This is what we need to recognize, understand,
and expose again and again! This madness
must be stopped!! — Molly
The New Killable Class
How a Manufactured Enemy Gave the White House a Blank Check for War.
White Rose (December 4, 2025)
The signs are familiar to anyone who has lived through America’s quieter, undeclared wars. First come the shapeless “threats,” crafted to fit whatever action the White House already wants to take. Then the labels, stretched wide enough to cover any target that needs killing. Then the bodies. By the time the public figures out what’s happening, the operation has already settled into routine. What’s unfolding now in the Caribbean fits that pattern far too cleanly to ignore.
These strikes have been on my radar since the first scattered reports of boats blown apart and civilians left in the water. The denials didn’t match the facts. The facts kept shifting. And underneath that shifting ground sat the same suspicion many of us picked up on immediately: this never looked like a real drug mission. In a previous piece, I talked about oil and how it looms behind everything Washington is doing in this region. But even readers coming in cold can recognize what’s happening now. The method is giving the motive away.
America doesn’t start these things with declarations anymore. It starts them with language. Before a missile is fired, someone in a polished office invents the kind of enemy the government is allowed to kill without congressional approval, public evidence, or meaningful oversight. In this case, the phrase was “narcoterrorist maritime actors.” No legal definition. No past usage. No boundaries. Yet suddenly powerful enough to turn a fishing boat into a legitimate target and a fisherman into a combatant. Once that phrase appeared at the podium, the legal terrain shifted under everyone’s feet.
Oil explains why the White House wanted freedom to act. This manufactured enemy explains how they seized it.
From there, the pattern hardened. The September 2 strike wasn’t an accident or a fog-of-war tragedy. It was the debut of a doctrine. Hit the boat. Hit it again if anyone survives. Let the sea erase the evidence. Let the press secretary wrap the whole thing in talk of “self-defense” and “standing authorities.” Let the lawyers backfill the justification. And by the time the truth leaks out, everything tangible is already at the bottom of the Caribbean.
That is what executive power looks like when it outruns the law. Congress never authorized force in Venezuela. It certainly never authorized force against this invented category of “maritime terrorists.” Lawmakers weren’t even shown a shred of evidence that would satisfy a Coast Guard trainee. Yet the administration behaves as if authorization is something it can award itself simply by renaming the people it kills.
The Pentagon’s unease spills into every briefing. The language is careful, strained, defensive. Officers talk like people trying to walk a tightrope over a fire they didn’t light. They know these operations sit in the gray zone between illegal and “plausibly defensible.” When the vocabulary grows ornate, the underlying order is usually rotten.
And let’s be honest about this part. No one who has ever worked around real counter-narcotics operations would mistake the Caribbean strikes for one. Legitimate interdiction leaves a trail. Seized cargo. Arrested crew. Phone records. Fuel logs. Satellite intercepts. Intelligence you can build on. Here, each mission ends the same way. No boardings. No seizures. No forensics. No survivors. Just shattered hulls slipping under the surface. A strategy that destroys evidence is not a strategy meant to stop traffickers. It’s meant to stop questions.
A blown-apart boat cannot embarrass the administration.
A dead fisherman cannot contradict the narrative.
A classified justification can paper over anything.
And that’s the point. The operation makes perfect sense if the real mission is impunity. It makes no sense at all if the real mission is drugs.
The deeper danger isn’t even geographical. It’s doctrinal. Once a president discovers he can create a killable class by inventing the right label, that authority never stays where it starts. It wanders. It looks for new targets. It follows political incentives. Today the label is pasted onto Venezuelan boats. Tomorrow, the pressure points shift north.
And Mexico sits directly in the crosshairs of that political logic. The fentanyl crisis is raw and real. The polling is brutal. The rhetoric is already halfway there. All someone has to do is declare that cartel labs qualify as “terrorist infrastructure,” and suddenly a president has a blank check to strike across the border without a vote, without oversight, without consequence. The bridge between narrative and policy is already being built in cable monologues, Senate trial balloons, and think tank whisper campaigns.
I’ve watched this pattern evolve before. The first CIA drone strike in Yemen didn’t matter because of who died. It mattered because of what the killing made permissible afterward. That one strike opened a door that stayed open for twenty years. Today we are watching another door being cracked open, this time in the Caribbean, under the cover of a drug war that doesn’t exist. A president is claiming the right to kill civilians at sea based on a category he invented, backed by evidence he refuses to show, justified by a legal theory that evaporates the moment anyone actually tests it.
Once this becomes practice, it becomes precedent. And once it becomes precedent, it becomes template. It becomes a way of doing business. It becomes part of the American vocabulary of force.
And the first victims of a new doctrine are always the ones the government believes nobody will defend. People without names in the American press. People whose deaths can be explained away with a shrug and a slogan. The people in that September 2 wreck were disposable. The eleven dead on the ferry were treated as disposable. The others who died before and after them were never meant to be remembered at all.
But doctrines never stop with the disposable. They start with them.
And if no one in power says no, the day eventually comes when that manufactured category expands far beyond the waters where it was first tested. That is why this moment matters. That is why the language matters. And that is why this quiet, creeping war deserves every ounce of scrutiny it’s finally beginning to get.
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Annotated Sources
New York Times coverage of U.S. Caribbean strikes, denials, confirmations, and terminology shifts
Washington Post reporting on Admiral Bradley’s orders and Pentagon internal conflict
PBS and NPR investigations into lack of evidence recovered from destroyed vessels
UNODC World Drug Report 2025 on trafficking routes and Venezuela’s minor role
DEA National Drug Threat Assessment 2025 on fentanyl origins and cartel structure
Statements by Colombian President Gustavo Petro at the UN on ferry victims and ICC referral
SOUTHCOM and Pentagon transcripts using “self-defense” and “narcoterrorist maritime actors”
Congressional statements from Senators Rosen, Tillis, Himes, and King regarding legality and oversight
Academic analyses of post-9/11 targeted killing doctrine, especially Yemen 2002 precedent
InSight Crime and WOLA research on Cartel de los Soles as corruption network rather than cartel
White House briefing transcripts confirming Hegseth’s authorization of the second strike
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