbing interdiction into a constitutional riptide. For the first time, President Trump’s newly minted “war on narco-terrorism,” navy-style, has produced prisoners, and with them, the unavoidable question of whether the United States is waging an actual war at all.
The president has boasted that U.S. forces are “taking the fight to the traffickers.” Pentagon spokesmen describe new rules of engagement permitting lethal force against vessels “linked to organized narco-terrorist entities.” The language is martial, but no declaration of war or congressional authorization followed.
Under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, a president must notify Congress within 48 hours of introducing U.S. forces into hostilities and withdraw them after sixty days absent approval. No such notification accompanied the Caribbean operations. Nor did Congress enact any statute granting the Navy authority to conduct combat operations against suspected drug traffickers.
That omission matters because U.S. law draws a sharp line between warfare and law enforcement. The Posse Comitatus Act bars the armed forces from performing domestic police functions without explicit authorization, and traditional maritime drug enforcement relies on the Coast Guard’s law-enforcement powers to stop, board, and arrest. The Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act envisions interdiction and prosecution, not annihilation by naval gunfire or missiles.
Once survivors entered U.S. custody, international law also came into play. If Washington insists it is fighting a war, those men qualify as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention (1949), entitled to humane treatment, Red Cross access, and review by a legitimate tribunal. If this was police work, they are criminal defendants entitled to due process under the Fifth Amendment. By repatriating them without either process, the administration effectively acknowledged neither status. It was seeking, in the words of an old CIA colleague of mine, “to fight a war while pretending it’s not.”
The maneuver recalls the early post-9/11 years, when the government coined “unlawful enemy combatant” to avoid Geneva protections for detainees at Guantánamo. The Supreme Court scotched that approach in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and Boumediene v. Bush, affirming that even foreign detainees captured abroad possess basic rights of review. This time, by swiftly returning the detainees to Colombia and Ecuador, the administration sidestepped any possibility of comparable judicial scrutiny.
It was a murky gambit, legally and morally, but far safer politically than arrest and detention. A public trial would have required the administration to disclose the intelligence justifying the strike — what signals were intercepted, whether the men attempted surrender, who authorized lethal force. Quiet transfer abroad ensures none of that will surface.
But the absence of prisoners tells its own story. In lawful conflicts, captives mark the boundary between combat and murder. Their survival signifies restraint. In this “narco-war,” there is almost none of that. Each engagement ends in destruction, not detention.
What began as seaborne spectacle has now exposed a legal vacuum. Internationally, the United Nations Charter permits the use of force only in self-defense or with Security Council authorization, and the law of the sea generally places vessels under the jurisdiction of their flag state. There is no open-ended license to sink suspected smugglers in international waters. By treating criminal cartels as enemy armies, the president has claimed a battlefield the Constitution does not recognize, and powers it was designed to restrain.
My concern over the prospect of an undeclared war of any kind is deeply personal. After serving as a CIA officer in Vietnam for five and a half years — a conflict we shoe-horned ourselves into through the same kind of double-talk and factual sleight of hand — I know how easily the rules can bend and the war machine slip out of sight. I still carry the pain of watching decisions made in shadow, consequences unseen in daylight, and civilians caught out in ways that legislation never intended. That history makes me an especially wary witness to today’s drift.
There is more. Parallel to the Caribbean interdictions, this administration has quietly been building a case against Venezuela. With the Marco Rubio-led State Department labeling elements of that authoritarian regime “narco-terrorists,” the White House is conjuring up a rationale for war with Venezuela, one that blurs the distinction between trans-national criminal networks and a target state. The line between interdiction of traffickers and regime-change intervention is now dangerously thin.
And there lies the larger danger. A president who can order the Navy to kill suspected smugglers in international waters without Congressional checks and balances wields a power that erases the last bright lines of the Republic. If the capture of two dazed men on a shattered hull proved anything, it is that America is drifting into a war no one has authorized, against an enemy no one has legally defined, in a theater where law itself is vanishing.
The weakening of the constraints on Trump’s war-making powers may also be part of a larger effort by this administration to justify expansion of U.S. military forces to quell alleged “enemies within,” including the President’s political adversaries right here at home, under the guise of national security. It feels as though the last safeguards of civilian oversight are collapsing.