A new test for the rule of law in America
Velshi
MS NOW, Ali Velshi
4.7 • 793 Ratings
🗓️ 7 September 2025
⏱️ 41 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Good morning. It is Sunday, September 7th. I'm Ali Valsh. Some troubling developments in the last |
| 0:10.5 | 96 hours as four of the most senior people in the executive branch have signaled that they and the |
| 0:16.2 | U.S. military are above the law as long as they do whatever is in service of Donald Trump's wishes. |
| 0:22.3 | This isn't hyperbole. On Tuesday, the U.S. surveilled a boat until it entered international |
| 0:26.8 | waters and then conducted a military strike on that boat. The administration says the boat |
| 0:32.4 | was carrying drugs from Venezuela with the final destination for those drugs being the United |
| 0:37.1 | States. The administration |
| 0:38.4 | claims 11 people were on board, people it describes as narco-terrorists. Importantly, those people |
| 0:45.1 | were not given a chance to surrender. They were apparently identified, determined to be guilty, |
| 0:49.4 | sentenced to death, and killed with no court of law, no administrative tribunal, no authorization |
| 0:53.9 | of the use of military |
| 0:55.6 | force. The administration has not offered any evidence to back up any of its claims about the boat |
| 1:00.4 | or its occupants or what it was carrying. We're all just meant to take their word for it. |
| 1:04.9 | As for legal justification for the shocking use of military force, it's been astonishing in its |
| 1:10.0 | flimsyness and seeming disregard |
| 1:11.8 | for both domestic and international law. Instead of interdicting it on the president's orders, |
| 1:19.3 | he blew it up. And it'll happen again. It's a war. It's a war on killers. It's a war on terrorists. |
| 1:24.5 | We're not just going to hunt for drug dealers with a little fastboats and say, let's try to arrest him. No, we're going to, the president has said he wants to wage war on these groups. |
| 1:31.9 | President Trump is willing to go on offense in ways that others have not been. It won't stop in with just this strike. Anyone else trafficking in those waters who we know as a designated narco terrorist will will face the same fate. I mean the legal authority, and I want to talk about these kids is that there are people who are bringing literal terrorists who are bringing deadly drugs into our country, and the President of the United States ran on a promise of stopping this poison from coming into our country. Hey, here's the thing. Drugs are bad. Drug dealers are bad. Terrorists are bad. You know what else is bad? Unchecked power. Use of our military without proper authorization. The determination that people should be subject to death without due process of law outside of willing participants in a war. And what's also bad is conducting extrajudicial killings of foreign citizens via military strikes in international waters with the legal justification being a campaign promise, according to the vice president. |
| 2:23.7 | Quote, Trump is willing to go on offense in ways that others have not been, end quote, says the defense secretary. |
| 2:29.7 | Who cares if the reason no one else is willing to do it is because it's illegal? |
| 2:34.4 | We're going to blow them up instead of arresting them and trying them in a court of law because we're waging war, says the Secretary of State. |
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