A former top legal adviser to the Pentagon is accusing the Trump administration of murder after it ordered a deadly strike on a civilian vessel off the coast of Venezuela, killing all 11 people on board.
Ryan Goodman, who previously served as special counsel at the Department of Defense and now teaches at NYU Law, made the accusation in a searing thread posted Wednesday night on X.
“I worked at DoD. I literally cannot imagine lawyers coming up with a legal basis for lethal strike of suspected Venezuelan drug boat. Hard to see how this would not be ‘murder’ or war crime under international law that DoD considers applicable,” Goodman wrote.
The vessel was reportedly in international waters when the strike occurred earlier this week. Trump, who confirmed the operation in a statement Tuesday, claimed the boat was suspected of transporting narcotics to the United States. No evidence of that has been released publicly.
But even if the suspicion turns out to be true, legal experts like Goodman argue that doesn’t come close to justifying the use of deadly force — especially without any due process, formal declaration of hostilities, or proof of an imminent threat.
Goodman linked to a detailed analysis on Just Security by Brian Finucane, another legal expert who previously handled use-of-force issues at the State Department under multiple administrations.
“The best line of argument for the administration might be that the law of armed conflict somehow applies,” Goodman wrote. “But if so (and it doesn’t), that means the US War Crimes Act applies too, including the prohibition on murder.”
In other words, the Trump administration can’t have it both ways: either this was an act of war — which opens the door to war crimes prosecution — or it wasn’t, in which case it may constitute an unlawful assassination under international human rights law.
And that’s not just academic legal theorizing. The U.S. military and the Department of Defense have long held that killing outside a recognized battlefield, especially when targeting civilians, has to meet strict legal standards under international law. This strike doesn’t appear to come close.
“If the law of armed conflict does not apply, then DoD has a long-standing view that assassination and murder are part of the customary international human rights law that applies to military action beyond U.S. borders,” Goodman explained.
Making matters worse for the administration is the fact that Secretary of State Marco Rubio all but admitted the strike was meant as a show of force, not a last resort.
Rubio, defending the action, said, “What will stop them is if you blow them up.”
That quote alone could be damning in any future legal proceedings.
“These statements by Secretary Rubio make the legal case against the U.S. strike even stronger,” Goodman wrote.
It’s a stunning rebuke of a sitting president and his Secretary of State — and a warning that this operation could have serious consequences under international law. Whether that leads to any actual accountability, though, is an entirely different question.
