This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network.

I'm your host, Greg Sargent.

Serious questions are mounting about President Donald Trump's decision to bomb a small boat in the Caribbean Sea, killing all 11 people on board.

The administration says these were drug cartel members transporting drugs that posed a threat to the United States,

but many legal experts have concluded the bombing might have been illegal or possibly a war crime.

And this saga is getting darker.

Senator Tim Cain and two dozen other Democratic senators just released a bombshell of a letter laying out sharply drawn questions about the situation for the administration, and were told

that Cain reached out to Republicans to get their signatures on the letter, but none would, which is appalling.

New information has also come out about the strike that makes it all look

even worse. We're unraveling all this with Scott Anderson, a senior editor at Lawfare,

an author of a great new piece analyzing the legality of the strike. Scott, thanks for coming on.

Thank you for having me. So here's where we are. On September 2nd, Trump announced that he'd ordered the sinking of this boat, supposedly carrying what they call narco-terrorists, all linked to Trend de Aragua, which the administration has designated a terrorist organization.

Congress has not authorized this.

The only legal authority the administration seems to be claiming is

inherent constitutional power as commander-in-chief. Scott, can you sum up what we know about the facts here?

Yeah, absolutely. What we're aware of is that on September 2nd, the United States through what

appears by some ordering a drone strike, although we're not 100%.

I don't think I've seen that officially confirmed anywhere, targeted a small boat with 11 people on board

that the administration has described as positively identified. That's the language they use

members of Trenton to Aragua, killing all 11 members. The boat was initially said at various points to be headed to the United States. There was some flip-flopping on that by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who suggested at one point, it might as head to the United States, then wasn't so sure about it. There have been conflicting accounts since then with people who have analyzed the type of boat, the amount of fuel it holds, the direction it was headed in, subsequent reporting suggesting that, in fact, it wasn't clearly headed the United States or perhaps that it had even turned around after detecting it was being surveilled by U.S. military aircraft of some sort. We saw President Trump, parrot, what looks to be a fair amount of more formal Defense Department information, judging for some of the vernacular and acronyms used on his truth social platform, saying essentially positively

identified 11 members of TDA were killed, used lethal force, no service members or U.S. people

killed on the ground, which doesn't really apply here because obviously wasn't on the ground,

...