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.
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.
Just like when the US used drones on Iraqi convoys and amazingly they were all Al-Qaeda sympathisers.
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.
Is Reddit going login-required now?
There’s no proof that that’s actually what they’re doing. They should present some.
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-...
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.
Don't put everyone in the bandwagon that wants the new Reddit UX. It happens because many people don't.
That would work too but why risk american soldiers? This is much more efficient and the footage makes for good deterrent/propaganda.
I just assume all federal data hoses are on borrowed time :(
If so, they want to age-verify you.
(Farside.link just picks a random instance)
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.
I can't wait until a worthy successor appears.
> 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.
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.
You know what is? A high chance of any, even minimal punishment. Better life conditions.
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...
And that it is similar to what a military junta does.
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.
What do you think they're doing? And what kind of proof would you expect?
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...
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.
Feel free to explain the submarine with no flag they bombed
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'.
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.
Naively it seems like old fashioned murder without any special qualifier. I guess it could be both too?
See also: All those "terrorists" they held at gitmo
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?"
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.
I think they murdered an innocent man, Alejandro Carranza, a Colombian fisherman. The President of Colombia himself personally advocated on his behalf; it's been all over international news. Does this stuff not diffuse into your echo chamber?
https://english.elpais.com/international/2025-10-22/colombia...
> "On the same Saturday, Petro declared that U.S. officials “committed murder and violated sovereignty in territorial waters,” stating that the fisherman identified by RTVC as Alejandro Carranza had no connection to drug trafficking. In subsequent posts, the Colombian president has repeatedly emphasized that Carranza was a “humble fisherman.”"
I would expect them to provide the proof that served as justification for the strike and an explatation as to why a strike rather than interdiction was lawful and justifiable.
Eg an intelligence source suggested this very boat was being being used by Bob the blow on such and such a date Bob was responsible for ordering the murder of 4 FBI agents and due to assets available it would have been a huge risk to our people and it might be difficult or impossible to local bob any time in the near future.
If need be this justification may be given secretly to a bipartisan group of lawmakers who assert vague but important findings like we believe that the strikes are justified and didn't kill innocent people.
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 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.
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
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.
Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_pizza_theory
(Or similar for the nearest base/command centre for operations near Venezuela)
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.
Proof would be if rather than blowing up the boats, they, say, intercepted them, searched them, and actually found drugs.
as a general best practice, id expect them to send a patrol boat to go board and confiscate the drugs, then show off said drugs.
its not hard to collect the evidence of drugs, since the drugs will be on the boat/sub, and with the size of the deployment, there's more than enough capacity to just sail over to it, rather than destroying it with missiles.
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"
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.
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.
"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!
For Iran, 15 minute latency would mean you got lucky with the cycles of several steps lining up just right.
The US attacks people and countries without declaring war.
If anyone did this to the US, can you imagine the butt-hurt response?
But in this case the point is a bit moot anyway as laws of war apply only to losers.
which this is not, so what's your point?
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.
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.
Does not maKE SENSE... Why are people extradited to US from overseas locations .
Like why they want Julian Assange ?
> 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.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/18/politics/caribbean-boat-strik...
Its also not hard to see the video of a fast boat with two to four huge 250HP outboard motors and the entire hull filled with huge light colored bales of something and conclude this is not a fishing boat and these are not fishermen who are transporting their catch for the day back to the port.
Is this what's happening?
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.
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.
For example Mexico's fight with drug cartels is widely considered to meet the definition of non international armed conflict.
>”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).
The two surviving terrorists are being returned to their Countries of origin, Ecuador and Colombia, for detention and prosecution,”
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.
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]
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’.
Just because Trump likes to heavily boviate while former Presidents generally kept this under the radar, doesn't change how the US operated.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
2. You like to make money
4) US law applies to non-US citizens who have never set foot in the USA (Kim Dotcom)
- 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.
Also, IIRC the first strike killed 11 people. Why would you need, or want, 11 people to crew a fast boat that's supposed to be clandestine. Is it possible that they were smuggling people instead of or in addition to drugs? In which case, maybe we just killed some migrants who wanted to get out of Venezuela.
ie. the hard bit.
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.
[0]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-11/chinese-boats-collide...
Ironically, by violating U.S. laws they made it virtually impossible to try Gitmo prisoners. They would have been better off presenting evidence at trial in the first place.
> [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.
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...
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/world/americas/venezuela-...
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PEA3...
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.
> amassing a naval fleet off the coast of another country
Surely you are joking about this part, right?
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.
What? The whole point of the "enemy combatant" designation is to say that they're not criminals and not PoWs either. I don't like it but it was the standard position under Bush, Obama, and Biden, there's nothing new here.
Know what Venezuela has a shit-ton of though? Oil. Guess who loves the oil, gas, and coal industries? If your answer involves someone orange you'd be right. Guess who got kicked out of Venezuela when Chavaz took over? If you said large multinational oil corporations you'd be correct.
On top of that donnie gets to look tough against a country that largely has no serious regional allies in fact I believe a lot of them are pissed, China has ties but they aren't going to ratchet up the trade fiasco over Maduro, russia is a bit busy punching itself in the balls and last I check Venezuelans aren't big fans of Maduro so donnie is basically riskless save domestically.
Also given the size of those boats I'd wager a solid amount on the total lost amount would be equivalent to taking out 8 McDonald's store shipments and claiming you've dealt a serious blow to McDonald's bottom line.
The same military used a 6 figure missile to shoot down a children's balloon https://www.npr.org/2023/02/18/1158048921/pico-balloon-k9yo
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.
Not as in a literal flag flying on the submarine. (Though they do fly flags near ports and such)
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.
>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...
Instead it’s just “boat bombed, terrorists killed, drugs destroyed” with no proof that they’re terrorists or that there are drugs.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/us/politics/boat-strike-s...
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/18/us-military-dr...
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.
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.
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.
You don't need to think about military personnel or reconnaissance teams. They all report to the president, and as such don't have much choice in the matter. You already said that you think Trump is an idiot.
I maintain that he's doing this because he thinks it intimidates people and makes him look strong. When, in the past, has he ever worried about getting caught doing something wrong or stupid?
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.
This is extraordinarily capricious and obviously disingenuous on the part of the administration.
Maybe this hasn't been aired on Fox News, but people are:
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/colombian-killed-us-strike-...
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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...
See also Cuba emptying its jails and sending the prisoners to Florida: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/criminals-in-exodus-from-...
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.
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?
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.
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
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?
Source? Piracy's definition under UNCLOS seems pretty tight [1].
[1] https://www.un.org/depts/los/piracy/piracy_legal_framework.h...
https://www.marinepublic.com/blogs/marine-law/294870-unclos-...
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.
Who can blame them!
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.
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.
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.
I have no idea if they really were doing anything but it is the obvious cover if they were.
Does not imply a belief of innocence.
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.
In the case of alleged terrorists being targeted by drone strikes, it would be risky in many cases to try to apprehend those individuals. They are in foreign countries or parts thereof which are not under U.S. control or control of an ally.
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.
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.
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.
“No US troops directly in danger means anything goes” is really the most cynical way to do FP, and all this tech has enabled it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_drug_trade_in_Venezuel...
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.
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.
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
Just because the USA has committed atrocities in the past doesn't mean that everything the government says is a lie. It's okay to be skeptical but if you haven't found any evidence to the contrary you should start to accept that maybe the US government actually hit real drug boats.
In this case, I don't think they care what's on the boats.
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.)
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."
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?
Oh sure. A 5% chance of finding that boat on that particular day, and confiscating the device. That sounds like a great idea. I think I'd rather stick with causing the smugglers enough misery that they consider another line of work.
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.
Cartels will be fine though, do not worry. USA credibility, less and less.
But that’s hard, unglamorous work, out of the limelight with people that are sick, addicted, grimy. No spectacular fireworks.
(Sorry for the rant)
Venezuela’s oil production is a single digit percentage of US oil production and the quality of their crude is famously poor. The US neither needs it nor wants it except to the extent they pay the US to refine it for them because they don’t have that ability.
Pinning this action on a desire for oil is a lazy argument far past its expiration date.
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.
[https://cepa.org/article/bombs-on-board-the-strange-streak-o...]
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.
It's in a similar calibre of official disregard for international law.
You can't kill people who present no immediate threat to anyone without due process. It's a human rights travesty.
What stops them from declaring you or me from being drug smugglers and drone striking us? You won't be able to dispute the accusation after, that's for sure.
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.
I wouldn't do that with the current US administration's actions and level of attention to detail.
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.
Correction: they spent endless amounts of time lying to congress and the UN about their concocted, pretextual justification for the Iraq war.
The populace is very much already on board.
It's only not a high risk situation if they are in fact honest fishermen. If they were drug smugglers, I would expect them to also carry weapons. Boarding seems risky to me.
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.
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.
lol, no. Alt-rights may call themselves "libertarian" while they're testing the waters before they can admit to themselves that their real desires are rooted in coercing people. But libertarianism, being concerned with individual liberty, is fundamentally leftist. The rightist axiomatic conception of the US "Libertarian" party can be useful on a small scale, but scaled up it doesn't amount to much beyond just another system of control. Proof by contradiction - definitionally ruling out coercion based on intrinsic market inefficiencies means one can merely reframe any government as a monopolistic corporation with onerous contracts to achieve a hollow "Libertopia".
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?
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.
There is a very long tradition of treating pirates as outside of all laws because pirates would murder and pillage in one jurisdiction or on the high seas and then sail away to another jurisdiction. So all nations had a duty to confront pirates. That is not to say that summary execution was considered normal - it happened, but typically pirates were captured and afforded some due process.
In the modern era this logic has been extended to terrorism and certain crimes against humanity like torture.
It has NOT been extended to encompass drug trafficking. If you're smuggling drugs from Venezuela to Trinidad, you really don't want to be detected, so you're not going to stop any random ship that you see and murder the crew and steal the cargo. The whole concept of the pirate as someone who is waging war on humanity with extreme violence and can't be effectively dealt with by the nation that is effected doesn't really apply neatly to this situation.
You could make the argument that because drugs are dangerous, and drugs can be transported anywhere, that drug traffickers are effectively enemies of humanity who are doing extreme violence in the same vein as terrorists and pirates. But that would be a novel argument, not, in any way, "normal".
There's also speculation that it may have lithium deposits because of it's location.
Yeah, turns out that only a very small fraction of drugs entering the US transit the Caribbean, so no amount of effort interdicting drug boats there is going to lead to meaningful improvement over the previous status quo.
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.
Not sure what you would expect, but on a state level. My state has hundreds of millions in funding for free clinics, free treatment centers, free methadone clinics, free housing, and free welfare. If people really want to get clean, they can.
This isn't a problem of funding either on the state or federal level, its a bunch of NGO's getting rich making sure the situation continues by handing out free tents, clean needles, narcan and "safe zones" where people can do their drugs without interference.
When you make it easier to stay addicted and homeless? Those who are in that situation will continue to take the easy route. Its not easy getting clean and this is 100% on the individual to make the choice to get clean. When you encourage addiction and make it socially acceptable, is it any wonder this issue isn't getting any better and in fact, is well past a crisis point now.
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.
Also did you think I was suggesting the U.S. govt wants it? Donnie's friends in the oil industry want it, single digit, double digit, doesn't matter to them greed knows no bounds with that crowd and this isn't Iraq in 2004 under Bush which I never believed had anything to do with oil.
Boats with four outboard engines? Sure, lots of them, I see those all the time when I'm at the coast.
> 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
instead, they have low powered engines to avoid detection. low and slow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_Interdiction_Tactic...
One, legitimately unclear to what degree Bush et al believed the nonsense.
Two, they bothered to engage. That's OP's point.
The USA was respected because it believed in those ethos…because it was better then a bunch of angry murderers.
With the trouble brewing with the Russian shadow fleet in the Baltics, flying a flag seem quite important unless you want the coast guard to stop you (they have also increased their presence significant the last 5-10 years and do a lot of random checks).
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.
Those operations have nothing to do with cartels and everybody knows that. Nobody knows if those boats are remotely linked to cartels, there's reason to doubt that the US army even does. Cartels are irrelevant here and the murder of random people is not why the world stands by and let this happen.
- 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?
This is much less effective these days due to the pervasiveness of network connected sensor data but it is still commonplace.
I live on the coast, in an area of the country where the local culture is, shall we say, fond of excess horsepower in all areas of life, including on boats. My next-door neighbor is a member at the local yacht club. I spend a lot of time walking by boats of many shapes and sizes. I don't recall the last time I saw one with four outboard motors.
There will also be those who try to take advantage of government funding. But the gross handouts to the Pentagon, we can and do audit NGOs. I doubt fraud is the biggest issue here, but if you have studies, please share them.
> Those who are in that situation will continue to take the easy route
Are you saying it's a personal choice and not a mental health problem?
> When you encourage addiction and make it socially acceptable
I don't understand how spending money on housing and addiction treatment is doing that. If you want to encourage addiction and make it socially acceptable, you just don't spend money on housing or treatment.
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-17/oba...
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.
The US has always had significant control over Venezuelan oil production because the US runs some of the only refineries that can process that type of low-quality crude. If the US banned Chevron from refining Venezuelan oil in the US, Venezuela has few other options. The US already captures much of the value of Venezuelan oil production because of the refinery monopsony. There is little margin in the rest of it. They’ve been profit-maxxing Venezuelan crude for decades.
Your argument could have been reasonable a few decades ago in a “big picture” geopolitical sense but we don’t live a few decades ago. OPEC no longer controls oil prices and the US is the uncontested oil producing superpower. No one saw that coming. Pretending all of this history never happened isn’t going to lead to rational conclusions.
The US used to expend a lot of power ensuring its oil supply. It hasn’t needed to do that for a while. Now it expends power to control oil supplies to other countries. None of this applies to Venezuela though because Venezuelan oil has a dependency on US refineries that other oil producing countries don’t have.
Who needs stealth when a cheap piece of fabric provides cover.
I'm definitely anti-murder, regardless of whether or not there is a trial. Over 70% of countries have abolished the death penalty...
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.
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.
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.
And it’s very unlikely any future or current president will want any past president in front of a court, because next time it may be them.
Further, these comments tend to come with the claim that the whole thing is a CIA/FBI hoax. Guess who bears the burden of proof for that? (Don't bother guessing. It's the person making the claim.)
Working conditions are by and large also pretty good. Americans love going to work much more than most Europeans.
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.
Your argument, then, is the GP has a more recent and up to date grasp of geoplotics than the current POTUS?
The same POTUS with a 1930s grasp of tariffs?
What reason exists for the US to "bail out" Argentina? Was that as simple as extending time for those who contributed to the Presidential library fund to claw back their money from Argentina?
Modern geopolitics is all very well and good, but it falls well short of explaining some of blatently century old banana republic stuff going on in the current US administration.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_shadow_fleet
https://eutoday.net/eu-sanction-issuers-of-fake-flags-to-rus...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/30/world/asia/ru...
https://www.nrk.no/vestland/xl/over-100-ships-have-sailed-wi...
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.
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.
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.
If you are OK with that, then, you are, basically, OK with everything.
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.
It used to come primarily from Indian and China way back in 2023... https://insightcrime.org/investigations/how-fentanyl-synthes...
The US loves to announce that it is fighting in a "war" on some abstract concept, and subsequently that it has won the war for whichever side it decided it was fighting on - and meanwhile the abstract concept remains unchanged.
In practical terms, the US likes two measures, an international measure which doesn't adjust for local costs, so it can say hey, our people could buy enough food and so on in Cairo, so that's not poverty - ignoring the fact that they're not in Cairo and must pay US prices instead; and a US measure developed in the 20th century which assumes poor people don't need telephones, refrigerators, and such "luxuries" only available to the wealthy a hundred years ago.
Yes, it will sink. These are semi-submersible "narco-subs". They have weak hulls and little reserve buoyancy. They have very little margin for error in heavy seas.
> 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.
Beaching (and getting off a beach) is a bit tricky for semi-submersible narco-subs. You need the right water depth for approach and departure - otherwise you can get grounded or stranded. Waves can swamp you. These subs are cheap - they have simple propulsion and little reserve power and have difficulty making tight corrections.
I am not sure why people are thinking it is as simple as driving your bike. It needs both training and experience.
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.
> This is precisely why we have due process
> a well-armed force committing extrajudicial killings
What process is due foreign drug smugglers operating outside of U.S. jurisdiction? It's a military operation. Did you want Osama bin Laden to receive his day in court, as well, instead of being shot in his sleep by a well-armed force?
"Due process" has been perverted in recent years in the Anglosphere to mean "infinite process, with no end result". Process for process's sake, because a lot of people's livelihoods depend on participating in and perpetuating that process; and zero recourse for taxpayers who want some semblance of results for their tax dollars.
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.
And while I haven't been to Venezuela, I have been to a number of pretty poor Caribbean countries. I still find some pretty decked out fishing boats, often for hire/rent to international tourists. Or they just are owned by foreigners/tourists. Or as mentioned, they're some of the wealthy people in the otherwise poor country. Rich people are pretty much all over the place, especially in otherwise desirable places to live (some extremely beautiful beaches and coastlines).
In any case, most of the time the people who claim that the war on poverty hasn't been won, like to look at the pre-tax, pre-redistribution income. Ignoring the great impact of the very programmes they are meaning to defend.
See https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61157 for more than you'd ever wanted to know.
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.
Think about that statement. How are you defining 'victim' in this case? From what I can see, 'victim' here roughly equates to 'willing purchaser of goods'.
I believe in Freedom as a fundamental right - 'freedom' in this context being 'whatever you want to do that doesn't unduly impact anyone else'. If you want to shoot yourself in the foot, well, it's your foot - have fun with that. This concept that the 'Drug War' is something that we've ever done for the benefit of our people is laughable.
Even running on the assumption that 'drugs're bad, mmkay?', there are still holes big enough to drive a truckload of opioids and vodka through (both legal substances that have each put more folks in the ground than all controlled substances combined [0][1]). So if we are protecting the poor helpless confused masses from themselves, why is it that we have decided to let them kill themselves with those particular things? What makes the legal stuff special? The concept is ridiculous at it's face.
> It's a military operation.
I must have missed the declaration of war congress approved on 'unknown and unaffiliated watercraft'.
> Anglosphere
wut.
> taxpayers who want some semblance of results for their tax dollars
As a taxpayer, I am unhappy with these results. I would like to return them, please.
0 - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db457-tables.pdf
Seems preferable to fascist thugs illegally assaulting or arresting random people on the streets. Extrajudicial killing inside U.S. soil are probably not far off either. Unfortunately people like you will be cheering that as well..
Or you truly see no issue with governments having the right to arbitrarily execute people with no oversight whatsoever?
The problem is that Venn diagram of those two categories is very much overlapping.
Fish aren't biting and the mortgage payment is due? Many fisherman in that scenario will move a little cargo without asking too many questions (here in the US and Europe too). And narcotraffickers aren't exactly known for being experienced seamen. For the most part they hire and/or coerce civilian captains to move their cargo.
I'm not necessarily disputing that the boats could have been moving drugs, I'm disputing that the crew would be hardened criminals, and not mostly down-on-their-luck civilians with few other options to make a living (in the midst of Venezuela's economic collapse).
100% unironically, yes.
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.
Boats with 3-4 outboards on the back carrying large bails of some unknown "cargo" transiting well-established drug routes is obviously not a "dubious" connection. We also don't know what the intelligence was on the ground which I'm also guessing was quite substantial.
Neither you or I have the faintest clue what information was available behind the targeting decisions. Reality and your desire to frame things to justify your hatred of Trump are two completely different things.
Seems like some people assume anyone who cares about human rights has some sort of line where we stop caring and think summary executions are okay.