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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."
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.
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.
Under modern customs, irregular combatants are not considered total outlaws and are still expected to be treated properly as POWs. I'm not sure if this is explicitly codified in international law or in US military policy, but it is certainly the general case. For example, even when fighting Al Qaeda or the Taliban, coalition forces were not allowed to summarily execute surrendering enemies (which is essentially what the Navy is being accused of in this case). The clearest example of this is the case from a few years back where an Australian special operations unit was found to have executed a group of Taliban prisoners because they could not fit them into their helicopter. The fact that the Taliban troops were neither regular military nor civilians did not protect the Australian soldiers from prosecution.
This doesn't even get into the question of whether the drug runners should really be classed as "combatants" in the first place as opposed to merely "criminals". If they are properly classified as criminals then these strikes are summary executions (or arguably just murder), not legitimate combat, and would be illegal anyway... but that's not really what's at issue here.
No one seems to know what is really at issue. You have a bunch of folks pointing out military codes and treaties. You have other people just handwaving. You have other people citing laws about piracy. Given that the "this is illegal" side has deployed so many different niche legal theories that seem to routinely fall apart upon full interrogation, I think we've gotten to the point of clarity that this is an "arguments as soldiers" situation, and some people just want more Coke and Venezuelans in the US.
If you ignore legal technicalities, the real issues are fairly clear. Before the alleged "double-tap", they were:
For contrast, if we ask the same questions about the War on Terror, the answers are:
After the double-tap story, the first question becomes slightly more pressing because the level of force the administration is proposing to use is "Maximally destructive naval warfare, equivalent to USW" rather than "Civilised naval warfare".
But fundamentally, this is an important issue because pre-Trump, US policy was to treat drug smuggling as a law enforcement issue, and to interdict it by having civilian Coast Guard vessels intercept drug boats and arrest the drug dealers, with lethal force only used if the drug traffickers fought back. Trump is now treating drug smugglers as a wartime enemy. And no Congresscritters were harmed in the making of this policy change.
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