A reader today commented, "Unflagged boats are considered pirates under international law. It is not against the law to take them out."
The idea sounds authoritative — a neat legal shortcut that turns riding in an unmarked vessel into a death sentence — but its real purpose is to sanctify state violence. It reduces international maritime law to a cartoon so that killing becomes easier to justify.
In reality, piracy has a precise legal definition under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. It refers to acts of robbery or violence committed for private ends on the high seas. A vessel without a flag is not a pirate ship by default, nor does international law grant states carte blanche to execute its occupants.
States are permitted to interdict unflagged vessels, board them, detain the crew, and bring them before a competent court. The law does not authorize summary execution, missile strikes, or sinking boats full of human beings based on suspicion or lack of a flag. To claim otherwise is to turn policing into assassination and law into propaganda for the criminals in our own government.
Now, in response to this, some people shift the justification — they insist it wasn’t the missing flag, it was the drugs.
So let’s address that too.
Saying “maybe the drugs on the boat had something to do with it” is another way of excusing the state’s right to kill without trial.
Even if a vessel is suspected of carrying narcotics, that does not give any government the legal or moral authority to execute the people on board.
International maritime law, U.S. law, and the most basic principles of due process are unambiguous on this point: suspected drug trafficking is handled through interdiction, seizure, arrest, and prosecution — not missile strikes.
If drugs justified summary execution, entire supply chains would be fair game — including the banks that launder cartel money, the chemical companies that ship precursors, and the political actors who profit from the trade. But the violence is never directed upward.
It is always directed at the poorest and most disposable people in the chain. That asymmetry exposes what’s really happening: not law enforcement, but the performance of force.
Carrying contraband does not erase a person’s right to a trial. It does not transform them into a legitimate military target. It does not repeal the Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter, or the core principle that punishment must follow evidence, not precede it.
When we justify killing by saying “there were drugs,” we are endorsing a world where the allegation becomes the sentence, and the state becomes both executioner and storyteller. That is the architecture of tyranny, not justice.
What we are really witnessing — and what Pete Hegseth and his cohort celebrate — is the normalization of extrajudicial killing, the abandonment of due process, and the transformation of the world’s waterways into zones where the powerful can kill without consequence. This is how imperial violence always cloaks itself: with half-read snippets of international law wielded as moral absolution.
Once a society accepts that certain lives are disposable, the machinery of death expands with terrifying speed. First it is “pirates,” then “drug traffickers,” then “narcoterrorists,” then anyone the state finds inconvenient.
Violence admired at a distance soon returns home. The logic of impunity does not stay offshore.
But the truth is simple:
If a state believes a crime has been committed, it must detain and try the accused. Not execute them.
The moment we allow governments to kill without trial, we step out of the rule of law and into barbarism.
Those cheering these killings are not defending civilization — they are dismantling it.
Tim Hjersted is the director and co-founder of Films For Action, an online library dedicated to the people and movements creating a more free, regenerative, and democratic society.