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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?
Isn't this a case where the US should be granting letters of Marque to hunt stateless vessels in international waters? Offer a bounty for each kilo of drugs returned and let them keep any oil they capture.
If letters of Marque start getting issued anyone want to go in on a boat? As the classic goes:
But seriously, I wonder what flag these boats are flying and if they respond to hails on guard. It seems unlikely that vessel designed for discreetly carrying drugs would be confused with a fishing boat to a trained navel eye. If you're being hailed by the US navy and ordered to submit to a Article 110: Right of visit (using UNCLOS as a customary standard though the US is not a signatory) to verify your flag, under any circumstance, wouldn't you yield and submit to inspection?
If they are flying a Venezuelan flag is the argument that Venezuela (also not a signatory) is not complying with Article 108:
Where exactly are these events occurring, are they being initiated in the exclusive economic zone where and Article 111: Right of hot pursuit would exist? If they are or not, are the boats running when contacted or are they not contacted? If they are running what rational actor would choose that course of action, how do they expect to out run a F/A-18 Super Hornet?
The legal analysis seems fraught given how much information has been released.
Being sure of your prize seems like huge headache if you only had a letter of Marque to protect you. Never mind on going in on the boat.
The administration has said it could have done this, but chose to dronekill from a safe distance without haling the boats in order to make a point.
If that's really the doctrine it seems... suspect?
I can imagine some construction where you hail them, they surrender, you find drugs and determine they are not properly flagged. You then scuttle their vessel to deny the organization the materiel. They could then claim the operators are unlawful combatants and send them to GTMO or claim they are stateless criminals and send them to CECOT El Salvador. Or even hang them as pirates.
The practical effect might be the same, but even literal pirates flying the Jolly Roger in the golden age of piracy would offer quarter if thier target surrendered and offered no resistance. Legal or not, offering no quarter at all seems highly undignified for a civilized navy and not at all in line with the traditions of the sea time immemorial.
They did that because taking the ship was still risky and some of them could die. Do you think the average pirate would have still been so merciful if they had the option to push a button and simply delete the defending crew?
Average pirate, maybe given the choice of a button that maroons the defending crew vs a button that just deletes them. Most came from backgrounds as lawful seafarers and understood the plight of the average sailor of the age. Benjamin Hornigold probably yes, he mostly tried to maintain at least a thin veneer that he was acting lawfully as a privateer. Just straight deleting the operators of merchant vessels would not have been in line with the veneer of lawful privateering.
Regardless, if the legal target is the drugs and vessels that are carrying them why waste a missile on them when the operators likely would surrender and you could just scuttle them by opening a seacock? I mean if they run or start shooting at you, sure they left you no choice. If the targets are the actual vessel operators, then definitionally this is an extrajudicial killing; in the sense that it is a intentional killing by a state actor without any judicial process. I'll let the lawyers argue about whether it's also an unlawful killing, but I do consider conducting extrajudicial killings to be an odious, ungentlemanly, and undignified task if I were the one that had to push the button. Maybe the age of expecting our officers to also be gentlemen is long gone or never existed, or our modern environment makes that ideal impossible. I still think it's lamentable if that's the case.
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