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Notes -
The latter part is not strictly true.
Per both the Comité Maritime International's Lex Meritima (of which the US is a signatory), and the UN Convention on Laws of the Sea (of which the US is not a signatory), vessels operating in international waters are required to display their name and home port/nation of origin at all times if they wish to claim protection under said conventions.
Yes - the claim that the vessels are "unflagged" being made by supporters of the "effectively pirates, so okay to dronekill" line of reasoning seems to me to be conflating two ideas:
The drone strike was carried out from a distance where the drone operator wouldn't have known whether the boats in question where displaying their name and port of registry - I don't know the details of the regs but when I was a sailor I did know that if you could read the name on a big ship you were too close. I would be very surprised if the US authorities knew or cared whether the boats in question were properly registered in Venezuela.
Pretty much every report I've read has placed the boat in international waters which means that they would have been well north of Trinidad and Tobago.
The drone strike was allegedly carried out with a hellfire missile which is a laser guided (IE line of sight) weapon. If they were close enough to score a hit, they were close enough to tell whether the boat was displaying a name and a flag even if they couldn't necessarily read it.
In any case, one of the core differences between "Admiralty Law" and conventional Anglo judicial tradition is that there is no presumption of innocence. Anyone in international waters is presumed to be operating outside the law unless they take explicit steps to remain within the law.
If the boat was in international waters, and I will concede that this is a big "IF", it was by default a legitimate target unless evidence is provided to the contrary.
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