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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.
In what sense are drug smugglers, if we grant that they in fact were for the sake of argument, "terrorists"? Terrorists, as I understand the word, are people who aim to instill fear in a civilian population by way of violent acts in order to extract political concessions. What concessions are drug smugglers aiming for, what are the violent acts, and what civilian population do they instill fear in? I would have thought that drug smugglers simply smuggle drugs because they want to earn money. This makes them regular financially motivated criminals. If the US government blew up the getaway car of supermarket thieves, and then methodically shot the survivors around the crash site dead, this would also result in an outcry. If anything, the US is more suspect of something meeting the definition of "terrorism" here: the best explanation for this sort of double-tap attack seems to be that they seek to instill fear in other would-be drug smugglers.
Apart from that, and also responding to @JTarrou above, as much as this is something few want to say out loud, but until now there has been a general tacit understanding that since 9/11 at the latest (if not since the founding of Israel), Middle Easterners are a special class that in the eyes of the US does not really have human rights; Americans generally can and will murder them with impunity, and in return it naturally can't really be helped that Americans may not expect baseline civilised treatment from them either. As someone who has many American friends and relations, I therefore begrudgingly accepted that they should be kept separate from people in that class, and I couldn't for example expect them to join me in travelling to those countries (so e.g. my long-standing wish to travel to Iran may not be realised together with my American SO). It does not seem like a good prospect if this class were to be expanded to Latin Americans - the geographic proximity is greater, the entanglements run deeper, and the affected countries and peoples hold more social and cultural value. More importantly, why? What did the US actually gain from killing the shipwrecked here (as opposed to picking them up and sending them to a POW camp or whatever), or blowing up the desert weddings in the past? Do you all trust your government so much that you just assume it has good reasons to do what it does, even if the immediate consequence is that in large parts of the world you may be picked off the street and justifiedly hauled off to be tortured and killed?
I mean, what makes terrorists special?
The origin of a ‘special category’ of criminals was pirates as hostis humani generis, followed by slavers in the 19th century, and terrorists after 9/11. Adding narcotraffickers doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch.
Historically, though, while using military force against pirates, slavers, etc. was commonplace, you executed hostis humani generis after a trial if they surrendered or were in a position to be captured. You weren't supposed to just summarily execute guys you thought maybe were pirates or slavers if they weren't actively committing piracy, manstealing, or resisting arrest. This actually mattered historically - for instance, several people who were tried for piracy because they were part of Blackbeard's crew were acquitted, so the trials weren't just pro forma. But the ones who weren't acquitted were generally hung pretty promptly.
There's no real logistical obstacle to taking these guys in and trying them for smuggling drugs, the US military/Coast Guard has a long arm and could easily arrest these smugglers instead of airstriking them. But the political situation in the United States has evolved (or devolved, if you prefer) to the point where it's significantly easier and cheaper to use the military to blow up hostis humani generis by basically executive fiat than it is to pass a bill saying "we will execute you if you smuggle lots of drugs into the United States" and then...execute people who smuggle lots of drugs into the United States.
I don't think this is accurate. It's much easier to send a missile than to catch a boat. The missile all move faster than boats, for one.
The reason for this is because of how long it takes to put people to death. Decarlos Brown, for example, is still living and breathing. and won't even get a trial for months. That's unacceptable. I'd rather he were shot in cold blood at the scene than linger on for months, years, or, god forbid, decades.
Justice delayed is justice denied, after all, and the one thing the justice system does well is delay. Fix this, and you'll find me coming around to due process and rule of law, but right now those are empty words that mean, in effect, no punishment for criminals.
Sure, but two Hellfires (in a double-tap situation like the one at hand) is going to run around $300,000, so you are probably losing money just to save time, if you contrast it with the cost of putting four guys that you're already paying in a speedboat out there or what have you. Granted, some of that depends on the specifics of the situation, and granted also that the .gov will allocate a certain number of Hellfires for firing as practice every year, but until the cartels start shooting back it's mostly just a question of if you want to give the Chair Force guys or the Coast Guard/high speed low drag types a live-fire exercise. It is true that sending the Navy SEALS or whoever out to arrest them is more dangerous than simply bombing them, but they do a lot of dangerous training anyway.
Yes. Dronestriking people is more theatrical, but it would be better (assuming for the sake of the discussion that it's good to execute drug smugglers) to do it via arresting and trying them, if only because we aren't going to drone strike the guys we apprehend at a border checkpoint. (Well, probably not, but see below).
Caveat that this is under-researched and I would be glad for pushback:
See, what seems to be under-discussed is the "can we drone strike US citizens with the military without due process by accusing them of being terrorists" ship sailed under Obama a decade ago. What's interesting about what Trump is doing is that now we've expanded what constitutes a terrorist to "member of a cartel." I have not done a deep-dive on the legal backing here (and IIRC the Trump admin hasn't released their exact legal reasoning!) but it seems to me that there's precious little reason not to drone strike US citizens assessed by US military intelligence as being drug dealers, under these legal theories, and then I'm not really sure what would stop you from doing it domestically except "bad optics." (Posse Comitatus prevents the US military from being used domestically for law enforcement purposes but my understanding is that this is not law enforcement but rather counter-terrorism under the auspices of an AUMF).
Which, frankly, wouldn't be surprising given the incentives. But I oppose it because I don't actually think it's a good idea to drone strike Americans in Kansas or wherever for drug-running, and also because I do not think the US government is nearly as good at determining if someone is actually "a bad guy" as TV would have you think, and finally because if the government can drone strike American citizens without having to show proof that they are actually doing bad stuff (which is the point of a trial!) then it's pretty tempting to just...blow people you don't like up and say "they were bad guys trust me bro."
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