The U.S. government has been executing suspected terrorists without indictment, much less trial, since the dawning of the Drone Age, on November 3, 2002. On that day, the George W. Bush administration used a Predator drone to dispatch six alleged terrorist suspects in a car driving down a road in Yemen, far from any battlefield. This unprecedented act of extrajudicial execution was precipitated by the attacks on U.S. soil of September 11, 2001, which set the stage for a new, sanguinary, period of military history.

Officials such as John Brennan, Barack Obama’s CIA director, and former CEO (from 2005 to 2009) of a private military contracting firm, the Analysis Corporation, assumed the lethal authority to incinerate potentially dangerous human beings, including U.S. citizens such as Anwar al-Awlaki. Officials at the helm of what became a literal killing machine adamantly insisted on the necessity of deploying deadly force wherever they ordered missile strikes. The psychological climate in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, powerfully suppressed criticism, and the new techno-killers enjoyed the benefit of the doubt on the part of both the mainstream press and most of the populace. After years of launching missiles covertly, under a pretext of State Secrets privilege, the summary execution of suspects came eventually to be openly acknowledged by President Obama and widely accepted as completely normal, a standard operating procedure, whether carried out by the Pentagon or the CIA.

Even while thus terrorizing millions of innocent people, the perpetrators of the relentless targeted killing campaigns always characterized them as antiterrorism initiatives. As the nugatory, counterproductive “Global War on Terror” dragged on, fomenting anger among locals and creating more radical jihadists than it eliminated, the so-called battlefield expanded to include countries where war was never officially waged, as it had been by President George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq. The inhabitants of Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Mali, and other parts of the Middle East and Africa were also regularly terrorized by the lethal drones flying above their heads, never knowing when or where the next missile would make contact with human beings on the ground.

Each successive president insisted that the AUMFs (Authorizations for Use of Military Force) granted by Congress to George W. Bush in 2001 and 2002 sufficed to make any suspected terrorist or associate identified by U.S. government authorities fair game for summary execution. Among the “authorities” enlisted to create kill lists were privately contracted analysts with financial incentives to locate persons suspected of terrorist acts, whether past or, preposterously, potentially in the future. Despite a long list of documented incidents involving the U.S. government’s annihilation of entirely innocent persons, and often their families as well, such as the case of Zemari Ahmadi in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 29, 2021, so-called suspects continue to be “lit up” by missile strikes, provided only that whoever happens to be the commander in chief either agrees with the lethal determination or has delegated his war-making authority to those in his employ.

Many of the missiles have been launched by remote control, from unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs), a.k.a. remotely piloted aircraft (RPAs), to eliminate persons in places where no ground troops would ever have been sent in to kill the suspects, because, among other reasons, they were not acting as armed combatants at the time of their death. The targets were not provided with the opportunity to surrender (most were not armed anyway) and in fact met their demise at the hands of the drone warriors only because of the development of the technological capacity to kill by remote control. No officials in the executive branch of the federal government ever publicly debated whether rejecting the advances made in the Magna Carta, the presumption of innocence, the very concept of due process, and the post-World War II Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a good idea. Instead, We Kill Because We Can became the U.S. government’s guiding principle throughout the Global War on Terror, as it evidently continues to be today.

Indeed, the Department of War (formerly known as the Department of Defense, and renamed for inscrutable reasons, given President Donald Trump’s avowed Nobel Peace Prize aspirations) has come to tout its superior lethality on a regular basis, as though it were obviously a laudable achievement to be able to massacre more human beings faster, which is the only thing that “enhanced lethality” can possibly mean, given that an individual who has been killed cannot be made more dead than he already is. There can be little doubt that the initiation of a new, far more lethal, war on narcotrafficking (referred to by bellicose leaders as narcoterrorism, for obvious reasons) was inspired by the monomaniacal comportment of those tasked with identifying targets ripe for annihilation. It should come as no surprise that some of the very same players in the push-button killer camp for the U.S. government have also offered “algorithmic support” to Israel in its hunt for Hamas members, which has laid to waste large swaths of Gaza and destroyed the lives of thousands of human beings, including a shocking number of children over the past two years.

Alex Karp is the CEO of Palantir, a company which furnishes the algorithms supposedly needed in order to facilitate (if not fully determine…) the ever-more-frequent life-and-death decisions being made by government bureaucrats in the realm euphemistically termed “kinetic action.” Palantir was founded by Peter Thiel, the billionaire donor who funded the Ohio senatorial run of J.D. Vance, before he was selected as the running mate of Donald Trump, who—surprise—was also generously supported by Thiel. The firm, which showed no profits for the first seventeen years of its existence, and most likely survived only through the largesse of Pentagon black budgets and the CIA, was recently awarded publicly acknowledged contracts amounting to $10 billion by the U.S. government for a range of projects involving algorithmic determination of when actions can and should be taken, up to and including the termination with extreme prejudice of alleged enemies. As Karp put it to his stockholders in February 2025, “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world, and when it’s necessary, to scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them.” Karp has further “philosophized” that “Safe means that the other person is scared.”

A rather loquacious and unedited fellow, Karp has shed a good deal of light on the Weltanschauung of those who have taken up the techno-killer mantel—for a price. The word for that used to be “corruption,” but Karp has reimagined his own transformation into a paid contract killer in patriotic terms, offering this explanation of what his firm is helping the U.S. government to achieve:

“And they [Americans] want to know that if you’re waking up and thinking about harming American citizens…something really bad is going to happen to you and your friends and your cousins and your bank account and your mistress and whoever was involved.”

Can it be that Karp has no idea why the Global War on Terror was such a colossal failure, having directly caused jihadists to spore and spread? It seems more likely that Karp is well aware that the investment by U.S. taxpayers of trillions of dollars in the Middle East over two decades in fact left religious fanatics in power in both Afghanistan and Syria, while rendering Libya a failed state. Wearing his CEO cap, Karp frankly averred, “Bad times are incredibly good for Palantir.” In reality, Karp is a newly minted billionaire thanks only to crony capitalism and, above all, his crassly opportunistic and diaphanously mercenary insistence that the military-industrial complex is the key to reclaiming America’s greatness.

We may never know whether Palantir analysts advised the U.S. Department of Defense/War to kill eleven people in a small speedboat in Caribbean waters near Venezuela on September 2, 2025, but somebody did. Of all the many vessels in the Caribbean, one of them was selected for obliteration on the basis of secretive criteria to which the public is not privy. The official story has been evolving as the administration composes and emends its narrative in response to the concerns of critics. At first, Secretary of State Marco Rubio reported that the boat was heading toward Trinidad, which seemed not implausible, given the size of the vessel and the unlikelihood that it would be making the long haul to Florida. Next, President Trump announced that the boat was heading toward the United States, intimating, for the very first time, that Venezuela was somehow responsible for the fentanyl overdose epidemic, even though no one has ever made such a claim before.

The small vessel was filled with people, who took up valuable space, which, given the well-established modus operandi of drug runners, does not make much sense. At most two persons would be needed to operate such a boat. It is also unclear how there could possibly have been enough fuel onboard to make it all the way to the United States.

Does anyone in the U.S. government know the identity of the persons rendered chum by missiles launched from a drone, or are they now simply line items on the long list of EKIA (Enemy Killed in Action), most of whose names were not known by their killers but were presumed nonetheless to be potentially guilty of future possible crimes? No doubt the victims’ bereft family members have by now determined why they never heard from them again. They never returned home from their fishing trip or, if migrants (as some have surmised), they obviously did not reach the land of opportunity. Whatever these people were in fact doing, were any of them guilty of capital crimes and subject to the death penalty, under any, even vaguely plausible reading, of U.S. law?

Assume, against all available evidence, that the persons killed were involved in drug trafficking. Since when are drug dealers regarded as fair game for summary execution without indictment or trial? (I note here that the Sackler family, whose fraudulent marketing of Oxycontin led to the deaths of millions of human beings, altogether evaded criminal penalties.) Why were the alleged narcotraffickers not apprehended by the Coast Guard, if the government was so sure that they were transporting drugs bound for U.S. shores?

According to Secretary Rubio, when boats of narcotics are intercepted, this does not diminish the flow of drugs. Only state-inflicted homicide, apparently, works. In that case, why not kill all of the drug users, as well, given that some among them, too, will eventually become dealers? That would swiftly and surely call a halt to the drug problem in America. Instead, the U.S. government has executed a small group of likely Venezuelans in a symbolic gesture, to demonstrate that Team Trump is working pro-actively to fight the scourge of narcotics in the United States, seemingly incognizant of the fact that the decades-long War on Drugs in Colombia did not diminish but increased the use of cocaine by Americans.

Once again, perhaps the critics and cynics are right, and the current administration is not nearly so obtuse as it presumes the populace to be. Perhaps the “necessity” of executing drug traffickers is but a pretext, just another cover story, like the WMD in Iraq, a lie fabricated by neocons to placate the naive and credulous populace.

For a quarter of a century now, the blunt characterization as a “terrorist” of anyone whom the government wishes to eliminate has been disconcertingly effective in deflecting any meaningful pushback against state-perpetrated serial homicide and illustrates how far the U.S. republic has already fallen. The administration’s callous abandonment of the presumption of innocence, due process, and any concept of human rights happened only through force of habit, over the course of the Global War on Terror, when targeted killing was normalized as a supposedly splendid and surgically precise counterterrorism tactic, all empirical evidence to the contrary having been ignored.

Officials such as Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who make a big show of their intent to increase lethality by all means necessary, and who already believe that it is perfectly acceptable to annihilate innocent persons while in pursuit of a coveted target, will likely continue to expand the domain of what they claim to be just killing, not only because they can, but also to prove that what they already did was right. (Never underestimate the power of self-delusion.)

Whether anyone believes the narcotrafficker narrative or not, a new war on the Caribbean has commenced, with all that this implies. Will anyone be safe anymore sailing through the waters between Florida and Venezuela? Not long after the spectacular execution of eleven persons of unknown identity in a boat which may or may not have been carrying drugs, the U.S. military began flying F-35 fighter jets over Puerto Rico, effectively terrorizing everyone on the ground there as well. How could anyone possibly know against whom or where the next round of missiles will be launched by the capricious killers? What we do know from the Global War on Terror is that terrorizing people in their homelands leads to the radicalization of and revenge attacks by angry dissidents. Lather, rinse, repeat.

For anyone still perplexed by the new war front opened up in the Caribbean, long regarded as a safe place for Americans to travel, untroubled by the chaos, murder, and mayhem in the Middle East, Glenn Greenwald has offered insightful analysis into what is really going on. In Greenwald’s view, the administration has simply dusted off a regime-change playbook from the late 1980s. This is certainly not the first time that the U.S. government has asserted its right to obliterate people whom they say are engaged in narco-terrorism and protected by a leader regarded by U.S. officials as a pariah, as is Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro.

Greenwald observes that the September 2, 2025, sinking of a boat near Venezuela containing alleged narcotraffickers/terrorists in fact recalls the slaughter authorized by President George H.W. Bush in Panama nearly forty years ago, in an effort, too, to effect regime change in that country. Despite having worked closely with the CIA for years, Panama’s de facto Leader Manuel Noriega (a military dictator who presided over the country via puppet presidents) fell out of favor with Bush Sr. and was removed from power, just as the U.S. government has been trying for years to do to President Maduro. Indeed, during Trump’s first administration, Juan Guaidó was regularly pronounced the president of Venezuela by U.S. officials, including then-Senator Marco Rubio, one of the most vociferous and impassioned advocates of regime change.

The ludicrous “kill all the narco-traffickers” line may still garner support among some of the American domestic populace—especially those with no awareness or memory of Noriega—but the precedent which this pretense represents is far more dangerous to Americans themselves than the typical feckless regime-change war. Just as the point-blank execution of Osama bin Laden led President Obama down a slippery slope to conclude that U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, too, was fair game for annihilation without indictment or trial, the use of lethal drones to sink a small boat in the Caribbean on ostensible grounds of national defense can only lead to a further extension of the U.S. president’s assumed license to kill, expanding the domain of what are decreed to be “necessary” acts of premeditated homicide perpetrated by the state.

Given how far the Department of War and Supreme Leader Donald Trump are evidently willing to go in asserting their absolute right to annihilate anyone anywhere, it will be only a matter of time before the denial of any and all civil rights seen in the case of Anwar al-Awlaki will be repeated for other U.S. citizens thought to be fair game by the techno-killers. Certainly Palantir CEO Alex Karp and those in his employ already assume that they may play God in the name of the sacrosanct state, whether Israel or the USA.

The next likely move, the targeted killing of suspects in Puerto Rico, will bring the administration one step closer to deploying premeditated, intentional homicide extrajudicially in the continental United States, under a guise of national defense, while flouting every principle the U.S. republic was founded on. After that, we will be forced to acknowledge that the former republic has been replaced by a despotic military state, where disputes are adjudicated, truth is determined, and justice meted out by, not the Department of Justice, but the Department of War.

The government’s power to criminalize anyone who disagrees has already been witnessed in the case of outspoken dissenters from the mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. By indiscriminately labeling pro-Palestinian voices “Hamas sympathizers,” the techno-killers are only one short step from adding even nonviolent dissidents to the notorious hit lists of so-called terrorist associates regarded as “fair game” for summary execution without indictment or trial.