> Over the last month the U.S. has carried out several interdiction strikes on narco-trafficking boats in the Eastern Pacific and Caribbean
There’s no proof that that’s actually what they’re doing. They should present some.
Shouldn't we just trust them? Have they ever made a false public statement?
Neat, but not really new. People have been monitoring military activity with FIRMS for years.
especially in the Ukraine war
Not for long after TFA.
For those who don't know, FIRMS is NASA's "Fire Information for Resource Management System".
Note: "before they're announced" which is quite specifically not "before the strike occurs"
Yes that is how the English language works.
that would require a time machine
Or the Pentagon Pizza Index: https://www.pizzint.watch/
Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_pizza_theory
(Or similar for the nearest base/command centre for operations near Venezuela)
Which is the same dude, so not entirely out of the question
It has been possible to detect operations before they occur through clever analysis of open source data. The US military became aware of this many years ago and has spent a lot of time studying this type of exploitation.
The US pays people to search for and red-team their real non-public operations using OSINT. It helps the US understand how exposed they are, how to effectively hide in the OSINT environment, and how to manipulate OSINT to misdirect adversaries sifting through the same data.
The Iran bunker-buster strike seemed to exploit this misdirection ability to some extent.
How so?
Possibly referring to the fact they sent half the stealth bomber fleet to the Philippines, while the other half was actually performing the strike straight from the US.
The operation efforts of distraction are very very real however what has never ceased to amaze me about the U.S. governments lack of "intelligence" is why they do not take the same approach in hiding the gas stations in the sky. Some here may have seen this distraction as it occurred and given enough exposure to said data, aka experience, when an event occurs it certainly stands out as an obvious data pattern anomaly against what is normal. The old magicians trick of distraction however some here are old and wise enough to know the elephant did not disappear. ADSB data is an amazing thing and the fact the the U.S. government pays to keep in suppressed should be an indicator towards its revealing power. What you cannot see matters most and the world is coming to learn this with each passing day.
No, that would take an information leak.
That would only be a scheduled strike. That wouldn't work for ad-hoc strikes.
Ad-hoc strikes still need approval from the chain of command (or at least would have/used to), so there would still be radio chatter.
After a general objective and ROE are set, then it's usually just a JAG officer telling you if it's legal or not and that's all over military satellites or in the actual room somewhere in Florida.
I assume there are scenarios where the chain is skipped? I could be wrong, but don't the people sitting at nukes just launch if they see certain things? If they have autonomy, I assume everyone with a missile launch button has some to some degree.
Nuclear release authority is pre-delegated to varying degrees, but not down to the launch control centers. They do not possess the required information to launch their missiles. Precise delegation details are classified.
For combatants down in Venezuela's waters, the only time they're going to have permission to blow a boat out of the water without checking with higher authority is if that boat is actively firing on American servicemen or presenting a similar imminent threat to human life. Otherwise the strikes flow through an approval matrix. All of this is subject to change as situations develop, and command centers have military attorneys present in the room with them to counsel local leadership.
Depends on the ROE I guess
Or access to the Minority Report precogs
Or a Signal invite from Hegseth
The satellite feed removed from internet in 3, 2, ...
From one of the comments:
> Yes, FIRMS data is what most people use to monitor large strikes that create a significant heat signature. In the middle of the sea you'll usually just see oil platforms generate heat like that.
> A lot of people reading this know this already, but you could see exactly where the bunker busters were being dropped in Iran months ago from FIRMS data within ~15-20min of the strikes.
Are you sure that 15-20min latency is the fastest you can get that data?
This post is relatively old information to anybody following e.g. the Ukraine War, which is where I assume the poster got the inspiration for this. It's regularly used to publicly confirm strikes.
Unfortunately, why would the current admin want to stifle info about these strikes?
They brag about them, because murdering random people in the ocean on flimsy pretenses is popular to their base.
We have murdered at least 66 people so far.
It sure is funny how republicans insist that Fentanyl is a huge problem, but decline to punish those actually responsible, the sacklers, and have abandoned their blame of China for fentanyl production.
Meanwhile we continue a military build up off the coast.
Can't wait for all those people who voted for Trump because he "Doesn't start wars" to be completely silent or even supportive of a war against Venezuela.
Some things don't entirely make sense with the cynical view though. I would think his base would be very supportive of openly advocating for regime change in Venezuela even by force, so I don't quite understand subterfuge unless this is just early opinion driving.
Republican presidents sure like how wars do for their re-election though, and the Trump admin would love a war to "excuse" something like... say.... suspended elections.
"at-sea strikes" / crime against humanity.
Extrajudical executions without evidence, just a bunch of spurious talking points and unfounded accusations. It reeks of the stench of the "Saddam WMDs" that didn't exist. Churning the curds of casus belli to justify launching a foreign war to distract from domestic concerns like the Epstein files and the clawing back of healthcare to give more money to the billionaires.
Does anyone know - do they give the guys on the boat a chance to surrender, and they're fleeing? Or do they just bomb them without any kind of notice?
They strike first, and then if there are any survivors, which there usually are not, they seem to release them to their home countries ( https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/18/politics/caribbean-boat-strik... ).
Now, you may ask "if these are criminal drug traffickers that need to be killed, why would we release survivors instead of arresting them and charging them with a crime?"
Appears to be without notice.
Which is sad because the USCG has teams (HITRON) trained to perform these ops without blowing things up as the first action.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_Interdiction_Tactic...
This is spray and pray, they have no idea who is on the boat or what are they transporting.
So offering 'surrender' makes no sense for them, it would just expose this behaviour. It is not a secret, but they act like it is.
No, you have no idea who is on the boat. That's very different from the US military having no idea.
They may have some idea, but they definitely don’t know for sure— there could very well be innocent people on the boat. I’m not sure why arrests are not an option in these cases. It would be great press to announce “x kilos of cocaine captured”, “6 drug smugglers apprehended”
Instead it’s just “boat bombed, terrorists killed, drugs destroyed” with no proof that they’re terrorists or that there are drugs.
> with no proof
That’s why arrests are not an option.
It’s not dissimilar to George Bush’s weapons of mass destruction lie.
Given the several fishermen who have survived the strikes thus far, I'm pretty sure the US military has less idea
Where can I read about this?
Unverified Bluesky posts by people with conflicting interests
Who has a conflicting interest with fishermen getting blasted?
People who want to kill random people and claim they were bad drug terrorists.
That's not a conflicting interest, that's just an interest.
The President of Colombia https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn8xg1jve73o
Fishermen fly flags of the country in which their boat is registered.
Far offshore? Ideally yes. But on the 30km voyage from San Juan de Unare to Trinidad? I hardly expect a small fishing boat to be flying an ensign in that scenario
There are different kinds of boats. Most of them I'd say don't fly any flags.
I would expect anyone with something to hide would ensure their boat is setup for fishing. It isn't hard to do and makes a great cover. There are a few other legal activities you can use as cover, fishing is just the most obvious.
I have no idea if they really were doing anything but it is the obvious cover if they were.
Footage of the boats to date show they aren't trying to spoof legitimate fishing vessels. They are IMHO very clearly dope haulers and anyone saying otherwise is either extremely credulous or not being honest with everyone. Fishermen don't use boats that are painted to camouflage themselves and have a bank of powerful performance engines.
The dopers probably have realized that the deception angle doesn't work and just wastes payload space, so you're better off trying not to be seen at all. I suspect what happens IRL is that boats are boarded with men with dogs and the ruse falls apart, so the doper leadership decided to stop bothering with all the subterfuge and just try to (sometimes literally) run under the radar, maximizing cargo space so the runs that get through realize the most revenue.
The probably are dope haulers, that does not make murdering them OK.
Killing all drug haulers/dealers is ok, I fully support what they do in China and most of East Asia. The amount of society damage from drugs warrants it.
> Footage of the boats to date show they aren't trying to spoof legitimate fishing vessels.
This is a great moment to share a link or some other source of verisimilitude.
Also no one uses "dope" anymore - don't forget to migrate, we're on Reagan v3.0 now.
Okay.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2025/09/15/us-attack...
If you think those are fishing boats you don't know very much about fishing. Those are dope haulers. The question of whether dope haulers deserve a .mil missile is separate from establishing exactly what those boats are and exactly what they are doing — something I think anyone with half a brain inwardly knows even if they maintain otherwise in public forums like this one.
Couple of points;
What you think is going on in other people's brains, partial or not, is inaccurate. This is generally true for pretty much everyone, but especially in a case like yours where you seem utterly convinced that you know.
I do not know what is on those boats, and neither do you. Neither of us will ever find out, because they were sunk before any actual facts could be verified. This is precisely why we have due process.
In the scheme of things, I am much more worried about a well-armed force committing extrajudicial killings than I am "some dudes who might have drugs". The fact that you seem very concerned about the latter and are totes cool with the former is... concerning, to say the least.
I do appreciate you posting your sources, so thanks for that.
I don't know much about those boats, but I know they did not have fishing gear on board. Nor were they a luxury yacht. By process of elimination we can assume they are hauling cargo. Most cargo is concerned about fuel efficiency and so would not have that much power for the size of boat (most cargo is on large ships so much bigger engines, but for the size smaller and slower).
I don't know what they were doing, but they didn't match the typical profile of legal things people do. No sign of fishing, no sign of luxury, no sign of water skies...
Due process would still be good, but we know a lot already without that.
I'm responding directly to a post on using subterfuge to pretend to be fishermen, and further addressing the oft-stated opinion that fishing boats are being targeted.
They aren't bothering pretending to be fishermen, and also stating my personal opinion that most people saying they are fishing boats know they're not (and thus are being dishonest). Those are separate points than fighting drug trafficking with missile strikes.
You know what? Fair point. I can't necessarily talk for anyone else, but I will say that I have a tendency to be extra critical where state power is being abused. I served, and in my Army, we knew to our bones that our mandate was to protect the American people from foreign threat of violence, not as a police force. Not then and not ever. Posse comitatus wasn't the law of the land - it was a commandment from the highest authority.
So I suppose I jumped on with a little more haste than a sharing of opinions warrants. Sorry about that - this stuff gets me very hot under the collar.
If I step back and take another look at it, well - I'm still not ready to make a judgement as to what those boats were doing. There's not enough information - even taking the profiling argument into account. There are people who live as digital nomads on the sea just because they like to. Those boats might have been smuggling something other than drugs, like people (who might have any number of reasons to be on it - from human trafficking to refugees). There may be reasons that people have for taking a boat of that shape out that I am unaware of. Irrespective of the use of force, there is simply not enough data to come to a reasonably certain conclusion.
My time in service was spent as part of an IO unit - we would never have advised action on the data that's available here. The Risk factors are simply too broad and too deep.
I hear you. Drug boats or not, I would not choose our present course of action.
I think you’re the one being disingenuous now…you surely can’t look at that footage and say “drugs, kill everyone”?
Who said kill everyone? I was responding to a post about using subterfuge to pretend to be a fisherman. Deception is a personal and professional interest of mine so I responded.
Determining what the boats are and what they are doing is a separate (but related) topic than determining whether or not they deserve being blown up. Some people who are reading these words hold that these are fishermen, not traffickers, and I feel that is either a dishonest statement or those people aren't very clueful.
The issue most people have is not about the murder of drug smugglers, it’s the lack of a trial. It’s the lack of real evidence being shown to the public. It’s the fact there actually might be innocents on those boats. It’s completely normal for people in 2025 to expect we arrest and not just kill people randomly.
The USA was respected because it believed in those ethos…because it was better then a bunch of angry murderers.
The military has told Congress they don't know either.
> [The department officials] said that they do not need to positively identify individuals on these vessels to do the strikes, they just need to prove a connection to a designated terrorist organization or affiliate
- https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/30/dod-military-strike...
The most generous possible interpretation is that they have no idea who is on the boat, but they have evidence that somebody associated with the boat has some connection to an organization that they have designated as "terrorists".
When Pete Hegseth leaked a military strike on Signal, the specific strike they were discussing was blowing up a residential apartment building because the target was visiting his girlfriend there. “The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed”. So in this case ~100% of the victims, besides one guy, were unidentified civilians. I think this is an instructive example to see how these people (don't) think about killing civilians.
They know it’s fishermen, they just don’t care.
Either you don't know or don't care that fishermen fly flags of their country of registration. All boats do this in fact. BTW, planes do this by filing flight plans. Either you don't know this or don't care because you just want to make outrageous political claims.
People that mold some fiberglass and put some engines in it do not usually put a flag on their thing.
Also, plenty of planes do not fill flight plans, even in international flights.
Let’s say for a minute these are drug or terrorist boats.
Wouldn’t it be in the US best interest to capture these, gather proof, gather further intel?
I’m not making an outrageous claim. They are making outrageous claims and destroying the evidence.
Pentagon officials have told Congress they often don't positively know who are on the boats.
True, but they do know what the boats are doing and it isn't fishing. If they were fishing, they would be flying a flag of a specific country. Operating a boat without a flag is the same as flying a plane without filing a flight plan. You can object to the rules of engagement but they are in line with hundreds of years of maritime law.
I've never seen a fishing boat fly a flag, and I've been sailing in many countries for >20 years. Generally, fishermen don't care for such things.
So, since I am British and have a UK registered boat and know a bit about this. The law that applies (The Merchant Shipping Act 1995 section 5) requires that we should fly the flag when entering or leaving a foreign port or upon a signal by one of Her Majestys ships [1]. Flying a flag routinely in international waters is very much not required, and very few vessels fly a flag out there, because there is not much there to look at it and it just flaps itself to bits.
I've definitely been on a fishing boat of tourists in the Caribbean that wasn't flying a flag.
I wouldn't do that with the current US administration's actions and level of attention to detail.
> Operating a boat without a flag is the same as flying a plane without filing a flight plan
You seem to really equate this with the idea of planes flying without filing a flight plan. Are you OK with the US military shooting down any plane that doesn't file a flight plan, without even trying to communicate with the vessel or intervene in any other way previously, even if that vessel doesn't appear to be heading towards any specific US territory or vessel? Is that also allowable under international law?
No. You're not supposed to be bombing any boat you find in international waters that doesn't have a flag on it for whatever reason you can come up with.
If they're known drug traffickers worthy of execution without due process, why are the survivors being sent home instead of tried for their supposed crimes?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/us/politics/boat-strike-s...
"...for their home countries to prosecute"
Does not imply a belief of innocence.
Is vague enough to mean either thing which in and of itself is a red flag. "To face justice" is both a phrase this administration would use and is more concrete.
GMAFB. The US is famous for using 'extraordinary rendition' to take custody of people it deems terrorists and either try them or hold them in isolation at military camps. Do you really buy the line that they're being 'sent home to be prosecuted' by the same countries that are condemning these strikes? It seems far more likely that they're being sent home because they don't want to put them in front of a judge.
> worthy of execution without due process
Quite the fascist take you got there, buddy.
edit: My bad. On closer reading I believe you might have said that tongue-in-cheek. Reading intent in text is hard.
At least with the narco-subs out of Mexico, etc., a lot of the times the "crew" are people forced to do the job. They fail, their families die. They have no reason to surrender.
There's also one guy in the sub whose job it is to shoot anyone who tries to turn back or otherwise interfere with the mission.
Stop giving monsters who continually do monstrous things the benefit of doubt.
They do not.
How can they do this? Why is the world tolerating it? Would it be as acceptable for China to start doing this?
> Would it be as acceptable for China to start doing this?
Xi’s China has been ramming vessels in the South China Sea for a while now [1]. In 2019, “a Philippine fishing boat anchored in Reed Bank in the South China Sea, sank after it was rammed by a Chinese vessel,” its crew surviving because they were “later rescued by a Vietnamese fishing vessel” [2]. (“In July 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague ruled on a claim brought against China by the Philippines under UNCLOS, ruling in favor of the Philippines on almost every count. While China is a signatory to the treaty establishing the tribunal, it refuses to accept the court’s authority” [3].)
Russia, meanwhile, conducts extrajudicial atrocities in Africa through Wagner [4].
The simple answer is the great powers are broadly and consistently rejecting the notion of international law.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/philippines-accuses-chin...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Reed_Bank_incident#:~:tex...
[3] https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/territo...
[4] https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/03/28/mali-army-wagner-group-a...
Everything you're linking to is being done through proxies and officially denied. A fishing vessel ramming another on alleged behalf of the Chinese government is materially quite different to openly sending drones to blow multiple ships up.
The Chinese are being pretty open about it and there's abundant footage. I do agree it's qualitatively different. The Chinese ations are also different in that they're being used to assert a territorial claim: China has been building artificial islands (by dumpin large piles of dirt) so it extend its territorial waters. So they always claim the other vessels are violating their boundaries. I presume this is being undertaken with a view to keeping the US and its proxies as far away from their coastal areas as possible in the future.
> done through proxies
> A fishing vessel ramming another on alleged behalf of the Chinese government
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMNOljrw22g
It's a video of a Chinese Coast Guard vessel and a Chinese Navy vessel trying to hit a Filipino Coast Guard vessel. I do agree that it's worth seeing differently, just pointing out that China's plausible deniability of this is not always such.
PRC uses coast guard hulls, there's nothing being denied, these are generally framed as domestic maritime policing actions for PRC. Which is what makes the comparison generally stupid because PH / PCA ruling is not formal international law. UN/UNCLOS/ITLOS/ICJ has not recognized it, and PRC isn't party to optional arbituation clause, so ruling can't even apply to PRC. Ultimately PRC is simply doing domestic law enforcement in disputed maritime area with is not out of line with her UNCLOS obligations, i.e. until maritime delimitation formally settled at UNCLOS, there's nothing illegal about coastguard doing coastguard stuff in disputed area. This is not to mention up until a few years ago PRC ramming = while many other claimaints where flat out shooting. Like PRC coast guard ships were the last to get armed, some other claimaints already had heavy machine guns of lol missiles.
The flip side of this is US isn't signatory to UNCLOS so they can murder whoever they want on the highseas, and in the Hague I guess.
I do agree there is a stark difference between using missiles and bombs on ships versus ramming and water cannons.
However, you're incorrect about it just being fishing vessels and third parties. There are tons of examples of Chinese coast guard and navy ships doing this, its not unmarked fishing vessels or other third parties doing it on behalf of the Chinese state.
Thanks for the correction, I'd be interested to read more about their navy doing this.
From 2025:
https://apnews.com/article/south-china-sea-thitu-island-phil...
From 2024:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/philippines-china-sea-conflict-...
Another incident in 2024
https://news.usni.org/2024/08/31/chinese-vessels-ram-surroun...
And the very violent Second Thomas Shoal incident:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2024_Second_Thomas_Shoal_...
Whoever told you its just fishing vessels doing this are liars spreading misinformation. It has been official coast guard and naval vessels for years. This is very well documented.
This was last month:
>The Philippine coastguard, in a statement, said a Chinese coastguard ship “fired its water cannon” at the BRP Datu Pagbuaya, a vessel belonging to Manila’s fisheries bureau, at 9:15am (01:15 GMT) on Sunday.
>Minutes later, the same vessel “deliberately rammed” the stern of the Philippine fisheries bureau vessel, causing “minor” damage to the boat.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/12/philippines-accuse...
Coastguard firing a water cannon and ramming a ship causing minor damage. This is the same as a military drone causing total destruction of multiple ships?
No merely addressing the "all done through proxies" claim. And to counter the argument you are making, is an official government owned vessel the same as small random fishing boat and/or smuggler? At least in terms of reaction? To GPs point, multiple large countries have been moving the overton window here for a long time.
> This is the same as a military drone causing total destruction of multiple ships?
It's in a similar calibre of official disregard for international law.
Pretty sure the world would do little.
Because they are drug traffickers and nobody likes them. The argument against the strikes is based on principle alone, and matters of principle count for nothing in geopolitics. Other countries aren't complaining too loudly because they are happy that the traffickers are getting killed, and even happier that someone else is doing it for them. China does worse things daily and nobody makes much of a fuss.
How do you know they are drug traffickers? This administration doesn't exactly have a track record of honesty, competence, and acting in good faith.
$500K speedboats taking off from an area known for cartel activity in a country with a < $5000 GDP per capita loaded full with boxes and hauling ass on a one way trip across the Caribbean? If you want to argue that we shouldn't use the military to blow up cartel boats, fine. If you want to claim that these guys aren't moving bricks, GTFO.
You being unable to trust the government is not evidence of wrongdoing.
The military has never had to share its intelligence with civilians and it's not going to start now just to ease your mind.
Literally nobody is demanding Ukraine prove its targets are actually part of the Russian military before striking them.
Historically we get the assurance at least from other branches of government and understand that various oversights are in place, not just whims of the executive.
Among other differences, Ukraine is at war with Russia.
This simply isn't true. Getting the populace on board is a standard and important part of democracies initiating military action. Bush and his team spent endless amounts of time briefing Congress and the public on their justifications for the Iraq war for example.
Ukraine has gone to extensive lengths to only target military and, more recently, energy infrastructure in Russia. They aren't blowing up random civilian vehicles or ships, and have a clear incentive to show that they aren't doing that.
Fighting drug smuggling is a flimsy pretext for why the US is blowing up random ships, although it's apparently one some people are willing to believe. Take the same actions but change up the countries and the reactions would be very different. This is about Trump doing yet another tough guy show of force against a much weaker country he feels safe enough bullying.
> Bush and his team spent endless amounts of time briefing Congress and the public on their justifications for the Iraq war
Correction: they spent endless amounts of time lying to congress and the UN about their concocted, pretextual justification for the Iraq war.
> Correction: they spent endless amounts of time lying to congress and the UN about their concocted, pretextual justification for the Iraq war
One, legitimately unclear to what degree Bush et al believed the nonsense.
Two, they bothered to engage. That's OP's point.
Because they aren't flying a flag of the country in which their boat is registered. All boats do this. Not doing this is like flying a plane without filing a flight plan.
Technically when you don't fly a flag you are considered a pirate. Clearly they aren't pirates but they are smugglers. There is no other reason why you wouldn't fly a specific national flag. You can complain about the rules of engagement and that is fine. However, posts like yours aren't exactly rooted in honesty, competence or good faith.
> Technically when you don't fly a flag you are considered a pirate
Source? Piracy's definition under UNCLOS seems pretty tight [1].
[1] https://www.un.org/depts/los/piracy/piracy_legal_framework.h...
Just random subs and boats hanging around in the middle of the Pacific ocean. It's probably a fishing trip. That's definitely worth the time and resources of the Navy.
Does it actually matter?
So far, no one with a government who is both willing and able to make a fuss about it has been involved.
This is what realpolitik is.
> Does it actually matter?
Yes. The precedent being established would let e.g. China or Russia pot a yacht on the high seas for reasons which only work under their own laws.
What makes you think they wouldn’t already, if they had a reason?
[https://cepa.org/article/bombs-on-board-the-strange-streak-o...]
I've spotted a partisan perspective.
> The argument against the strikes is based on principle alone
So you're alright with the sitting president in the US now being able to kill civil citizens in international waters without declaring a war? Without having to go through congress?
Just by saying: "Ah this is a terrorist organization. And these people must be part of that terrorist organization"
What do you mean "now"? It's been this way since the Patriot Act.
Since long before that. The US hasn't declared war in a long time, but they have spied on, tortured, killed, maimed etc foreign civilians all the time.
And their own. Remember as well as deliberately executing its own citizens abroad the US also still just tortures some of its own citizens to death for ordinary crimes which they may or may not have actually committed. Basically it's a third world country with more extremely wealthy people than you'd otherwise expect, it's eerily like several Arab countries, but with slightly more democracy, at least for now.
fully agree with you but this language
> basically it's a third world country
is imprecise and misleading. torturing your own citizens to death is a first world specialty, see for example the troubles in northern Ireland
I was thinking of the extreme poverty and poor working conditions which are widespread in the US, but sure, the history of UK intervention in the Troubles isn't exactly a story of benevolence. No examples of torturing people to death came to mind though, are you thinking of some? The Five Techniques are torture, which is why they were banned before I was born, but the intent wasn't to torture people to death as I understand it - it's like "Enhanced Interrogation" in that you can tell idiots you're doing it to get information even though you're actually just a sadist. Even idiots understand that dead people can't tell you anything.
Sitting US Presidents have been able to kill and massacre people (including US citizens) in international areas without declaring a congressionally approved War for a very long time now.
Just because Trump likes to heavily boviate while former Presidents generally kept this under the radar, doesn't change how the US operated.
I think you need to show evidence that this is a power U.S. Presidents have. As much as I dislike most of the drone strikes the U.S. has conducted in the "war on terror" in the Middle East (and think some of them are war crimes), that actually does have specific Congressional approval.
This military action in the Caribbean does not have that approval, and I don't think there is any way of categorizing the smuggling of drugs as a part of terrorism. Bad and illegal, and worthy of policing, yes. Terrorism, no.
And to be even more specific: I think that there is good evidence that in many countries the drug cartels are committing terroristic acts in many South American countries in order to force the populations there to accede to them. But those are in those countries, and are not directed at the United States. And blowing up boats that the U.S. suspects are carrying narcotics (sometimes not even on their way to the U.S.), is not fighting that terrorism.
If you are referring specifically to AUMF-2001 under which both President Bush and then President Obama used as justification to bomb anything they disliked in the middle-east - including drug crop fields of the Taliban, I would point out that is an extremely flimsy supporting argument. The authorization was stretched until it was less than paper-thin. Many of the folks that the US bombed also became funded by the US just a few years later.
Head-chopping terrorists magically became "moderate rebels" - famous term by President Obama.
(I don't support these strikes - my only point was that former US Presidents unfortunately setup this tradition and culture of military strikes that has now been normalized. Congress needs to firmly reclaim the use of lethal international force under their authority.)
The point is that there isn't anything like the AUMF that authorizes these recent strikes in the Caribbean/pacific. The administration reported them to Congress at the outset, but now that the 60 day limit (on continuing something without Congressional authorization) they've switched to claiming they don't need Congressional authority.
Overbroad application of the AUMF in no way authorizes these actions. The administration claims it has a legal memo articulating why they're OK, but refuses to disclose it, citing security concerns. That's applicable to the specific intelligence they use, but not to legal arguments that supposedly justify their use of force.
‘So you’re alright with’? What do you think that has to do with anything?
No one really asked if anyone was okay with Obama ‘droning’ random folks while calling them terrorists either.
Notably, using the same tools (social network analysis, etc) that are now apparently being aimed at domestic ‘terrorists’.
People did complain about Obama's done strikes. Find articles from back then and you see the words "controversial" [1].
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/18/us-military-dr...
People used to complain about Obama's drone strikes. They still do, but they used to, too.
Yes. I said ‘did anyone ask’, aka did anyone doing them care.
And the answer is no. There was a bigger fuss in the power structure about the time he wore a tan suit, than about drone strikes.
That someone complains doesn’t mean if it matters. Plenty of people are complaining about what is going on now, also to zero effect.
And for those saying the AUMF justified Obama - it clearly didn’t justify it in Libya (not affiliated), and Congress expressly did not authorize it against ISIS - but drones were still widely used.
The biggest difference in these scenarios is if they were sold as ‘the right thing’, or as ragebait. There is plenty of precedent for presidents just droning/air striking countries with zero congressional approval - including Trump in his first term, Obama before that, etc.
Hell, Trump himself bombed Iran just a few months ago, and folks barely blinked an eye. Zero congressional involvement.
I'm not a fan of Obama's legacy of drone strikes. They hurt a lot of civilians and I think probably did more harm to US interests overseas than they helped.
However, most (if not all?) of the intended targets of Obama's drone strikes were targets with a pretty reasonable connection to the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military force. So those drone strikes were likely "legal" and covered under what Congress enabled when it passed that law and has so far failed to repeal. Theoretically, these were all people Congress agreed we were essentially at war with. Congress can choose to repeal the AUMF at any time, and could have done so during Obama's term.
I don't think there's any reasonable interpretation that random boats of the coast of Venezuela have any connection to 9/11 though, and thus there's pretty much no way to contort an argument that these actions are then somehow allowable. If Trump wants to go to war against Venezuela, he needs to get Congress to approve.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Milit...
I think Trump is an idiot and almost everything he is doing is a disaster. And the fact that the country is still running in spite of this is thanks to a lot of effort by other people.
However, in this particular case, I do have doubt. Because drug cartels are a huge problem and local governments are often very bad at handling them. Now, I take into consideration that it might be poor Venezuelan fishermen that are being mistaken for drug dealers, but I very much doubt it. It wouldn't make sense for anyone: for Trump, once the truth comes out, for the military personnel doing the strikes, for the reconnaissance teams - it's just nonsensical. And I believe that Trump, even though I don't keep him in high regard, actually is not a fan of killing just for killing. Or, to put it more cynically, he won't win his dream Nobel prize for killing innocent people senselessly. So, maybe, in this one particular case, maybe it could be effective in scaring the cartels into finding other routes.
Venezuela more known for gold smuggling (and 'trafficking' people who want out) than drug smuggling.
I bet some environmentalist will argue that gold smuggling is worse than drug trafficking, but still, my bet is that most of the kills were trafficked people and gold smugglers.
Venezuela has been a top 5 drug seizure country for many, many years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_drug_trade_in_Venezuel...
>Because drug cartels are a huge problem and local governments are often very bad at handling them.
True, but the legal precedent this sets is very important. The requirement for sound legal justification is the only leverage the Judicial branch has. Today's Supreme Court may be too deferential to the President, but that's not to say they don't have a line (listen to yesterday's hearing on tariffs). Also, the Supreme Court a decade from now will rely on today's justifications.
I do not want to give any President the power to unilaterally conduct military killings of people he considers a terrorist. For this specific President, remember that he's declared Antifa a terrorist organization. And that he has very casually accused a lot of citizens as being in Antifa before.
> Or, to put it more cynically, he won't win his dream Nobel prize for killing innocent people senselessly
You say that, but the lady who just won it this year is practically cheering on the prospect of Trump taking military action _on her own country_ to overthrow their leader. So I don't think thirst for war or death precludes winning a peace prize, unfortunately
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/05/machado-praises-tru...
Oh no, the absolutely horrible cocaine which is safer than alcohol.
Would you be okay with bombing some guys house that was growing marijuana? Or gunning down people in fancy cars that are suspected to contain drugs?
I didn't ask about China doing "worse things daily," I asked about China blowing up vessels in international waters and amassing a naval fleet off the coast of another country. If I understand correctly you are saying the world would be fine with that as long as they claimed the vessels belonged to a drugs cartel?
There's a distinction that you either didn't recognize or willfully excluded.
It's not that the US is simply "claiming" the vessels belong to a drug cartel, it's that nobody is denying that they were drug vessels. Not even Venezuela [1]. Maduro has denied that he is involved with the drug cartels, and Venezuela has claimed that the one or more of the strikes occurred within Venezuela's territorial waters, but they haven't made the argument that those boats were actually innocent non-criminal vessels.
And once you make that distinction, then yes. The world is fine with blowing up vessels that belong to drug cartels, even if China did it. They probably wouldn't be fine if it was actually refugees, but this does not appear to be the case.
Tacitly encouraging/aiding drug trafficking is also a low intensity way to have an asymmetric conflict with a much more powerful country.
See also Cuba emptying its jails and sending the prisoners to Florida: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/criminals-in-exodus-from-...
Drugs don't harm the other country, so it doesn't help win any conflict.
Are you familiar with the opium wars?
> It's not that the US is simply "claiming" the vessels belong to a drug cartel, it's that nobody is denying that they were drug vessels.
What? The king of England hasn't denied that they're drug smuggling vessels either, it doesn't mean he's admitting they are. I don't understand this logic at all.
I don't support these strikes since I personally believe the US would be far better served in the long run by arrest and interrogation - and not just a matter of ethical principle.
Having said that, all legal vessels have an ID and someone would have complained already about their property and crew being blown up. Its pretty clear they belong to hardcore criminal elements.
There's probably nothing to interrogate - the dudes driving the boats are probably just random poor farmers that took a pay day from a cartel.
Random poor farmers can't really operate a submarine.
Random poor farmers manage to drive cars, trucks, planes, boats, drones, etc. What is so special about a DIY submarine with a max depth of like 15 feet that they couldn't be taught in about 15 minutes? These aren't WWII U-boats, they are small personal craft. There is even an entire community of DIY Caribbean submarines for exploring coral reefs and shit and they aren't all build and drove by engineering PHDs.
These kinds of submarines really aren't very complicated to operate. Its not like you're managing a nuclear reactor or anything.
They are more complicated than you state. Crew need to navigate long distances in open ocean, handle rough weather, and perform docking/unloading. These subs have control systems, ballast tanks and pumps. You need both training and experience.
Mismanagement can cause swamping or sinking. The management loses their vessel and their cargo.
Basically, "just random poor farmers that took a pay day from a cartel" is simply not possible.
"perform docking/unloading" LOL. Pull up on a beach in the middle of the night and grab the bricks out of the sub for the guys waiting for you there. This isn't a commercial port with cargo cranes, industrial equipment, and all that. As for handling rough weather, it's a sub. What's going to happen? It's going to sink?
> Crew need to navigate long distances in open ocean
Not incredibly difficult these days with GPS. Especially if they're doing an Atlantic crossing, its not like there's a lot of things to hit. They're all diesel-electrics, they spend a lot of their time practically at the surface. When they need to dive, its usually only for a few hours at a time, a compass heading is good enough for those times especially in the open ocean. Its not like they're trying to read complicated sonar outputs or anything like that. They're not busting out a sextant to figure out their latitude. They also aren't explorers trying to chart out a new path, they're pretty much going to follow the known good routes other boats have gone before.
> perform docking/unloading
I imagine there are more than just the people operating the boats at the docks. I also don't think it takes a lot of training and skill to pick things up and set things down. And its not like they're having to be some certified harbor pilot bringing in the boat into the shipping lanes, its going to be some little dock off in the middle of nowhere far away from other traffic.
They could learn the ropes of how to operate this thing in a few days along with some good basic documentation, assuming the farmers are literate. Its not like its that hard figuring out "this handle makes us dive, this handle makes us go up, don't go deeper than this, make sure batteries stay within this range, follow the GPS route".
I'm not saying these couldn't possibly be well-trained people operating these vessels, but it doesn't take too much training to figure out how to operate one of these things.
If you traffic drugs to China the CCP will do things to you that are very much worse than the comparatively humane quick death in an airstrike.
> amassing a naval fleet off the coast of another country
Surely you are joking about this part, right?
So would you say it's fine if China claims that some boats in the South China Sea are drug traffickers and blows them up without any evidence?
Shouldn't there be some evidence at least that this is the case? Maybe capture the boat and show the drugs, instead of just blowing up any chance of evidence?
> So would you say it's fine if China claims that some boats in the South China Sea are drug traffickers and blows them up without any evidence?
People making those arguments probably would say it is fine, in the abstract, then when it actually happened they would loudly complain that it was a violation of some treaty or another nation’s sovereignty.
Cartels are not some unique exception to the rule of law any more than human traffickers, terrorists, or other bad guys. But the rule of law doesn’t really matter anymore.
The legalism of the 20th century is stone dead. In time we will have to relearn the lessons that first brought us there, hopefully without too many needless deaths along the way.
Would I say it's "fine?" No. I also wouldn't say it's just fine that Trump is blowing up cartel boats. But would I be outraged, or even feel sorry for them? Also no.
Divulging your means and methods is a surefire way of getting the cartels to adjust their operating procedure to avoid detection. If they're being watched via satellites, they'll move their ports. If their cell phones have been hacked and are leaking info, they'll start using different devices. If there's a human source giving the info, he'll be hunted down.
It's not like this is the first time when the US has withheld evidence for certain actions it took. That doesn't mean the evidence isn't there. This is generally a problem with judging government behavior due to the information asymmetry
Again, I'm not asking about other unnamed things China may or may not do. I'm asking about blowing up ships in international waters.
Then I will answer you perfectly directly. Nobody would give the slightest shit because China already does things 10x worse and nobody gives a shit.
This isn't really a direct answer, it's just hand waving. I'm not sure how you're qualifying "ten times worse" and without pointing to specific scenarios it's impossible to verify the responses or non-responses to them.
The real answer is that these boats are not flying national flags. That makes it legal under maritime laws that have been in place for hundreds of years. If you are watching a news source that doesn't mention this, you are consuming propaganda. BTW, this line of propaganda about lack of rule of law is dangerous. Seriously, you should stop it.
You keep arguing that not displaying a falg is justification for killing people. This is bullshit. It's justification for interdicting a vessel but not for simply blowing it up.
Explain to me in what scenario it would make sense to put 7 people on a small speed boat and fill up the rest with drugs to transport them from one Caribbean location to another.
Explain to me in what scenario innocent people loaded the boats up like the ones shown in the video below just to do what? Dodge tarriffs? A boat like that full of cocaine is worth enough money to be worth the trip. A boat like that full of coffee beans is not worth enough. And that isn't a fishing boat, a tour boat, or any recreational yacht.
1. It's a day that ends in Y
2. You like to make money
Actual evidence for "fill up the rest with drugs" is missing (or at least not publicly presented).
Everywhere. Here it's just another day in Spain raiding Morocco drug boats trying to get themselves into Algeciras.
But there it makes sense. It is a short distance and there is lots of police which puts time pressure on the transport and offloading. If you are near Venezuela why wouldnt you just put your tons of drugs in fishing boats or transport ships. What do you need the additional half a ton of human weight in those small boats for?
Raiding drug boats coming into Spain, blowing up alleged drug boats in international waters? Is there any difference?
Well, the murder, for one.
> Because they are drug traffickers and nobody likes them.
So far zero proof of that, but plenty of proof that this administration lies about everything. So, the probabilities suggest these are lies too and they're just murdering random fishermen.
So you really believe they are just murdering random fisherman for fun?
> So you really believe they are just murdering random fisherman for fun?
I believe they are murdering geographically-selected fisherman and painting them as traffickers targeting the US (even though this is implausible for multiple reasons) as propaganda to manifest justifying “escalation” in a war they have been claiming even before they started those publicized murders was being actively fought between Venezuela in the US as a pretext for bypassing due process and moving toward direct executive fiat and militarization of civilian life within the US, starting with the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act on March 15.
Yup, and plenty of history of this cough WMD’s in Iraq, Gulf of Tonkin, and many more.
Fishermen do not use semi-submersibles or speedboats with four outboard engines. Would you agree with that?
Fisherman? No. But you could go to any marina on a US coast and find endless amounts of boats with 4+ motors on them. You are an idiot if you go out on the open sea with some little boat with just 1 motor, having extra engine power is the only thing keeping you alive out on the open ocean.
Semi-submersibles? Probably not fishermen.
Boats with four outboard engines? Sure, lots of them, I see those all the time when I'm at the coast.
$200k USD worth of outboard engines on a speedboat. Tell me you know nothing about fishing without telling me that.
I spent half my life on the coast. I've seen a lot of boats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dpvFzlmW0Y
Guess these are all purpose built drug smuggling boats. Shit, some have 5 engines.
Shit, I live near some crappy lakes in Texas and I still see a few four-engine boats by people with more money than sense. Guess they're trafficking that fentanyl from Lewisville to Little Elm.
Are these $500K boats in a country with a GDP per capita of $5000? Are these boats taking off from areas that are known origin points for drug trafficking? Are these boats making sketchy long distance one way trips or just cruising around for the day and returning to the same marina? Have you surveilled these boats with insane OP state of the art military surveillance tech and concluded that they are running drugs?
The coast of Venezuela, loaded full of unknown packages? Jesus, there's video. Do you think they're loaded with dozens of rectangular bundles of tuna?
Why don't you argue that arbitrarily shooting missiles at random drug smugglers is bad instead of arguing that they're not actually drug smugglers?
Why don't they argue boats loaded with strange cargo hauling ass in the middle of the ocean is probably a drug boat instead of suggesting all boats with four outboard engines can't possibly be a fishing boat? Go to any docks on the Gulf Coast, you'll find tons of four-engine fishing boats. Or are those all used for narcotics smuggling?
I'm not arguing they're definitely not drug boats. They likely are! But the person I replied to suggested all boats with four outboard engines are likely drug boats, which is absurd.
What a ridiculous take.
Tell me about those WMD's again.
Tell me about the 100k fentanyl deaths each year. How does this volume of drugs reach the US?
It's fentanyl, one semi successful smuggling run traffic's enough fentanyl to lethaly dose thousands of people.
The US mail and Fedex. A single small package can have enough fentanyl to kill 100K people. It certainly doesn't come from South American.
> Tell me about the 100k fentanyl deaths each year. How does this volume of drugs reach the US?
Illicitly manufactured fentanyl used in the US is predominantly produced in Mexico and smuggled across the very large land border between the US and Mexico.
Probably the next most common source is domestic illicit production.
Given that nobody grows opium poppy in South America, it's definitely not through Venezuela.
By coming over the land border with Mexico. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg93nn1e6go
Your rhetorical question suggests you thought lots of fentanyl is coming on boats on the ocean. This might be a good moment to pause and reflect on where you get your information and how you reach your conclusions.
People cooking it up domestically? Its not hard to make (if you don't mind killing some people) and its ingredients can be commonly found in the US.
Through small parcels from China mixed in with regular mail? People mail weed all the time and that's also illegal to go through the mail. A small parcel can carry many thousands of doses with high enough purity.
Most fentanyl in the US probably has little to no connection to Venezuela. Probably lots of other drugs, sure, but not fentanyl.
A lethal amount of fentanyl can be as small as 1-2mg. So enough fentanyl to kill 100k people would be like 50ish grams. Its not nearly some massive amount of material like you seem to think it is.
It's mostly made in Mexico... https://insightcrime.org/investigations/fentanyl-producers-m...
It used to come primarily from Indian and China way back in 2023... https://insightcrime.org/investigations/how-fentanyl-synthes...
I believe they are murdering people they have convinced themselves are probably drug traffickers, for fun and geopolitical tensions.
For instance, the CIA was following the preacher Roni Bowers cessna plane as suspicious for drug trafficking. And then she was shot down, and her family killed. Because intelligence is often wrong.
Now you'll point out, after they were shot down, magically it was uncovered the CIA actually suggested the people that shot them down not do it. Even though the CIA was the one sticking them on them in the first place.[] If they had actually been drug traffickers, or just nobodies, of course, we'd hear precisely what we've been hearing about these vessels, which is jack squat from the government other than they killed the "drug traffickers" and we'd never hear about the voices that recommend they not.
If they end up killing a preacher or a scientist in the future, you can be sure they'll magically find the same evidence. "We warned them not to this time, but they did it anyway."
[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Peru_Cessna_185_shootdown
Reasonable take. I think they at least believe they are doing something good for the country.
The El Salvador approach to extreme aggression against cartels has changed the calculus for many leaders in the Americas. See Rio De Janeiro last week.
Can you elaborate? El Salvador's approach seems to me to be "let Trump use our prisons, he lets go of our drug dealers". Bukele's closeness to MS13 of course biases him against their rivals, but that doesn't stop drugs from coming to the US, just who gets the money.
For fun? Not entirely. But these killings make great propaganda pieces about stopping foreigners and drugs despite not making even a dent or scratch against illegal drug importation.
Yes, that's what the US has been doing for decades after all.. After all, they could easily (attempt to) arrest them without killing them. Fortunately, it's becoming more of a multipolar world. The neocons (just like yourself) have no morals.
It pretty clearly is for fun since the US has the capability to disable and board these vessels.
Yep, this is clearly what is stupid about the situation. They want to blow the boats up. Now, if I wanted to do it, I'd blow some up, then disable some and show how they were loaded with drugs and we never got the boats wrong.
In this case, I don't think they care what's on the boats.
Oh, you mean business as usual for decades, that changes nothing.
Of course not. They're murdering random fishermen for political gain.
The US has gone to war with entire countries over complete bullshit. Remember WMDs? Gulf of Tonkin? Do you really think the current government is above killing a few randos to make themselves look good?
> Because they are drug traffickers and nobody likes them.
I mean thats what the US is saying, but proof is elusive.
> The argument against the strikes is based on principle alone,
No, law, and the US's own rules of engaguement. Fucking about in international waters, and sinking civilian boats with no warning, proof or attempt to detain is going to cause issues when it happens to the USA.
> Other countries aren't complaining too loudly because they are happy that the traffickers are getting killed
They are not complaining because the USA is run by a capricious child who will cause economic harm if his ego is attacked.
> China does worse things daily and nobody makes much of a fuss.
You might not be looking at it, but those who live near are making a huge fucking fuss.
TLDR:
just wait till someone does it to the USA.
What's China doing that's worse? What evidence is there that these are actually drug traffickers?
You could start with killing disfavoured people to order for their organ donor programme. Or that whole Tibet thing.
I mean, China has committed an ACTUAL genocide.
This is neocon propaganda that only simpletons believe.
Just curious, why should I believe this is merely neocon propaganda? I've read tidbits about this off & on over the years and it doesn't seem that straight forward, even if calling it genocide is on the hyperbolic side.
Technically its just ethnic cleaning because its trying to destroy their local culture. But somehow I bet you don't want to base your argument on this technicality.
I've got news for you about the "genocide" in Palestine, and your left wing propaganda.
And yet, the arguments against the narrative of Uighur genocide seem to exclusively be childish insults. Seriously, I see comments just like this all the time when someone mentions Uighur genocide, of which there is some evidence, and never an actual refutation. Are simpletons those who believe evidence might indicate truth, or those who let themselves be browbeaten by tribalism into believing otherwise? I wouldn't even ask if I thought you were just a CCP bot but your post history suggests you're not.
No, the burden of proof is on the proponents of this.
If the Chinese are committing genocide against the Uighurs, the US is also committing genocide against its black population, which it imprisons and kills at much higher rates. I'm willing to accept that both are committing active genocide but few China-haters seem to be.
Trump pardoned the operator of the largest opiates by mail operator in world history on his first or second day in office (Ross Ulbricht). I'm pretty sure they're doing this just to start war with Venezuela from some mix of Venezuela nationalizing their oil in the past and wanting to undo that, Venezuela lobby and intersection of with the rightwing Cuban lobby/Rubio's ties to that. Democracy probably as low concern, given our relation with Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.
The history of Rubio introducing the Venezuela Temporary Protected Status and Asylum Assistance Act of 2018 in Trump's first term, leading to large parts of the "immigration crisis" under Biden, and then Rubio going along with rescinding the status is pretty crazy. We played a big part in their economic crisis, offered asylum to many people driven to flee not just politically but largely from that crisis, then rescinded status to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans and began deporting to concentration camps based in some cases on tattoos, now the extrajudicial killings, and it's looking like big potential for a war of aggression.
You aren't getting it. Basically every country on earth hates the cartels and wants them dead. They aren't going to complain when somebody is making that happen, and they don't much care how it's done as long as it isn't happening on their soil. And they care even less that the people doing it aren't saints themselves because nobody is. Nobody is going to stick their neck out for a cartel.
This is just about people wanting to be seen as strong men in their own country and attacking citizen from other countries they know cannot retaliate.
Cartels will be fine though, do not worry. USA credibility, less and less.
Yes, but the question was "why does the world stand by and let this happen?" and I was answering that.
Interdict the vessels!
Why resort to madness and slaughter?
I can think of few people on earth who deserve madness and slaughter more than the cartels.
Because surely the people running drugs across international water in boats are certainly hardened cartel members that make decisions and not just whatever poor saps they can find that are desperate for money?
That's not justice. And that attitude can easily be turned on anyone you know or care about.
We're powerwalking towards regime change wars over cocaine. It strikes me as completely absurd to employ our significant military power to destroy tiny vessels at sea instead of targeting operations and finances. It seems just as amoral and egregious to make a show of such wanton and asymmetric destruction. I have a number of questions about this like:
- Is our military intelligence now being used to conduct international police work and enforce international or domestic law?
- Should we expect our police mandate to extend to foreign countries?
- Are these military operations undermining existing narcotics operations and international cooperation with DEA?
- When these civilians dissolve back into the population, will we chase them there with cruise missiles and drone strikes?
- If the cartels load a brick onto FedEx freight, will we destroy the aircraft? Why not just blow it up?
- Does it matter who is captaining the vessels, if the cartels (as ruthless as they are, and I am on board with this sentiment 100%) force/threaten/coerce a person to mule for them, how would this victim convert to a valid military target?
- This is whataboutism or close enough, but it is more than reasonable: Didn't our previous interventions in these exact regions train thousands of elite paramilitary operators who would later become the very mercenaries and thugs running the show today? (School of the Americas, Los Zetas)
- Why does it feel like we are replaying 2 or 3 of our worst policy blunders since the 1980's and/or are we actually just cleaning up the blowback?
Really? I can think of lots
When there are survivors we've just been sending them back. Likely some haven't been smuggling drugs at all, and even less to the US given the distance and the range of the boats. In 25% of coast guard drug suspicion induced stops near the US, the coast guard fails to find any drugs. Would you be ok with the US national guard going into Appalachian cities and killing doctors suspected of running pill mills without trial, by aerial bombardment, and with high rate of mistakes?
> Because they are drug traffickers
Are they? How do you know?
And even if they are, where does it say that drug traffickers should be executed on the spot? Furthermore, where is the law that punishes drug trafficking with death?
In the Philippines policies that landed Duterte in The Hague.
It's always the same "but uhhh China is even worse" argument but no proof to back it up. It's also completely invalid to justify an immoral action by comparing it to something even worse: "Yeah we genocided some palestinians but hitler was even worse so it's ok".
Yes, of course there is no proof. It's all US lies. Stop calling our reeducation centers prisons!
Surely all the Venezuelan cops who are getting paid to turn a blind eye like them. IDK how many of those guys there are and how much pull they have with the government....
They don't. The people paying them and the schleps on the drug boats are two different people. They're putting their worthless peasants on the boats; Venezuela is chalk full of them so blowing up a few here and there makes no difference in the incoming bribe money nor to the drug trafficking organizations.
No one cares that they are dead. Not their employers, not the Venezuelan government, not the police who can now exploit the families of the dead even more, nor the Americans bombing them. They are mere expendable flesh in a game of politics, a token blood offering to the kings and princes of prohibition.
My point is that even if the government would rather not have a drug trade fueled competing government within it's borders (which is what the cartels basically are) there's a whole bunch of people in the pickaxe business that would rather the gold rush remain profitable which potentially constrains the government's ability to solve the problem itself.
If I were the police looking to sell the most "pickaxes" I'd be thinking more about how I could take bribes from traffickers and also sell out the traffickers (or just selected patsies with the blessing of the cartels) to the US authorities at the same time.
They may be able to sell even more pickaxes than before.
Yes, that makes total sense, that a narcoterror regime would entrust the security of their extremely valuable drug shipments to "worthless peasants" instead of professional gunmen from Tren de AGUA.
They don't put pros on the boats because there is no reason to. Their gunmen won't do a damn thing against the coat guard, and nobody private is dumb enough to hijack a cartel boat, and the peasants on that boat know exactly what happens if they don't deliver the cargo.
Professional gunmen doing what exactly, while they are on a go-fast boat or narco-submarine with actual professional gunman on the docks on either end? The only people capable and willing to board such boats are the coast guard. Sending higher up professional gunmen to risk the open seas would be virtually pointless. Even if a private individual/group tried it, the cartel would 'deal' with them as soon as they got it back on land, no need to risk their enforcers on the high seas for such an improbable event.
You can see the same thing watching drug trafficking police videos. Most the time the drugs are in transit it is some random poor person with not much else going on in their lives. As soon as they are confronted by armed men they play dumb until the ruse is up.
It's tolerated because the US is the most powerful country in the world. Lots of things we do wouldn't be accepted from any other country (invading countries unprovoked, funding and arming genocides, staging coups and rigging elections, assassinating foreign leaders, the list goes on and on)
"narco-trafficking boats"
There's no public evidence of that though. No trial. It's the same as if we sent the navy to board those boats, put a gun to people's heads and execute them in cold blood.
100% agreed with this and this is one of the worst issues about the development of long range weapons. 'We droned this guy.' 'We bombed this area.' 'We destroyed this boat.'
All of this really sounds so much better than what it really is. It's murdering people all around the world, many of whom are 100% innocent. For instance the last person we droned in occupied Afghanistan was Zemari Ahmadi - a longtime worker for a US humanitarian aid organization. A US drone operator mistook bottles of water he was loading into his car for his family as bombs, and so they murdered him as well as 10 other civilians, including 7 children, all with the press of a button. [1]
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/world/asia/us-air-strike-...
>many of whom are 100% innocent
Under US law, 100% of them are 100% innocent, by definition. "Innocent until proven guilty" and whatnot; it literally means that every person is innocent in the eyes of the law until a court finds them guilty.
Its kind of irrelavent in an armed conflict. There are a bunch of rules (i.e. the geneva conventions) around who can and cannot be targeted in an armed conflict, but innocent vs guilty is not how it works. Innocent people being killed can sometimes totally be consistent with the rules of war. Guilty people being killed can sometimes be a violation of the rules. Innocent vs guiltly is the wrong metaphor for what makes a legal target.
It's not an armed conflict in any legal sense, according to everyone but partisans (that I've seen).
In general only combatants are allowed to be targeted. (Alleged) drug trafficking is not combatting.
But in this case the point is a bit moot anyway as laws of war apply only to losers.
It kind of seems like a stretch in this case, but in principle those two things can overlap.
For example Mexico's fight with drug cartels is widely considered to meet the definition of non international armed conflict.
Is USA at war though?
In the modern sense, yes. We no longer declare wars explicitly, nor do we limit that decision to Congress. Trump's decision to attack these targets is consistent with every other conflict we've engaged in since before either of us were born... national security threats. Even if you believe the dope itself to be no great national security threat, that's just their payload today, maybe next time they'll smuggle in a nuke or whatever.
Of all the things that people on the left might find objectionable about Trump, this should be at the very far bottom of the list.
> Of all the things that people on the left might find objectionable about Trump, this should be at the very far bottom of the list.
Given that the left are the only ones complaining about the extrajudicial killings under the Obama administration, I disagree.
Personally, I find public officials murdering unarmed people objectionable in practically all cases. And I think it's probably the worst thing a public official can do.
>Given that the left are the only ones complaining about the extrajudicial killings under the Obama administration, I disagree.
I see no evidence of that. The only places I've ever noticed any complaints there were from the alt-right and libertarians (same thing?). You can see this in magazine titles like Reason if you care to check.
>I find public officials murdering unarmed people
What evidence is there that these people were unarmed? And what if they were? If there was 800 pounds of cocaine (or whatever) on board, and they didn't even have a butter knife with them... why should that somehow exempt them from the hostile response they received?
We should probably enact harsher laws on drug smugglers / narco traffickers. A lot of asian countries have essentially declared the death penalty to drug importers.
The administration wants to see results and it would seem that the problem is that the American judicial systems is set up to simply cost money, which is something narcos have.
If you take a cartel to court, they just have a lawyer tie up your law team. We've made the mistake of allowing capitalism to influence too many of our systems of government from judicial (cost of lawyers) to electoral (advertisement costs and political campaigning). Isn't this the problem?
> Of all the things that people on the left might find objectionable about Trump, this should be at the very far bottom of the list.
Saying the quiet part out loud: "Murdering people without due process should be at the bottom of the list of things to care about." Yes, thank you for clearly outlining the "right's" position on the issue.
> Even if you believe the dope itself to be no great national security threat, that's just their payload today, maybe next time they'll smuggle in a nuke or whatever.
You're saying it's fine that they're killed for something they could "maybe" do in the future? Without even seeing any evidence that they're doing what they're accused of today? Have there been instances in the past of drug smugglers moving into the nuclear warhead smuggling game?
>You're saying it's fine that they're killed for something they could "maybe" do in the future?
Smuggling of any sort is a weapon with disastrous consequences. We wouldn't let the cartels have nukes, why would we want them to have "smuggling"? Yes, I'm fine with this. That they promise not to use it for really bad stuff for now wouldn't make a difference (and they're not even making that promise).
>Without even seeing any evidence t
I'm not interested in being the internet jury for this, no.
>Have there been instances in the past of drug smugglers moving into the nuclear warhead smuggling game?
Gee. That's something I really want to wait until after they commit the offense before we do something about it. You've changed my mind with your top-notch debate strategy.
The boats they are attacking won’t have drugs, these are the slow fishing boats that are at most refueling the go-fast boats with the drugs. Killing these people is just murder and nothing else. We have been doing drug interdiction for years without killing everyone until the orange dictator came into power.
Source: I did a deployment in counter drug interdiction in the Navy.
Edit: if you really want to know how threatening these guys are, they usually spotted our aircraft and the first thing they did was ALWAYS to jettison any weapons they had immediately, then start throwing out the drugs. They knew they weren’t fighting a USN ship and that we weren’t guns to harm them if they were peaceful. I suspect they might fight back now, though.
> that are at most refueling the go-fast boats with the drugs.
Oh. Wow. That makes it ok then. As long as they can all play hot potato and the drug runners don't have it on their own persons when the missile hits, it was unjustifiable.
Most of the fishing boats we boarded that were suspected to be resupply boats were, in fact, regular old fishing boats. The 1 we found that was a resupply boat had only external signs of fishing, but internally had fuel bladders instead of fish and ice. We, of course, didn't murder those guys or the 4-5 go-fasts we caught: we captured them and turned them over to partner country navies for legal processing.
In other words, most of the boats our intelligence apparatus thought were possible supply boats were simply fishermen. We are definitely killing some innocent fishermen with these strikes, and even if we weren't it's not ethical or legal to murder a bunch of guys selling fuel to drug runners. By the way, all of the drug runners are basically indentured servants or slaves and their families are being held back home as collateral.
Keep thinking you're on the side of right, though, and when you realize the USA is the baddies on this one you will hopefully be horrified at the realization.
> We wouldn't let the cartels have nukes, why would we want them to have "smuggling"?
Because usually we only respond to behaviours and actions that actually exist in the real world. By this logic we should charge all shop lifters with treason because they're not promising they'll never steal state secrets.
> Gee...You've changed my mind with your top-notch debate strategy.
I'm not sure why you're choosing to take this tone but I would hope we could have any further discussion like adults.
Actually i find all those other interventions unacceptable as well. Nobody on earth should be accepting summary executions in international waters without evidence. Today "cartels," tomorrow journalists.
> Innocent people being killed can sometimes totally be consistent with the rules of war.
The US attacks people and countries without declaring war.
If anyone did this to the US, can you imagine the butt-hurt response?
> The US attacks people and countries without declaring war.
Declaring a war stopped being a thing after world war 2. Not just for usa but for everyone. In modern times a decleration of war has no meaning in international law. It only has meaning in domestic law.
I think the reason is that the UN charter makes it illegal to fight a war except in self-defense. In modern times declerations of war have generally been replaced with sending a notice to the un security council that you intend to use your right to self defense. I dont know about this particular situation but i think a lot of the time historically the US has followed that procedure.
The majority of the West has implicitly or explicitly ceded their national defense and warfighting capabilities to the USA. The comparison between USA and “other countries” isn’t really valid, as the situations are vastly different
What does that mean? That USA is somehow killing people all around the world as a puppet or Iceland or something?
The West isn't the world, though. China could start taking out random boats next week.
US exceptionalism doesn’t make killing ok.
Its kind of irrelavent in an armed conflict
which this is not, so what's your point?
Seems like it’s turning into one
sure does, but temporal considerations matter and the United States military has been killing people—at the President and SecDef's direction—in the Caribbean and Pacific for weeks, now, without even the slightest fig leaf of Congressional authorization. In other words, even if there's a formal declaration of war on Venezuela (which will never happen), that doesn't excuse the prior behavior.
Declerations of war are irrelavent to if its an armed conflict (in general declerations of war are obsolete in international law. They might have meaning domestically but do not have meaning in international law).
From what i understand there are two requirements
- the violence has to be intense enough. I think we are there
- the other side has to be an organized armed group capable of conducting warfare. This is the part that seems to be a stretch. The drug runners may be organized but are they really capable of conducting warfare? The quote i found from the red cross is: "Non-governmental groups involved in the conflict must be considered as "parties to the conflict", meaning that they possess organized armed forces. This means for example that these forces have to be under a certain command structure and have the capacity to sustain military operations."
Mexico would say that drug gangs are capable of conducting something that at least looks like warfare.
Not just mexico saying it: https://international-review.icrc.org/articles/opening-pando...
Well, here's a somewhat analogous precedent: The US (and other nations) have been fighting piracy in the Horn of Africa area for several years now. No declared war (by anybody - it's not just the US that didn't), but pirates are being killed.
So the precedent is there that this is how we do things. It's not just this operation. (If you don't like that, what do you want? Do you want to require that the military get Congressional approval for every operation in which someone might get killed?)
At least (just today), some members of Congress finally got briefed on the classified intel that leads people to think that these are in fact drug smugglers getting killed.
Look, I'm not saying that bombing these boats is justified. I'm just saying that the Congressional oversight rules are not unique to this operation.
Although the Venezuela example is quite an overreach, none of these people fall under the US laws you think they do
The legal basis is them being declared Unlawful Combatants under the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Once they do they are enemy combatants in war and can be killed.
This law was so thoroughly used by all presidents since then that you cannot really claim it's illegal
> Although the Venezuela example is quite an overreach
To me it sounds like that killing was (possibly) illegal. Idk about that 2006 Act though. From a moral stand point it doesn't matter if it was (possibly) illegal or not however.
It matters quite a lot, it’s the biblical difference between killing and murder.
Law at biblical times had a different foundation than today. Today the foundation is legal positivism, which is the philosophical decoupling of moral and law (which sounds terrible at first glance, but is important if you think it through). Therefore, it is not useful to apply the definition of the terms from back then, because the whole context in which they were used doesn't exist anymore.
In the Western world, the meaning of murder and killing is different and while that described action might be an unlawful killing (by accident) it most likely was not a murder.
They're not enemy combatants, at worst they're drug runners. Just because Trump declares something to be true doesn't make it true (although his lackeys will act as if it is).
This is not how to deal with The Drug War™, it's very expensive theater that does nothing to address the problem. In fact that very war is the reason why it's a problem in the first place. Remember that an earlier batch of dangerous drug dealers were Americans working out of doctors' offices.
I assume the pretext is actually the war on terror because of the heavy involvement of Venezuela and its drug cartels with financing and supporting of Hezbollah and the IRGC
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/world/americas/venezuela-...
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PEA3...
Donald Trump just pardoned CZ changpeng zhao who was banking for sanctioned entities like Iran. Should the White House therefore strike Air Force One?
This is extraordinarily capricious and obviously disingenuous on the part of the administration.
> They're not enemy combatants, at worst they're drug runners.
And even at worst, if the Navy boarded those boats, found drugs, summarily executing everyone on board would still be murder. Rule of law is what separates us from animals, and the people ordering and carrying out these killings fall squarely in the latter.
Carrying water for this is beyond the pale, but is, of course, fully in alignment with a cornerstone of a political philosophy - that there are rules that protect some people, but do not bind them, and that there are rules that bind other people, but do not protect them.
The idea here is that they are declared enemy combatants in a war (very plausible for Al-Qaeda, quite less here).
In a war bombing a boat filled with combatants or members of an armed force is legal and does not amount to murder. While in the same war capturing the same boat filled with enemy combatants and executing them is illegal.
So I don't think your example holds, and that distinction is probably the basis for drone assassinations
In what universe are (alleged, no proof provided) smugglers enemy combatants? In one where anyone is?
You can squint and claim that a wedding that has one person who spends his Saturdays and Sundays playing partisan in the hills is full of enemy combatants (obviously all men and boys above the age of 12, don't think too hard about what that means for your kid's next track meet), but justifying this is utterly beyond the pale. This is a war crime if there's a war, and murder if there isn't.
This government corrupts anyone it touches, so this is fully in its playbook - make it's subordinates choose between following their conscience and resigning, or being complicit in its crimes.
There's no war in this situation. The War on Terror™ and the War on Drugs™ are jingoistic phrases that are not actionable declarations of war.
These attacks are theater to distract us from other failures, like the ability to the federal government running again. And the Epstein Files too, it's likely that is the driver for this.
> This is not how to deal with The Drug War™, it's very expensive theater that does
That's unclear. We'd have to know more about what sort of deterrent it is making on the drug runners. Quite possibly this does have them shitting their pants and delaying shipments hoping to avoid the risk. At the very least that's not absolutely impossible. When someone says "it's expensive theater" in this circumstance, I think that their criticism has more to do with their objection to the person ordering the strikes and less to do with the effectiveness of them, especially considering that we might not know for months what the true impact is.
The Venezuelan cartel (well, cartel network) is the 5th biggest on the Atlantic/Caribbean side, and are known for people trafficking and gold smuggling before drug related offence. Targetting Venezuelans boats is political. US should target Mexican, Haitian, Dominican, Columbian boats way, way before Venezuela if it was about drug trafficking.
I have another comment that's a sibling to this and I'll avoid the copypasta.
tl;dr -- the current model is whack-a-mole and is a fiasco except for it's unstated but intended purpose (oppression of "others"). What you're suggesting will not work, will waste likely billions of dollars, and just create even more misery in the world.
We created the damn cartels in the first place with our insatiable demand for their products.
The current model is designed to create crime from end to end. And it was never about safety (FFS, look at how people who are busted for using drugs are treated).
Humans like having altered states and there will always be a market for that. There are risks and dangers in that but they can be mitigated. I'll trot out the classic counterpoint to the current madness: alcohol and tobacco are legal and sanctioned but we know they're dangerous and kill over half a million US citizens per year.
Again, if you think it's about safety you are mistaken: it's about oppression and control and it's ruining this country as well as our neighbors to the south.
"...And 50 water buffalos too! They were all certified!"
Unfortunately that had been forgotten in this era.
Fun fact, if you're not a US citizen on US soil US law does not apply. I'm not saying this because I'm taking a side, but this was how the Patriot act had knock on effects.
An interesting case of this is something like you call a foreign national in another country and this is enough to be able to tap both sides of the conversation via Patriot Act / NSA purview.
> not a US citizen ***on US soil*** US law does not apply.
2) US law definitely applies to non citizens on US soil.
Like that's such a ridiculous statement. Even if the law was "we can do whatever if you're not a citizen", that's still law...
You think non citizens are all sovereign citizens bound to no law? To be able to do whatever they want? I didn't know my neighbor was a diplomat.
I think you mean rights. Which this is much more dubious. The constitution definitely interchanges the use of "citizens" and "people". Notably the 11th amendment uses citizens, specifying belonging to states foreign or domestic. It was ratified only a few years after the Bill of rights, so not like a drastic language change happened.
There are people who will argue "the people" means "citizens" but I find that a difficult interpretation if you read the constitution or federalist papers.
3) quite a few US laws apply to US citizens on non-US soil (paying domestic taxes on foreign income)
4) US law applies to non-US citizens who have never set foot in the USA (Kim Dotcom)
Are you saying that non-citizen residents of the US are not subject to US laws? That seems dubious.
And we know for sure there were no US citizens on these boats?
RE ".....not a US citizen on US soil US law does not apply....."
Does not maKE SENSE... Why are people extradited to US from overseas locations .
Like why they want Julian Assange ?
Just some ideas:
- Drone-bombing an embassy in downtown London does not look good on social media
- He's too famous and has many supporters in the Western world to be publicly assassinated, regardless of location (example: Lady Gaga visited him while he was stuck in the embassy)
- He's more useful as a deterrent, i.e., "see what might happen to you", to the people who might decide to go a similar route. Some will go that route regardless, but chances are at least a few have been persuaded otherwise.
For all the ridicule of the government, the Intelligence Community seems to be doing a fairly intelligent job most of the time to satisfy its objectives.
It does not apply in general, but a country will always declare jurisdiction if deemed necessary. A common example in Germany is that the country will try to enforce German law for foreign-hosted websites hosted by citizen of another country if the website is targeted at German citizen.
A country jurisdiction is both territorial and personal, the laws apply to anyone on the soil, and to the citizens, permanent residents, asylum seekers etc anywhere in the universe.
Oh sorry, I have the wrong polarity here:
"not US citizen" on "not US soil" is what I meant.
Sorry for the firestorm this created!
What I mean to say is that the USA INTENTIONALLY violates rights of people outside the USA, expressed in things like the Patriot Act re:wiretapping, and also the spaces between passport control where they say "USA laws don't apply, our agents have purview to do essentially anything". If you check the discussions in the 00s about this the fed govt was very dicey and you can tell they were chomping at the bit to be able to have essentially NO OVERSIGHT on any of these massive violations of people's rights.
I'll take the karma hit, there is no way to edit it apparently. Sorry!
But it can be even worse than that. It's "we assassinated the phone", "algorithm says vehicle has suspicious travel history and must die". There's no real thinking human in the loop for some of this stuff, just some model decided the metadata has a high probability of being associate with an opponent of some flavor and then everyone in the vicinity is blown to bits as computer said kill.
> this is one of the worst issues about the development of long range weapons. 'We droned this guy.' 'We bombed this area.' 'We destroyed this boat.'
The US administration uses the long range to argue that the War Powers Act doesn't apply: They aruge that the Act applies to 'hostilities', and US soldiers are too far from the targets to be exposed to danger, therefore they aren't 'hostilities'.
And that reasoning was plagiarized from Obama's justification for operations in Libya.
>100% innocent
Feel free to explain the submarine with no flag they bombed
Innocent until the courts say otherwise. It's why we apprehend people for crimes instead of just shooting them (in most countries)
i have not seen any submarines with flags though.
I think GP means flag as in flag state - ocean vessels are typically to some country. In this sense, nearly all submarines are flagged - US navy, Russian navy, whatever.
Not as in a literal flag flying on the submarine. (Though they do fly flags near ports and such)
Their is an entire DIY submarine community around the Caribbean and those guys aren't part of any navy or military and don't fly flags.
Murdering people for "committing" a nonviolent crime in international waters that still wouldn't qualify for capital punishment if it was committed on US soil. It wouldn't matter if they provided mountains of evidence, it would still be wrong, and yet they are providing zero evidence. We're just openly committing war crimes knowing that no one can really stop it.
> Murdering people for "committing" a nonviolent crime in international waters
If that is the rationale usa used, then yes it would be an obvious war crime. You can't shoot people in war because they are guilty of a crime unless they can legitamently be targeted for some other reason.
I think USA is probably going to try and spin it as they are members of an armed group USA is in an armed conflict with, and they were targeted on that basis and not because of any particular crime any particular person comitted.
How convincing that is is debatable [ianal but it sounds pretty unconvincing to me], and you of course still have the problem of how exactly the US can claim self-defense against a foreign drug cartel.
Could you please clarify this statement for me:
>”You can't shoot people in war because they are guilty of a crime unless they can legitamently be targeted for some other reason.”
From what I understand (and I am no expert), in a war, the default is that you can shoot someone if you believe them to be acting in a manner which is against your side’s interests (and have not surrendered while satisfying certain conditions).
You can shoot them if they are in combat against you, but that's not considered a crime and it would be illegal to arrest them for it. Soldiers are considered to have immunity for acts of war (except war crimes)
So for example it would be a war crime to punish someone for fighting in an opposing army. You can hold them as a prisoner of war for the duration of the conflict, but its supposed to be a means of keeping them out of a fight and not a punishment per se.
I think the biggest difference is that crimes can generally be punished after the fact. A murderer can be punished whenever they are caught. A soldier can be shot at at the time, but if they decide they are tired of the war and run away to a farm or something, they are now civilians and can no longer be shot at or punished for previously being a soldier (unless they comitted war crimes) even if the war is still raging on.
> Soldiers are considered to have immunity for acts of war (except war crimes)
Late edit: to clarify that is soldiers of an actual country have immunity. Combatants of a non-state group do not have immunity, so can be subject to arrest for merely participating in the conflict.
The fact that it'd be hard to prosecute them is exactly why they're being droned.
See also: All those "terrorists" they held at gitmo
In a strange way you're correct. If the Coastguard were sent then there's a risk of the drug runners pleading asylum. Then the US has to feed, water and care for them for basically forever as getting court cases deferred is easy. Which makes doing things the "right way" impossible.
That's how gitmo came about - It was impossible to do the "right thing" under US law which would be inevitably be too lenient to the captured enemies of the US.
Is it war crimes when there's no war? Would actually be curious to learn if the answer is yes.
Naively it seems like old fashioned murder without any special qualifier. I guess it could be both too?
War crimes require an armed conflict but not a "war". Note that declerations of war no longer really have meaning in international law and dont affect anything whether they are given or not.
Armed conflict can be either international (e.g. between two countries) or non-international (e.g. you are atacking a non-state group. For example ISIS. However note that attacking a non-state group on the territory of a different state without permission of that state makes it be both.). War crimes apply to both types but the rules are slightly different between the two.
Keep in mind also that people often colloquial use "war crimes" to mean any international crime, but technically its only one type. Crimes against humanity and genocide are technically not war crimes but a different category. They generally do not require an armed conflict (although often when they do happen its related to sone sort of armed conflict)
Anyways this whole thing probably counts an armed conflict. I think at the least its a non-international armed conflict with the drug cartel. Attacking boats is usually an act of war even if they are in international waters, which might make it an international armed conflict with venuzula as well if the boats are connected to it (but the rules related to that im not really clear on and is a bit beyond my knoeledge).
[IANAL]
The possibility of this being an ‘act of war’ does seem very interesting, but I’m not sure Venezuela could claim it in this circumstance, as the vessels do not appear to be ‘flagged’. I would be interested to learn what the status of unflagged vessels is in international law, and I suspect there must be law on the subject, as pirates were typically unflagged.
I think its an interesting conundrum because you're right it is the same as what you said!
They don't tell us the due diligence they do, but we would hope that our bureaucracy is careful about who they target and carefully thinks about how it affects the perception of americans vs. the potential benefit to our society (elimination of narco traffickers)?
Ukraine / Russia aside, we no longer have much in the way of conventional wars where each team wears a certain color and they shoot at each other. Instead the weaker force tries to disguise itself as best possible and strike when possible. In this case, a drug cartel would try to be as under the radar as possible.
What level of due diligence would you need to see before you would trust that a strike is justified? Or is the problem that narco trafficking doesn't justify death and therefore they should simply be imprisoning traffickers?
On the subject of evidence, the problem with AI is that now video and imagery can easily be faked. You've always been able to plant a bag of weed on a teenager and arrest him, so planting a kilo of coke on a boat and arresting someone is no different.
Malaysia, Philippines, China, Singapore all punish drug related crimes with death. One could argue that the societal impact of drugs is incredibly bad, thus warranting death to the traffickers.
Without a doubt, helping addicts is a societally very challenging problem! Anyone who has had a loved one fall victim to addiction has dealt with the struggle of emotions that comes with it. A need for them to be better, but lacking the path forward when they regress. Simply removing the drugs from the equation would have never destroyed their lives.
At some point it fundamentally needs to come down to trusting the people who defend the country ... who are entrusted to do this most difficult job.
Taking the moral argument aside the fact that the largest best funded navy run by the wealthiest country have to call in airstrikes against barely(if at all) armed fishing vessels, that may or may not be smugglers, rather then board arrest and at least make an attempt at tracing the cash flow back to the wealthy businessmen who is organizing/funding the smuggling reeks of weakness and desperation rather then being the signal of strength and competency it's intended to be.
Sure it's a widely understood and often repeated problem with especially western naval and military doctrine that the peace time buildup favors white elephants(battleships, F35s etc) that, as was the case of the British high see fleet of WWII, end up inactive while entire new(often much cheaper and less sophisticated) classes of ships like destroyer escorts or Patrol boats have to be build as replacements. But still the US haven't quite deteriorated so badly yet that it couldn't reacquire whatever boarding capacity got lost in the relentless pursuit of military industrial complex profits quite quickly.
There is a non zero chance one of these strikes was a mistake and instead hit an innocent fishing boat. Because humans make mistakes all the damn time.
Most of the released videos show speedboats without fishing equipment. For all intents and purposes, these speedboats might be medevac or just joyrides, but I would strongly count that they were fairly confidently related, to, uhm, the groups that were being referenced as being targeted officially. The sea allows for quite a bit more clearance regarding these things, mistakes can still happen, but are less likely than on densely populated areas on land. Anyways these strikes don't change the big picture in terms of movement of the things that they move - the things that they move comes in on airplanes, trucks, containers, through tunnels, in pockets of people arriving, even in fishing/leisure boats. For all I know they could be easily moving it using homing pigeons. And you can pass the pigeons through the gaps in the wall. Sure, not as efficient as by speedboats,but the demand will make stuff move. The solution to this problem is complex, but solving it in the society is easier than trying to stop the flow... I mean, people would just start producing locally then. Either with the groups of people that are being targeted or without.
It seems as though part of the rationale may relate to ‘defunding’ the Venezuelan government (as the current administration seems to disfavor them), which appears to be deriving a significant amount of revenue (which may not be going to the treasury) from granting ‘license’ for these traffickers to operate from their coast.
The US gov cartel is ruthless - military members get to be murderers, but its good preparation for when they are deployed against US cities
this kind of stuff lines up with the US military MO going back to at least 2008, when more than a few civilian wedding parties in Afghanistan were hit by drone strikes (not the last wedding party in the region to be blown up during the Obama administration). We can say that perhaps we are regressing but it is not really a new development.
Well luckily it turned out that they were all ne'er-do-wells so it's all good.
Just like when the US used drones on Iraqi convoys and amazingly they were all Al-Qaeda sympathisers.
I mean, if you don't watch the evening news or look for any evidence then I guess you wouldn't think there was public evidence.
CBS Evening News has showed footage of the boats [1]. While this isn't ironclad proof (would you expect the drug runners to hold up identification showing them as criminals?), it is unlikely that these four-engined speed boats loaded with something is anything other than drugs. They are not boats full of people/refugees. They aren't cargo ships operated by a shipping company with any official records claiming to have been lost, or any legitimate tour company. The characteristics of these boats match many other drug trafficking boats that the US Coast Guard has intercepted in the past full of drugs.
You can debate whether the US President has authority to order strikes like this but insinuating these might just be innocent people and not drug runners isn't going to go very far.
It's the same as if Obama sent a drone to kill people in a foreign country, no?
> It's the same as if we sent the navy to board those boats, put a gun to people's heads and execute them in cold blood.
That would work too but why risk american soldiers? This is much more efficient and the footage makes for good deterrent/propaganda.
We have millions of years of human history that emphatically prove that "Chance of death" is not a deterrent
You know what is? A high chance of any, even minimal punishment. Better life conditions.
No having the navy board the boats would be way worse because it would put US servicemen in danger. Bombing the boats from a safe distance is by far the best way to deal with this problem.
Droning people without public evidence is nothing new for any POTUS in the last 20 years.
It’s not quite the same. It’s considerably more cowardly.
It's not cowardly at all because the person making the decision would not be putting themselves in danger either way.
It's just pragmatic.
The United States seems to be using the same logic as Uncle Jimbo in South Park did when he hunted animals: "it's coming right for us!"
The United States has been famous for this logic for a while now. [0]
When you direct it at humans, it's called murder. When you do it at sea, it can be called piracy.
But as long as you leave no survivors, who is going to dispute whatever story you want to spin about the people you are killing.
When you are a world superpower, most people will hesitate to call you anything you don’t like. Because they’ll likely be next.
I submitted this link to HN with the Reddit title in quotes. Not sure why the quotes were removed, but I want to clarify that I am not the Reddit post author.
It's never been the case that an HN title like this is assumed to be a statement by the submitter.
We always match the HN title to the original post's title, unless it's misleading or linkbait, as per the guidelines. Quotation marks are generally superfluous except, I think, if the article is about a quote.
satellite imagery will be called terrorism now
next up: anyone with the knowledge to do data analysis
Like alot of others on the reddit thread, I suspect this will get shut down fast, since it relies on US government imagery from NASA.
TFW next generation of US specop influencers are from SouthCom. Boring counter-narctoics = boring books = boring movies without explosions. At the end of the day policy bros just want to make sicario reality. That's barely a joke. Villeneuve triumph of the willed war on drugs.
Could we change the title to the more accurate "summary executions" instead of "at-sea strikes"?
That's what the reddit thread is called, there's a rule against editorialising titles here.
Execution implies some sort of legal process. This is just murder.
If you want to be nitpicky: randomly killing people isn't necessarily murder. There's eg also manslaughter and a few other legal categories.
no we can’t, pg confirmed earlier this year he aligns with this admin’s war on reality
billionaires can't afford to go against the orangefuhrer. They might start falling out of windows.
> Over the last month the U.S. has carried out several interdiction strikes on narco-trafficking boats in the Eastern Pacific and Caribbean.
Way to accept the framing. They are straight-up performative murders of people on boats and there's so little evidence supporting them that not only is the guy whose responsibility it is actually quitting his job, when they find survivors on these boats, they let them go home rather than charging them.
Yes, it is impossible to understand why a destroyer or a couple of gunship-helicopters with a SEAL like team can't just properly arrest those boats.
This was, in fact, typical for the Navy and Coast Guard before the Trump admin. As was due process.
I know. 50 years ago my father was on a USSR fishing vessel arrested by US for violation of fishing rules. They spent 2 weeks in NY harbor until some US fishing vessel got arrested by USSR for violation of fishing rules :)
KGB fishing trawlers are a well known thing. If it swims like a fish, smells like a fish, gotta be a fish, right?
Yet again no justice for the fish.
That is one of the things one learns with time (if one not smart enough to understand it from the beginning) - it is small guy who get caught in the fight between Big Guys who suffers the most and pays the price, so don't be that small guy.
For few decades it looked like we've been building around the world the system which would protect small guy, yet the last few years the system has come down crashing. Interestingly that one of the architects of that crash - Dick Cheney (RIP, was just on the news and this is why he came to mind) - has lived to see those fruits of his labor and ultimately even voted against the most prominent expression of his policies - ie. against Trump and for Harris.
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I'm not an expert but I was in the military a decade or so ago. The Coast Guard and DHS definitely do partner operations in international and state-run waters for interdiction; the Navy definitely did similar interdiction operations with their smaller boats usually with partner nations. The Navy shooting missiles at alleged narco boats is new. At most the Navy and Coast Guard would engage to defend or disable.
There's documentaries on streaming services where they put this on full display.
> narco-trafficking boats
First of all, I haven't seen any evidence that those were actually boats used for trafficking, happy to update my knowledge here. Murdering them without a shred of evidence, that's be wrong regardless of what laws apply.
If maritime law doesn't allow you to arrest these people, then maybe that's not the right place to deal with them.
Are navies allowed to just kill people on boats for not flying a flag? Arrest them perhaps, I could see - but just kill them with no attempt to find any other recourse?
Define "allowed", esp. whom it is doing the allowing.
Any and all current international treaties are visibly toothless these days. Russia invades Ukraine and the UN shrugs while they say "hey, cut it out!". Israel colonizes parts of Gaza that it has specifically agreed not to colonize and the response is the same. The US commits a war crime with it's morning cuppa and every time the international community sorta whistles and heel-turns hoping that they're not interesting enough to be next.
The problem is that IOT have any kind of effective enforcement mechanism, you have to have the bigger stick, and we've just allowed countries to do nothing but build bigger sticks since the 40s.
I think the meaning of "allowed" was pretty obviously "per whatever laws are applicable", not "are the laws enforced properly".
It's a fair question. I was only able to rabbithole on this for so long before realizing I had to get back to work, but if anyone wants to continue the search here's the most relevant document I was able to find. It's dense and very legalese:
https://www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unc...
From what I was able to gather, there are a lot of holes in the convention that are large enough to drive a gunboat through. What I mean is, in the places where a clause might say something like "don't indiscriminately sink ships", it will also say "unless effects of criminal activity extend to sovereign land" or something like that. This is vague enough that your lawyers could grind the wheels of justice to a halt on the premise that "we are protecting our citizens from all that dangerous cocaine" or whatever.
Frankly, I wonder what changed between when we were putting the stuff in cola sold on shelves and now that it justifies batrillions of dollars fighting an unwinnable war to suppress.
It depends on what you mean by allowed. It doesn't matter what rules exist if there is no way to enforce them.
The thing I used to like about the USA was that it aspired to a higher standard than the historical ones set by monarchs and fascists.
>If any other "framing" was correct, they would be flying a flag of some country.
sounds like your knowledge of maritime law tells that flying some country's flag would have prevented those boats from being blown up. Silly narcos not knowing that yours maritime law.
>Sending them home is about making sure there isn't anyone willing to take the next run.
Why it isn't done with other criminals?
> Tell me you don't understand how maritime law works without telling me you don't know how maritime law works.
I will tell you that I don't understand how maritime law works in any great detail, but I do know what unprovoked murder without any discernible basis in fact is.
If they wanted to stop these boats and turn them back, or stop these boats and arrest the people on them, they could do so with exactly the same justification they are using to murder the people on them. i.e. zero justification. And it still wouldn't be unprovoked murder. Wouldn't that be better?
Given they have the tools to track them to murder them, they could also track them and wait until they arrive in US waters to arrest them. This is how it normally works. And even if that is inefficient it still does not justify killing them as a more efficient alternative.
> without any discernible basis in fact is.
I don't think there have been any details released about the information. There never are with military operations, so I'm not sure why they're expected now, especially since this is ongoing, and it would invalidate their methods. Of course, this all requires that you don't believe the military is firing randomly at boats.
There has been testimony in front of Congress stating that they don't know who is on the boats and don't have any evidence that they are involved in drug trafficking. Common sense tells that the boats could not possibly reach the US, at best they are headed to the Caribbean. Even if these are drug vessels, the drugs aren't coming here.
> don't know who is on the boats
I think that's somewhat orthogonal though, since stopping the act is the goal, rather than knowing/caring who's doing it.
> don't have any evidence that they are involved in drug trafficking
I tried, but can't find anything related to this. All I can find is that they haven't provided evidence, with many claiming they don't have any. Do you have a reference? The military rarely, if ever, gives away how they gather intelligence, so I'm not sure why it's expected now.
You appear to be correct, they have declined to provide evidence, even in closed hearings, they have not admitted to having no evidence. It's merely highly probable that no evidence exists.
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Please don't post snark on HN. We're trying for something better here.
sorry for that, however it did seem a bit too much on the baity title and trivial reality side
Sure, and we’ve let flags and normal penalties pull it down off the front page now. Best to flag the post if it’s a low quality article, and if it’s really needing our attention, email us - hn@ycombinator.com.
It's frustrating how some people insist on prefixing reddit URLs with "old", requiring everybody else who opens their link to load the wrong page, edit it, and reload the modern version. 3 seconds of OPs time could have saved thousands of people from wasting their 8 seconds each.
And how do you think everyone else feels about being forced to open a shitty mobile page with 30x the data requirements and extra telemetry, popups about using an app, and asking for a login and requiring people to edit the title with old.
> requiring everybody else who opens their link to load the wrong page, edit it
It's not required. You have a preference for the "new" experience, but many people see the additional time it takes to load and read the "new" experience as the actual waste of time.
> requiring everybody else who opens their link to load the wrong page, edit it, and reload the modern version
Don't put everyone in the bandwagon that wants the new Reddit UX. It happens because many people don't.
Maybe I like the misery!
I prefer the old links as they don’t put up login walls or other popups that try to get me to use an account.