Charlie Savage

And then there was this oddity of why are there so many people on this boat?

And there was immediately a reaction among...

Experts in the law of armed conflict, retired senior judge advocate general officers who used to be in charge of telling the military stories.

where the limits lay and what was permissible in terms of using force.

And a hallmark of the entire ethos is you do not deliberately target civilians, even criminal suspects, unless they are directly participating in hostilities.

And the Trump administration has not put out a detailed legal rationale for how this isn't just murder.

They've gestured at the outlines of a rationale.

They have said that

at a time in which 100,000 Americans a year die from drug overdoses, Trump has the authority to lawfully decide that the criminal problem of drug smuggling and drug trafficking is essentially an armed attack on the United States, that the United States can use military force in self-defense,

against drug trafficking and that, therefore, he has constitutional authority to kill these people.

At this point, all we have is for the first attack, especially September 2nd, is President Trump's assertion that the intelligence was confident that this boat was carrying drugs that would eventually be bound for the United States.

Further complicating that is just because if there are drugs on a boat, just because they're leaving one country down there doesn't necessarily mean they're bound for here, that

It looked like it was going to Trinidad and Tobago from Venezuela, and that's often a transshipment point to Europe.

In any case, all we have is Trump saying, we have recordings, we know it was on the boat.

Take our word for it.

And then it turns out that the video he released, which shows a boat moving in the water and then blown apart, is not the whole story because it was edited.

And the people who had been briefed on the unedited video said,

say that number one, the boat

had turned around before the United States military attacked it.

It had apparently seen an aircraft kind of stalking it and gotten freaked out, whoever was piloting the boat, and turned around and was pointed back towards Venezuela.