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Am I understanding this correctly that striking the boat and killing everyone would be fine and legal, striking the boat and killing a bunch and letting the rest drown or be eaten by sharks is fine and legal. But sending in a second strike to "finish the job", that is crossing a line, that is a war crime, Hegseth must be sent to the Hague for hanging?
I could see being upset about the initial strike, if there was another available option to intercept the boat, try the drug dealers, and hang them under law. It is better to go the extra mile to show you aren't making mistakes and accidentally striking innocent boaters.
But making the second strike the point of outrage? Yawn, don't care.
Yeap, should have pulled a Batman and just say “I won’t kill you, but I don’t have to save you”
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Killing the crew of a disabled ship in the water absolutely is a war crime, and a pretty serious one at that. You could hang for doing something like this in the past (I’m not sure if there are examples of this actually happening, just speaking to the attitude historically taken toward the issue). I believe this was codified at The Hague at the turn of the 20th century but it was generally accepted convention for a long, long time before that as well.
Simply firing two missiles at the boat would not be a war crime (well, there’s an argument to be made that these operations in general constitute extrajudicial executions more than warfare, I personally have mixed thoughts about it, but obviously for this discussion we’re assuming the combat itself is legitimate). The crime is from firing once, confirming the boat is disabled and sinking, noticing survivors in the water, then firing again to finish them off. This is unambiguously a war crime today and has always been considered egregious misconduct. Even if you were fighting against pirates, back in the day, you wouldn’t order your marines to shoot the survivors of a sinking ship out of the water. That would be dishonorable. You would be expected to rescue them and take them prisoner, and perhaps then execute them in an orderly manner if deemed appropriate.
The concept is the same as how you don’t shoot at a pilot who has ejected from a shot-down plane, and is therefore no longer part of the battle. If you kill him in the process of shooting him down, c’est la vie, but if he bails out and you circle back to blow him away on his parachute, that’s beyond the pale.
War crime conventions apply to uniformed soldiers and civilians. A core portion of the legal argument for these attacks is that these boats are not uniformed military (obviously) nor civilians (obviously) and are instead nonuniform guerrilla terrorists who fail to abide by any conduct contemplated in any war crimes regime the US has adopted.
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You and others (u/UwU , /u/haversoe) are ignoring both the letter of the law and spirit of the law. The letter of the law (such as Geneva article 3 -- https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gci-1949/article-3 ) does not apply to pirates or criminals at sea. They are not a member of armed forces, they never signed the conventions, they are not on the territory of a signing state, they do not get protected.
The spirit of the law is that international law is basically a gentleman's agreement (often observed in the breach), the cooperate quadrant of a prisoner's dilemma to make war slightly more awful. If an enemy unit has been completely defanged, and I capture them instead of killing them, that costs me little, and if my opponent does the same to my troops, we are both much better off because fewer men die unnecessarily. Therefore, it is in my interest to make an agreement with my opponent and order by officers to obey the agreement so that our men are given similar treatment. The spirit of the law is furthermore that members of official armed forces are usually decent, good, productive men, often with families, who are doing the right thing in serving their country, and even if they are on the wrong side of the war, will be productive citizens in the future and it will be tragedy for any more to die than necessary. They are not criminals. The parachuter who we rescue and imprison instead of shooting, may go on to have a great life.
Whereas with drug runners and pirates, we are not in a gentlemen's agreement with them, and we do not want to preserve their life. I could really care less if they are just excuted on the spot, left to be eaten by the sharks, or brought home to be hung. Either way, they are dead. So there is a big difference between executing the drug dealer who deserved to be killed anyways, versus executing the parachuter who we want to live.
They probably wouldn't bother to waste ammo, but if they did shoot the pirates in the water, absolutely nobody would care.
That’s true, but I don’t think it would’ve been considered “proper” conduct. They might sink a pirate ship and leave without making a rescue attempt but I don’t think they’d finish off survivors. And it would be more a case of “nobody is going to miss them anyway” rather than active policy. Certainly many pirates were captured from sunk/defeated ships, then tried and jailed/whipped/executed according to the law. Admittedly I got a bit carried away with the historical analogies, I have some knowledge but I’m far from an expert and it’s not a perfect parallel to the issue at hand anyway.
Part of the (legal) problem is that the anti-drug operation is being justified in no small part by declaring the smugglers to be irregular combatants (narco-terrorists) affiliated with the Venezuelan government. If they are merely ordinary drug smugglers then the Navy should not be sinking their boats at all, per US law, and doing so would be criminal. But if they are combatants then the strike would be a war crime. There’s no version of modern law where killing the survivors after destroying the boat is legal/acceptable conduct.
Edit: @KMC as well
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Yes, you literally would. There's no war crimes for pirates. It requires state actors, which these are not. They are beyond the law, and have put themselves there. Narco cartels are not signatories to the geneva conventions, and would not be allowed if they wanted to.
Pirates do not deserve due process, and never have, and never will.
Just to further drive this point home: the narcos are engaged in what is effectively chemical warfare. They are in the process of violating the GC when they were shot out of the water.
No, they're not; this is just sophistry.
Yeah, at that point, you'll have a hard time waging a war that's chemical-free (SMBC).
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Personally, I think these guys ARE state actors, but Venezuela has obvious incentives to never ever claim them, so they're acting under the flag of no nation, and thus its hard to see why we shouldn't call their bluff and just treat them like pirates until Venezuela actually complains.
We're also at the point where the U.S. response to sending these boats has been made clear. I'm sure there are also backchannels where its communicated "if the boats keep coming, we're going to keep blowing them up."
They keep putting the boats in the water. What precisely are they EXPECTING. "Don't worry brother, they will surely detain you for a fair trial if you're caught in the act. Pay no attention to the reaper drone circling overhead."
It would explain the extra personnel on the boats. Illegal smuggling as a patronage jobs program.
My priors on a struggling petrostate trying to make up lost funding by becoming a narcostate are pretty high.
The only other viable explanation would be that Maduro has lost significant control over his territory to gangs, but for obvious reasons wouldn't want to admit that, so this is in fact just cartels acting with impunity and they consider the occasional drug mule being obliterated as the cost of doing business.
Its just possible that the boats getting ganked are intentional diversions from, I dunno, actual submarines or some more surreptitious shipping methods.
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There was a rather more pointed example of this, IIRC, where deniable Russian troops in Syria got in a dustup with the US military. The story I heard is that US forces contacted the Russians demanding that their forces cease fire and withdraw, were told that no Russian forces were involved, tee hee, and responded by annihilating the Russian troops with a sustained, overwhelming bombardment.
The Battle of Khasham, for those interested in reading more.
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That's as clear an example of Defect/Defect as you can ask for. Sucks for the Russians... but doesn't it always?
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>mfw I'm a member of a deniable military squad working for a sovereign nation, and I am denied by my nation when the opposing force has arty.
Or if you like:
"Andrei, you've lost ANOTHER Mercenary Battallion?"
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Yes it would be a war crime. Why do you think there's so much ink spilled down thread about whether the second strike was to sink the disabled boat and the deaths were incidental or that it was done specifically to kill the survivors? You are not allowed to kill shipwrecked crew who are out of combat.
What say you to this: "Am I understanding this correctly that shooting the fighter plane down and killing the pilot would be fine and legal, allowing the pilot to bail to be eaten by bears in the woods is fine and legal. But strafing the parachuting pilot to "finish the job", that is crossing a line, that is a war crime?"
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Killing combatants who are hors de combat (i.e. providing "no quarter") is illegal for signatories of the Hague convention of 1899. It's a war crime. In any case, it's not clear that's what happened and I assume that's why Congress is investigating. If they find evidence the civilian leadership committed a war crime, I have no idea where it goes from there. When it's a uniformed guy, the military branch convenes a court martial and hopefully justice is served one way or the other. But when is the last time a department head has been found guilty of anything?
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Yes, because that's apparently what happened and so that is the rope by which his enemies will attempt to hang him. If he had let them drown, that would be the rope instead. If he had killed them all in the first strike, then that.
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