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Notes -
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/white-house-admiral-approved-second-strike-boat-venezuela-was-well-within-legal-2025-12-01/
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/some-us-republicans-want-answers-venezuela-strikes-despite-trump-2025-12-01/
Aaand (after previously denying it?) the White House confirms that a second strike killed survivors of an initial strike on an alleged drug smuggling boat. (Hegseth is joking about it) It even seems the purpose of the second strike was solely to leave no survivors.
Curious that the targeted smuggling boats have large crews, rather than conserving space and weight capacity for drugs...
Anyone have a read on whether or not there are still "Trump is the anti-war President" true believers and, if so, how those people are trying to square the circle?
The stupider this becomes, the more likely it seems that this conflict is a result of Trump's fixation with spoils of war and that he actually thinks we can literally just "take the oil."
The “laws of war” aren’t real and don’t apply to terrorists. This kind of bloviating about moral principle might work on the DC politicians who read the Washington Post, but we here simply don’t have to participate in this. We do not have to accept moral lectures from the same politicians behind Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, etc. The purpose of a military is to kill people. We’re not playing these nice legal lawyer games where we can’t kill our enemies or else they win. We don’t have to care about the latest high-level inflammatory anonymous “sources familiar with say” nonsense story about how Trump is doing this evil evil thing that was normal until five minutes ago.
My position is that it didn’t happen and it’s a good thing if it did.
If your belief is that Trump is lying about who was killed, you should just say that. Because a passing knowledge about American satellite tech reveals that we have an extremely good idea of who we’re targeting and the risk that these drug smugglers are actually innocent fish peddlers is on the same order of magnitude as discovering we lost the moon.
If it is any consolation, I was against these invasions/interventions as well. Obama wisely got the Nobel before he started his campaign of drone strikes against weddings. (The main difference being that the logistics of capturing someone in rural Afghanistan might be slightly more difficult than capturing a small boat in the middle of the ocean. But international humanitarian law should be followed even if it is not convenient.)
Respectfully, I disagree. The purpose of a hitman or an SS-Totenkopfverband is to kill people.
The purpose of a military is to achieve military objectives. Frequently, this involves blowing stuff up, which incidentally also tends to kill bystanders. Sometimes, it involves incapacitating enemy soldiers, and the best ways to do so often involves killing them.
Now, I am personally sympathetic to Tucholsky's claim ("soldiers are murderers"), but I reject your framing that this is all there is to the military. I see them more like Walter White, someone willing to murder when their goals demand it, and less like cultists of Bhaal or Khorne, who murder for the pure joy of it.
I am skeptical that honor has ever been a dominant force on the battlefield, but I believe that it is something which can slightly lessen the horrors of war. If you have your soldiers kill helpless combatants, that will affect the self-understanding of your troop.
This is a fully general argument against due process. After all, with the data the NSA has on US citizens, we could just trust them to designate bad people and have the cops shoot them.
I think that in response to Trump blowing up boats, other countries have decided not to share their intel on drug smuggling any more. I do not believe that the US has the tech to identify drugs on boats from satellites.
Now, it could be that the US has ground assets to reliably identify all drug-smuggling boats, but it could also not be the case. My mental model of Trump says that he is unlikely to accept "Sir, we have no positive ID on any drug smugglers at the moment". In such a situation, it would be in the self-interest of the commander to identify the most suspicious boat and destroy it. After all, nobody will go through the wreckage and find out what amount of drugs they were carrying. If you say you had ironclad evidence that they were carrying drugs, who could prove you wrong? Probably some Latinos (and the left) will cry about how you murdered innocents, but realistically that would happen in either case.
This is, of course, why we need due process: not because the government will never have ironclad evidence for its violence, but because we can not trust them to tell the truth about their evidence.
But then again we should not worry, because you estimate the probability that a commander acting on less-than-perfect evidence would target an innocent boat as similar to that of losing the Moon (which is p<1e-10, conservatively).
Pretty much nobody thinks that due process should be applied or not applied depending on what you think the chances are of guilt. But the argument was about the chance of guilt--the OP was trying to insinuate that because the boats have large crews, they are unlikely to be criminals. So disputing that can't be an argument against due process.
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