Boat attack commander says he had to kill 2 survivors because they were still trying to smuggle cocaine
7 months ago by inclementimmigrant to c/politics
Aren't they in international waters, anyway? They're not even under the purview of US law. They can carry as many drugs as they want.
They still haven’t proven the boat had drugs, or have they?
Haven't proven ANY of these boats have had drugs on them. And if they did this is a good way to fight an endless war, by waiting patiently for the grunts to leave the trench and making no advance and gaining no intel.
Hard to do when you're executing people from 1000 miles away via drone.
If they want people to believe them, they need to share a sanitized version of their intel, and send a cutter over to pull heroin out of the water. Go through the effort of identifying the victims and justify that they were indeed cartel members
I realize all of that can be faked too, and I’m not sure I trust this administration even if they showed ”evidence”, but at least it would be an attempt to justify murder
Super-especially-not without due process!
The US isn't supposed to execute people for smuggling cocaine.
You shouldn't just be able to call them enemy combatants if they're not even combatants. Words are supposed to have meanings.
By the logic that you can just call things whatever you want and then you're magically allowed to treat them as that thing, then why not just call them "fish" and say that the American military was just "fishing"? That makes just as much sense to me as what they did.
I reread the article and it doesn't mention "narco-terrorists." It's about calling them combatants. Although I misremembered when I said "enemy combatants." It's "unlawful combatants."
So the article is about that, as well as about what you're even allowed to do or say about people who are clinging to flotsam and jetsam after a shipwreck.
I think calling them "narco-terrorists" wouldn't give the military enough legal reason to murder those people as they had been illegally ordered to do.
Ah I got the phrase from their video interviews not the article. I should have been clearer.
I think calling them "narco-terrorists" wouldn't give the military enough legal reason to murder those people as they had been illegally ordered to do.
Oh naturally. I just think they're using that terminology deliberately to remove the "murder" issue versus "war crime" which is easier to sweep under the rug.
The US has been using this kind of logic since Sept 12 2001 (arc)
SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
After the attacks on September 11, 2001, the George W. Bush administration arrested hundreds of suspected terrorists. Most of them were never criminally charged and eventually let go. Some spent years in inhumane conditions, even though they had no connection to the Taliban or al-Qaida. In 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where many of those prisoners were being held, and described them using this term.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONALD RUMSFELD: And one of the most important aspects of the Geneva Convention is the distinction between lawful combatants and unlawful combatants.
PFEIFFER: By labeling them unlawful combatants, the U.S. said it was justified in holding them indefinitely without trial and denying them international legal protections. The Trump administration is now applying the same term to people on board boats it's blowing up because it says they're transporting drugs from South America. The language here matters. It underpins the legal arguments presidents make to justify their actions. Here's current Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth referring to the cartels that ship drugs from the southern hemisphere to the United States.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PETE HEGSETH: So our message to these foreign terrorist organizations is we will treat you like we have treated al-Qaida.
A lot more good information and history in that article, but the important point is that because they're not soldiers (i.e. lawful combatants), they don't get Geneva Convention protection, but because they're not criminals either they don't get due process protection either. It's a completely blatant and stupid way to just ditch all the humanitarian guardrails around government violence we spent the 20th century building, it was fucked 20 years ago and it's fucked today but we never held the people doing it accountable so here we are.
That's pretty much the MO of authoritarians everywhere. Just listen to Putin or Xi, they talk like that all the time.
I agree, but it's also consistent with how the US operates. Through Afghanistan's and Iraq, anyone appearing as a military-aged male in the vicinity of an operation (e.g. a village where insurgents were shooting from) was labeled an enemy combatant and treated as valid targets.
I don't think it's consistent with your example, because nobody in or near the boats was an insurgent. I'm not saying that it's not similar, just that it's a clear divergence. They don't have any pretense that anybody on or near the boat was planning to attack them.
I agree, I'm separating the justification of the engagement from how they label people. So the parallel I'm drawing only has to do with how they loosely label people as part of a group based on broad characteristics once they decide a group can be a valid military target, i.e. "insurgents" or "narco-terrorists".
Declaring drug smugglers as valid military targets is certainly new, but ordering strikes on military targets on the thin rationale of "hey, they look like the group we said we can hit" is not new for the US military.
If it's not obvious, I disagree with both of these issues.
I think it echoes that video of those two Apache crews blowing up civilians in Baghdad and then targetting people who came to help the injured. One of the most chilling parts of that video was probably how casually routine it all seemed. Can only imagine what footage existed that never got leaked.
Please don’t give Fox News any more ideas
*When you're a NATO ally there are no international police. Russia Yemen North Korea etc. get sanctioned to hell (which doesn't do enough to stop those regimes from brutalizing people, but it's more than places like Saudi Arabia and Israel ever get).
I have no idea why this admiral would be willing to fall on the stupidest sword imaginable for pete god damned hegseth. Like... are they offering him a lot of money or something? How flimsy is his sense of honor that he'd be willing to sell out his entire reputation for that?
Maybe he really is this shitty. Remember that the guy who used to have this job retired a few months ago. Maybe this guy was picked to replace him because he's just as much of an asshole as the rest of them.
IIRC, the previous guy left (don't remember if willingly) because he questioned the legality of what they were doing. You can all but guarantee that his replacement is a huge piece of shit.
You read too many Clancy novels, honor and reputation don't buy Porsches. He'll get some sweet bullshit diplomatic post or hired back as consultant.
More like he signed up to do this job and thats why they gave it to him in the first place. His predecessor retired recently.
So he's admitting his crime.
An angle i havent seen anyone latch onto yet is the fact that the US is trying to dictate to the world what is or isnt allowed to be transported between countries. If 2 countries decide they want cocain and heroin to be legal and want to trade it who is the US to step in and tell them no. How long until this spirals to other commodities that arent considered "drugs"
Because cartels have A LOT of money. Money can be used to influence everything. The US also has a lot of money. The US is deciding who's money gets to influence everything. It's a power struggle.
I'm somewhat split on this
Basically you're right, the US should not dictate what other countries transport between themselves, but...
There are more than enough materials that indeed should not be allowed to be shipped anywhere. Heroine is one of those materials, there is no good application for that, period. Anything needed for actual medical or research purposes can be acquired via other channels. Two countries wanting to transport cocaine are up to no good, thatuch should be obvious.
The bigger problems are that these assholes act as if criminals are the same as a country. You're not at war with criminals, we have a justice system for that. Criminals go to court, and a judge and jury will sentence them and their main function is not to incarcerate the criminal, it's to ensure the innocent aren't incarcerated. You just cut all that away and started murdering possible criminals, but definitely a bunch of innocent citizens.
Murdering innocent civilians is nothing new for the US, but it is new that it is done so brazenly, so openly, and worst of all, with pride.
And basically nothing is done to stop this. These no kings protests had a net zero effect, nothing changed
While I go through logic like this, it all comes down to trust. This administration has not offered any evidence that they are actuating affecting heroin trafficking nor are they allowing due process. It’s straight up murder without due process or evidence. We only have their public claim and their rhetoric has too much history of flat out lying, too much history of complete disregard for human life.
So they're still in touch with Elon's dealer?
"Instinct to survive? No, they must be struggling valiantly to get that cocaine shipment squared away." -People who should not be in charge of decisions for themselves
The perfect little insect for the Trump regime military; see all innocent civilians as legitimate targets, and make sure there is absolutely no living thing left alive in a square mile from the site.
Bullshit.
Also it doesn't excuse the action even if it were true.
lol, lmao even.
and yet, no actual cocaine was presented.
Is the smuggler in the room with us now Admiral?
I think this is his way of displaying that he knows he's totally fucked, he followed an illegal order, and is trying to get away with it.
Fuck him, fuck Hegseth and fuck Trump
They were trying not to drown!
Dude seriously, I'm genuinely asking, do you not see ANYTHING wrong with us using the US FUCKING MILITARY to bomb fishing ships in another countries territory?
They have shown NO PROOF that these are drug vessels
Even if they were, are you just ok with executing people for crimes? No trial? No conviction?
Like honestly does it simply not bother you that the military is being used for executions like this? Not even just destroying the "drug" boats, but circling back and killing the survivors?
Come on man, I refuse to believe a rational decent person could be ok with this bullshit.
You mean like the Democratic former servicemembers who made a video telling members of the military not to follow illegal orders before the President said they should be killed?
….what?
A bunch of congressfolk came out talking about the tape the other day and it sure seemed like it wasn’t the democrats defending it.
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Smuggling cocaine isn't a valid defence of the first strike, why would you think it's a valid reason for the second one?
We don't fucking issue death sentences for trafficking drugs.
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