Senator Adam Schiff responding to question on Meet The Press regarding trump’s policy of destroying alleged drug boats in the Caribbean -As to it’s legality and morality:
They're unlawful. They're unconstitutional. And killing two people who are shipwrecked at sea is also morally repugnant. I agree with Tom, we should do everything lawfully that we can to stop the scourge of drugs coming into this country. But this is not at all lawful or constitutional. And frankly, if the Pentagon and our defense secretary are so proud of what they're doing, let the American people see that video. Let the American people see two people standing on a capsized boat, or sitting on a capsized boat, and deliberately killed and decide for themselves whether they're proud of what the country is doing.
I can't imagine people would be proud of that. And as you pointed out, the Manual on the Law of War makes it explicit that killing people who are shipwrecked is illegal, is a violation of law. And the most troubling thing I heard from Senator Cotton was when he said it really didn't matter what these people were doing on that capsized boat, whether they were signaling their distress and asking for rescue or what they were doing. It does matter. It does matter. And, you know, one point I would share with him, and that is I also think that all of these strikes are unlawful. They're a form of extrajudicial killing. These boats are not invading the United States in an armed assault. They're thousands of miles away. Some of them, maybe even this vessel, if reports are accurate, wasn't even heading to the United States.
And for us to be engaged in this kind of unauthorized campaign of extrajudicial killing, couldn't be I think a more clear violation of the law. The fact that the administration may put a group of organizations, terrorists, narco-terrorist organizations on a list doesn't change the legal ability, doesn't confer on a president the ability to kill them at sea.
You could put anyone you want on a list. It doesn't make it lawful to say I can now kill them. And one final point, they've been very fast and loose with whether they know exactly who is on those ships. Or they're just saying they're associated with a terrorist organization on a secret list. And we need a thorough investigation to find out what the orders were, whether it was to kill everybody in an organization without knowing specifically who these people were, or what the situation was.
