Donald Trump’s White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had no answer when a press corps journalist used facts to challenge her claim that the US Navy’s attack – under orders from ‘Secretary of War’ Pete Hegseth – on a fishing boat was in accordance with international and US law.

The US fired a second missile at the vessel, supposedly a drug boat but claimed to be a fishing boat, as it lay damaged in the ocean off the coast of Venezuela with two crew members clinging to it after a first missile strike. The second strike murdered the two survivors.

Michael Schmitt, a former Air Force lawyer and professor at the U.S. Naval War College said:

I can’t imagine anyone, no matter what the circumstance, believing it is appropriate to kill people who are clinging to a boat in the water.

That is clearly unlawful.

Trump war-mongering

A lobby journalist pointed out that the US Navy’s own handbook on the laws of war are completely clear: attacking wounded survivors and an already-wrecked vessel is, unequivocally, a war crime – so Leavitt, unable to compute anything meaningful, simply ploughed on as though the facts had never been brought up. Instead, she began insisting that the attack complied with all laws and repeating that the targeted boat had been in international waters, as though that made it alright:

International law

Leavitt may have been hoping listeners would be fooled that being in international waters somehow means that sailors and air crew in the US Navy, and those commanding them to act, are not under US law. But international and US law are quite clear on that too – wherever they go, US naval assets are considered an extension of US territory and US law applies to US Navy personnel as long as they are on them, though this does not make them immune from other local laws or from international law:

The basic postulate upon which the law of the sea rests is that every nation has exclusive jurisdiction over all vessels flying its flag. The laws, civil and criminal, of the nation concerned are applicable to any act or occurrence taking place on board ships flying its flag.

For far from the first time, the essentially terrorist Trump regime’s approach to law is to use it against its opponents and ignore it for its own actions.

Featured image via YouTube screenshot/Sky News

By Skwawkbox

This post was originally published on Canary.