The first step was taken in September. Donald Trump ordered a deadly military strike against a civilian boat in international waters, and according to the White House, the operation killed 11 people. Two weeks later, there was another, followed by a third strike four days later.

Week after week, the operations kept going. From the late summer through the fall and into winter, the administration kept targeting these boats and killing much of their crews.

This week was no exception. The Associated Press reported:

The U.S. military said Tuesday that it carried out strikes on three boats accused of smuggling drugs in Latin American waters, killing 11 people in one of the deadliest days of the Trump administration’s monthslong campaign.

The series of strikes conducted on Monday brought the death toll to at least 145 people since the administration began targeting those it calls ‘narcoterrorists’ in small vessels in early September.

A related report in The New York Times noted that Monday’s strikes marked the first time since the military campaign began that the administration bombed targets on both sides of the Panama Canal on the same day.

The developments increased the total number of U.S. strikes to 42 — or, more to the point, 42 strikes that we know about as a result of Pentagon disclosures.

When the number of strikes against civilian boats in international waters first started climbing, the entire policy didn’t just generate front-page headlines, it also faced foundational questions about the propriety of the military campaign.

Roughly five months later, the strikes have become so common that the coverage has moved off front pages, but the underlying questions haven’t changed.

They also haven’t been answered.

We don’t know whether there have been other strikes that haven’t been disclosed. We don’t know who has been killed. We don’t know if Team Trump is telling the truth about whether the targets were actually narcoterrorists.

Perhaps most importantly, we don’t know whether any of these extrajudicial killings have been legal, though a great many legal experts have argued that they are not. Indeed, NBC News reported in November that the senior military lawyer for the combatant command overseeing the lethal strikes reached the same conclusion.

Around the same time, Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, a former CIA analyst who served multiple tours in Iraq, told The New York Times that she had heard from active-duty troops who were concerned about the legality of the administration’s boat strikes, with some wondering whether they could be held personally liable for the operation’s many deaths.

Just because these questions are no longer dominating headlines doesn’t mean they don’t need answers. The need for congressional oversight in a controversy like this one seems obvious.