How we talk about murder

Seventy-six people in 19 strikes in just over two months: that's how many civilians have been killed in a U.S. war that has not been declared. It is a war, ostensibly on drugs, and packaged for social media, that has left wives without husbands and children without fathers, their names and faces as absent from the media coverage as any legal justification.

The accusation — that those slaughtered were involved in the narcotics trade — has been leveled only after the sentence has been carried out, each unverified claim accompanied by a clip on social media showcasing the extrajudicial sentences.

"I don't think we're going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war," President Donald Trump told reporters in October. "I think we're just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country."

There is no pretense of justice on the part of the executioner, at least as it's been conceived since the Magna Carta, nor even a credible claim of active armed conflict that might blur the lines between cold-blooded murder and legitimate self-defense. If it's been open about anything, the U.S. government has been open about the fact that the only law here is the word of one man.

Killing these people is a political choice: it plays well for those, frightened by the endless repetition of claims and images on their screens, need to see foreigners killed to feel safe and secure in their cul-de-sac. As executing gang members is not tenable in the homeland, at least not yet, the performance is carried out under the guise of foreign policy, politically-motivated killings being permissible in the name of national security.

That this is indeed murder for show — and that even the perpetrators know, on some level, that there's something dishonorable about the whole thing — is revealed in how they have treated some of those who have survived their initial blow.

When an October strike on a vessel in the Caribbean Sea had the unwelcome outcome of not instantly killing everyone on board, the U.S. government was left with a decision: it could finish the job and execute those in its custody, reflecting the present administration's belief that an accusation is as good as a jury trial; or it could acknowledge that an in-detention killing would be viewed as a crime against humanity.

The executioner flinched.

"The two surviving terrorists are being returned to their Countries of origin, Ecuador and Colombia, for detention and prosecution," Trump posted on his website.

There is no moral difference between executing an alleged criminal in one's custody and executing an alleged criminal who could easily be detained. The U.S. Coast Guard has for years intercepted and searched boats suspected of transporting drugs, and it continues to do so to this day; it has even collaborated with formal "enemies" of the United States, partnering with Cuba to dismantle trafficking operations.

However biased and editorializing it may appear, there is a legal term, then, for what the Trump administration is doing: murder. That's what it would be even if Congress gave these killings the color of law with a declaration of war — these would still be civilians, none engaged in combat — and that's what the recovery of those survivors demonstrated.

In an Oct. 31 letter to the U.S. Department of Justice, a group of Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee spelled this out.

"Based upon the reported facts," they wrote, "it appears the strikes may violate 18 U.S.C. § 1111, which makes it a felony to commit murder within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States, which includes the high seas."

That's not an ethical judgment, but a legal and inescapable one, based on facts that no one really disputes: we're killing people we could have detained for crimes they haven't been charged with.

The only way out of this judgment is to wrap oneself in the flag and say that this is a "war," with all the evisceration of peacetime norms that word entails. This may not work in an international court of law, but these arguments, for now, are being fought for purposes of public opinion — and even in undemocratic states, a war-time framing unlocks and legitimizes a wide range of brutality that would otherwise be impermissible.

The language of war doesn't just lower the bar, but it anesthetizes. "Murder" sounds bad; we are familiar with the concept and generally frown upon it. But a "kinetic strike," it's harder to say. What even is that?

It is, for one, how the Pentagon would like to frame its killings. And because deference to powerful institutions is conflated with objectivity, it's also how some in the press are anodizing the reality.

"Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announces another kinetic strike on Thursday against alleged narcoterrorists in the Caribbean," is how one local NBC affiliate described a Nov. 6 attack that killed three people. "To more 'narco-terrorists' were killed in the Trump administration's latest kinetic strike," said another.

"US obliterates alleged 'drug boats' with lethal kinetic strike," declared The Independent, a British newspaper that accompanied its Nov. 11 headline with a 38-second video of that particular lethal kinetic action.

It's not just journalism that's corrupted by adopting the obfuscating euphemisms of the state, "kinetic strike" — a term for any destructive warfare — as unhelpful to the average reader's understanding as "officer-involved shooting." Whether in the media, the Pentagon or academia, jargon is a savvy replacement for actual knowledge, and has thus proven irresistible to some in the political opposition.

Earlier this month, Sen. Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who serves as vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, sounded more like a Republican consultant than a serious critic following a private briefing with Trump officials. With the murder toll approaching triple digits, his gripe was not at the immorality of killing criminal suspects but with how the White House was going about selling its illegal campaign.

"Kinetic strikes, without actually interdicting and demonstrating to the American public that these are carrying drugs and they're full of bad guys, I think, is a huge mistake and undermines the confidence in the administration's actions," Warner told reporters. He added that it was "good" that senators could now see, per CNN, "the administration's detailed legal justification for the strikes in a classified setting."

Even as he critiques, with a peep about how "interdicting" the deceased would have been ideal, Warner cedes ground, politically and linguistically. A "lawless killing spree," as the International Crisis Group's Brian Finucane describes the strikes, lets one know that what's happening here transgresses all notions of honor and decency; "kinetic strikes" are a policy difference, to be discussed in respectful chats among the exclusive club permitted to know the legal arguments for why Donald J. Trump can be judge, jury and executioner.

As the Trump administration performs its kinetic, compensative masculinity at the expense of the foreign nationals in boats it decides to blow up, the press and political opposition would do well to remember that language is also a battleground — and that the ugly truth, plainly stated, is a useful weapon.

If you appreciated this piece, please consider a paid subscription or one-time donation.