> Yes, FIRMS data is what most people use to monitor large strikes that create a significant heat signature. In the middle of the sea you'll usually just see oil platforms generate heat like that.
> A lot of people reading this know this already, but you could see exactly where the bunker busters were being dropped in Iran months ago from FIRMS data within ~15-20min of the strikes.
This post is relatively old information to anybody following e.g. the Ukraine War, which is where I assume the poster got the inspiration for this. It's regularly used to publicly confirm strikes.
Because they are drug traffickers and nobody likes them. The argument against the strikes is based on principle alone, and matters of principle count for nothing in geopolitics. Other countries aren't complaining too loudly because they are happy that the traffickers are getting killed, and even happier that someone else is doing it for them. China does worse things daily and nobody makes much of a fuss.
> The argument against the strikes is based on principle alone
So you're alright with the sitting president in the US now being able to kill civil citizens in international waters without declaring a war? Without having to go through congress?
Just by saying: "Ah this is a terrorist organization. And these people must be part of that terrorist organization"
Since long before that. The US hasn't declared war in a long time, but they have spied on, tortured, killed, maimed etc foreign civilians all the time.
I think Trump is an idiot and almost everything he is doing is a disaster. And the fact that the country is still running in spite of this is thanks to a lot of effort by other people.
However, in this particular case, I do have doubt. Because drug cartels are a huge problem and local governments are often very bad at handling them. Now, I take into consideration that it might be poor Venezuelan fishermen that are being mistaken for drug dealers, but I very much doubt it. It wouldn't make sense for anyone: for Trump, once the truth comes out, for the military personnel doing the strikes, for the reconnaissance teams - it's just nonsensical. And I believe that Trump, even though I don't keep him in high regard, actually is not a fan of killing just for killing. Or, to put it more cynically, he won't win his dream Nobel prize for killing innocent people senselessly. So, maybe, in this one particular case, maybe it could be effective in scaring the cartels into finding other routes.
Venezuela more known for gold smuggling (and 'trafficking' people who want out) than drug smuggling.
I bet some environmentalist will argue that gold smuggling is worse than drug trafficking, but still, my bet is that most of the kills were trafficked people and gold smugglers.
> Or, to put it more cynically, he won't win his dream Nobel prize for killing innocent people senselessly
You say that, but the lady who just won it this year is practically cheering on the prospect of Trump taking military action _on her own country_ to overthrow their leader. So I don't think thirst for war or death precludes winning a peace prize, unfortunately
I didn't ask about China doing "worse things daily," I asked about China blowing up vessels in international waters and amassing a naval fleet off the coast of another country. If I understand correctly you are saying the world would be fine with that as long as they claimed the vessels belonged to a drugs cartel?
So would you say it's fine if China claims that some boats in the South China Sea are drug traffickers and blows them up without any evidence?
Shouldn't there be some evidence at least that this is the case? Maybe capture the boat and show the drugs, instead of just blowing up any chance of evidence?
> So would you say it's fine if China claims that some boats in the South China Sea are drug traffickers and blows them up without any evidence?
People making those arguments probably would say it is fine, in the abstract, then when it actually happened they would loudly complain that it was a violation of some treaty or another nation’s sovereignty.
Cartels are not some unique exception to the rule of law any more than human traffickers, terrorists, or other bad guys. But the rule of law doesn’t really matter anymore.
The legalism of the 20th century is stone dead. In time we will have to relearn the lessons that first brought us there, hopefully without too many needless deaths along the way.
Explain to me in what scenario it would make sense to put 7 people on a small speed boat and fill up the rest with drugs to transport them from one Caribbean location to another.
> Because they are drug traffickers and nobody likes them.
So far zero proof of that, but plenty of proof that this administration lies about everything. So, the probabilities suggest these are lies too and they're just murdering random fishermen.
It's always the same "but uhhh China is even worse" argument but no proof to back it up. It's also completely invalid to justify an immoral action by comparing it to something even worse: "Yeah we genocided some palestinians but hitler was even worse so it's ok".
Trump pardoned the operator of the largest opiates by mail operator in world history on his first or second day in office (Ross Ulbricht). I'm pretty sure they're doing this just to start war with Venezuela from some mix of Venezuela nationalizing their oil in the past and wanting to undo that, Venezuela lobby and intersection of with the rightwing Cuban lobby/Rubio's ties to that. Democracy probably as low concern, given our relation with Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.
The history of Rubio introducing the Venezuela Temporary Protected Status and Asylum Assistance Act of 2018 in Trump's first term, leading to large parts of the "immigration crisis" under Biden, and then Rubio going along with rescinding the status is pretty crazy. We played a big part in their economic crisis, offered asylum to many people driven to flee not just politically but largely from that crisis, then rescinded status to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans and began deporting to concentration camps based in some cases on tattoos, now the extrajudicial killings, and it's looking like big potential for a war of aggression.
You aren't getting it. Basically every country on earth hates the cartels and wants them dead. They aren't going to complain when somebody is making that happen, and they don't much care how it's done as long as it isn't happening on their soil. And they care even less that the people doing it aren't saints themselves because nobody is. Nobody is going to stick their neck out for a cartel.
We're powerwalking towards regime change wars over cocaine. It strikes me as completely absurd to employ our significant military power to destroy tiny vessels at sea instead of targeting operations and finances. It seems just as amoral and egregious to make a show of such wanton and asymmetric destruction.
I have a number of questions about this like:
- Is our military intelligence now being used to conduct international police work and enforce international or domestic law?
- Should we expect our police mandate to extend to foreign countries?
- Are these military operations undermining existing narcotics operations and international cooperation with DEA?
- When these civilians dissolve back into the population, will we chase them there with cruise missiles and drone strikes?
- If the cartels load a brick onto FedEx freight, will we destroy the aircraft? Why not just blow it up?
- Does it matter who is captaining the vessels, if the cartels (as ruthless as they are, and I am on board with this sentiment 100%) force/threaten/coerce a person to mule for them, how would this victim convert to a valid military target?
- This is whataboutism or close enough, but it is more than reasonable: Didn't our previous interventions in these exact regions train thousands of elite paramilitary operators who would later become the very mercenaries and thugs running the show today? (School of the Americas, Los Zetas)
- Why does it feel like we are replaying 2 or 3 of our worst policy blunders since the 1980's and/or are we actually just cleaning up the blowback?
What is the evidence that these are drug traffickers? Are they convicted anywhere? Should the police in the US be able to execute anyone they claim are trafficking drugs or committing other crimes?
..."alleged" drug traffickers. These are summary executions. The US shouldn't be committing summary executions in international waters anymore than they should be doing so on US soil.
The reason no other country is doing anything about it is because, well, what would they do? Submit a complaint to the ICC? And for what benefit to themselves?
There's no public evidence of that though. No trial. It's the same as if we sent the navy to board those boats, put a gun to people's heads and execute them in cold blood.
100% agreed with this and this is one of the worst issues about the development of long range weapons. 'We droned this guy.' 'We bombed this area.' 'We destroyed this boat.'
All of this really sounds so much better than what it really is. It's murdering people all around the world, many of whom are 100% innocent. For instance the last person we droned in occupied Afghanistan was Zemari Ahmadi - a longtime worker for a US humanitarian aid organization. A US drone operator mistook bottles of water he was loading into his car for his family as bombs, and so they murdered him as well as 10 other civilians, including 7 children, all with the press of a button. [1]
Under US law, 100% of them are 100% innocent, by definition. "Innocent until proven guilty" and whatnot; it literally means that every person is innocent in the eyes of the law until a court finds them guilty.
Its kind of irrelavent in an armed conflict. There are a bunch of rules (i.e. the geneva conventions) around who can and cannot be targeted in an armed conflict, but innocent vs guilty is not how it works. Innocent people being killed can sometimes totally be consistent with the rules of war. Guilty people being killed can sometimes be a violation of the rules. Innocent vs guiltly is the wrong metaphor for what makes a legal target.
In the modern sense, yes. We no longer declare wars explicitly, nor do we limit that decision to Congress. Trump's decision to attack these targets is consistent with every other conflict we've engaged in since before either of us were born... national security threats. Even if you believe the dope itself to be no great national security threat, that's just their payload today, maybe next time they'll smuggle in a nuke or whatever.
Of all the things that people on the left might find objectionable about Trump, this should be at the very far bottom of the list.
> Even if you believe the dope itself to be no great national security threat, that's just their payload today, maybe next time they'll smuggle in a nuke or whatever.
You're saying it's fine that they're killed for something they could "maybe" do in the future? Without even seeing any evidence that they're doing what they're accused of today? Have there been instances in the past of drug smugglers moving into the nuclear warhead smuggling game?
> The US attacks people and countries without declaring war.
Declaring a war stopped being a thing after world war 2. Not just for usa but for everyone. In modern times a decleration of war has no meaning in international law. It only has meaning in domestic law.
I think the reason is that the UN charter makes it illegal to fight a war except in self-defense. In modern times declerations of war have generally been replaced with sending a notice to the un security council that you intend to use your right to self defense. I dont know about this particular situation but i think a lot of the time historically the US has followed that procedure.
The majority of the West has implicitly or explicitly ceded their national defense and warfighting capabilities to the USA. The comparison between USA and “other countries” isn’t really valid, as the situations are vastly different
sure does, but temporal considerations matter and the United States military has been killing people—at the President and SecDef's direction—in the Caribbean and Pacific for weeks, now, without even the slightest fig leaf of Congressional authorization. In other words, even if there's a formal declaration of war on Venezuela (which will never happen), that doesn't excuse the prior behavior.
Declerations of war are irrelavent to if its an armed conflict (in general declerations of war are obsolete in international law. They might have meaning domestically but do not have meaning in international law).
From what i understand there are two requirements
- the violence has to be intense enough. I think we are there
- the other side has to be an organized armed group capable of conducting warfare. This is the part that seems to be a stretch. The drug runners may be organized but are they really capable of conducting warfare? The quote i found from the red cross is: "Non-governmental groups involved in the conflict must be considered as "parties to the conflict", meaning that they possess organized armed forces. This means for example that these forces have to be under a certain command structure and have the capacity to sustain military operations."
Although the Venezuela example is quite an overreach, none of these people fall under the US laws you think they do
The legal basis is them being declared Unlawful Combatants under the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Once they do they are enemy combatants in war and can be killed.
This law was so thoroughly used by all presidents since then that you cannot really claim it's illegal
> Although the Venezuela example is quite an overreach
To me it sounds like that killing was (possibly) illegal. Idk about that 2006 Act though. From a moral stand point it doesn't matter if it was (possibly) illegal or not however.
Law at biblical times had a different foundation than today. Today the foundation is legal positivism, which is the philosophical decoupling of moral and law (which sounds terrible at first glance, but is important if you think it through). Therefore, it is not useful to apply the definition of the terms from back then, because the whole context in which they were used doesn't exist anymore.
In the Western world, the meaning of murder and killing is different and while that described action might be an unlawful killing (by accident) it most likely was not a murder.
They're not enemy combatants, at worst they're drug runners. Just because Trump declares something to be true doesn't make it true (although his lackeys will act as if it is).
This is not how to deal with The Drug War™, it's very expensive theater that does nothing to address the problem. In fact that very war is the reason why it's a problem in the first place. Remember that an earlier batch of dangerous drug dealers were Americans working out of doctors' offices.
I assume the pretext is actually the war on terror because of the heavy involvement of Venezuela and its drug cartels with financing and supporting of Hezbollah and the IRGC
> They're not enemy combatants, at worst they're drug runners.
And even at worst, if the Navy boarded those boats, found drugs, summarily executing everyone on board would still be murder. Rule of law is what separates us from animals, and the people ordering and carrying out these killings fall squarely in the latter.
Carrying water for this is beyond the pale, but is, of course, fully in alignment with a cornerstone of a political philosophy - that there are rules that protect some people, but do not bind them, and that there are rules that bind other people, but do not protect them.
> This is not how to deal with The Drug War™, it's very expensive theater that does
That's unclear. We'd have to know more about what sort of deterrent it is making on the drug runners. Quite possibly this does have them shitting their pants and delaying shipments hoping to avoid the risk. At the very least that's not absolutely impossible. When someone says "it's expensive theater" in this circumstance, I think that their criticism has more to do with their objection to the person ordering the strikes and less to do with the effectiveness of them, especially considering that we might not know for months what the true impact is.
The Venezuelan cartel (well, cartel network) is the 5th biggest on the Atlantic/Caribbean side, and are known for people trafficking and gold smuggling before drug related offence. Targetting Venezuelans boats is political. US should target Mexican, Haitian, Dominican, Columbian boats way, way before Venezuela if it was about drug trafficking.
Fun fact, if you're not a US citizen on US soil US law does not apply. I'm not saying this because I'm taking a side, but this was how the Patriot act had knock on effects.
An interesting case of this is something like you call a foreign national in another country and this is enough to be able to tap both sides of the conversation via Patriot Act / NSA purview.
> not a US citizen ***on US soil*** US law does not apply.
1) these strikes are happening in international waters
2) US law definitely applies to non citizens on US soil.
Like that's such a ridiculous statement. Even if the law was "we can do whatever if you're not a citizen", that's still law...
You think non citizens are all sovereign citizens bound to no law? To be able to do whatever they want? I didn't know my neighbor was a diplomat.
I think you mean rights. Which this is much more dubious. The constitution definitely interchanges the use of "citizens" and "people". Notably the 11th amendment uses citizens, specifying belonging to states foreign or domestic. It was ratified only a few years after the Bill of rights, so not like a drastic language change happened.
There are people who will argue "the people" means "citizens" but I find that a difficult interpretation if you read the constitution or federalist papers.
- Drone-bombing an embassy in downtown London does not look good on social media
- He's too famous and has many supporters in the Western world to be publicly assassinated, regardless of location (example: Lady Gaga visited him while he was stuck in the embassy)
- He's more useful as a deterrent, i.e., "see what might happen to you", to the people who might decide to go a similar route. Some will go that route regardless, but chances are at least a few have been persuaded otherwise.
For all the ridicule of the government, the Intelligence Community seems to be doing a fairly intelligent job most of the time to satisfy its objectives.
It does not apply in general, but a country will always declare jurisdiction if deemed necessary.
A common example in Germany is that the country will try to enforce German law for foreign-hosted websites hosted by citizen of another country if the website is targeted at German citizen.
A country jurisdiction is both territorial and personal, the laws apply to anyone on the soil, and to the citizens, permanent residents, asylum seekers etc anywhere in the universe.
"not US citizen" on "not US soil" is what I meant.
Sorry for the firestorm this created!
What I mean to say is that the USA INTENTIONALLY violates rights of people outside the USA, expressed in things like the Patriot Act re:wiretapping, and also the spaces between passport control where they say "USA laws don't apply, our agents have purview to do essentially anything". If you check the discussions in the 00s about this the fed govt was very dicey and you can tell they were chomping at the bit to be able to have essentially NO OVERSIGHT on any of these massive violations of people's rights.
I'll take the karma hit, there is no way to edit it apparently. Sorry!
But it can be even worse than that. It's "we assassinated the phone", "algorithm says vehicle has suspicious travel history and must die". There's no real thinking human in the loop for some of this stuff, just some model decided the metadata has a high probability of being associate with an opponent of some flavor and then everyone in the vicinity is blown to bits as computer said kill.
> this is one of the worst issues about the development of long range weapons. 'We droned this guy.' 'We bombed this area.' 'We destroyed this boat.'
The US administration uses the long range to argue that the War Powers Act doesn't apply: They aruge that the Act applies to 'hostilities', and US soldiers are too far from the targets to be exposed to danger, therefore they aren't 'hostilities'.
I think GP means flag as in flag state - ocean vessels are typically to some country. In this sense, nearly all submarines are flagged - US navy, Russian navy, whatever.
Not as in a literal flag flying on the submarine. (Though they do fly flags near ports and such)
Murdering people for "committing" a nonviolent crime in international waters that still wouldn't qualify for capital punishment if it was committed on US soil. It wouldn't matter if they provided mountains of evidence, it would still be wrong, and yet they are providing zero evidence. We're just openly committing war crimes knowing that no one can really stop it.
> Murdering people for "committing" a nonviolent crime in international waters
If that is the rationale usa used, then yes it would be an obvious war crime. You can't shoot people in war because they are guilty of a crime unless they can legitamently be targeted for some other reason.
I think USA is probably going to try and spin it as they are members of an armed group USA is in an armed conflict with, and they were targeted on that basis and not because of any particular crime any particular person comitted.
How convincing that is is debatable [ianal but it sounds pretty unconvincing to me], and you of course still have the problem of how exactly the US can claim self-defense against a foreign drug cartel.
>”You can't shoot people in war because they are guilty of a crime unless they can legitamently be targeted for some other reason.”
From what I understand (and I am no expert), in a war, the default is that you can shoot someone if you believe them to be acting in a manner which is against your side’s interests (and have not surrendered while satisfying certain conditions).
You can shoot them if they are in combat against you, but that's not considered a crime and it would be illegal to arrest them for it. Soldiers are considered to have immunity for acts of war (except war crimes)
So for example it would be a war crime to punish someone for fighting in an opposing army. You can hold them as a prisoner of war for the duration of the conflict, but its supposed to be a means of keeping them out of a fight and not a punishment per se.
I think the biggest difference is that crimes can generally be punished after the fact. A murderer can be punished whenever they are caught. A soldier can be shot at at the time, but if they decide they are tired of the war and run away to a farm or something, they are now civilians and can no longer be shot at or punished for previously being a soldier (unless they comitted war crimes) even if the war is still raging on.
War crimes require an armed conflict but not a "war". Note that declerations of war no longer really have meaning in international law and dont affect anything whether they are given or not.
Armed conflict can be either international (e.g. between two countries) or non-international (e.g. you are atacking a non-state group. For example ISIS. However note that attacking a non-state group on the territory of a different state without permission of that state makes it be both.). War crimes apply to both types but the rules are slightly different between the two.
Keep in mind also that people often colloquial use "war crimes" to mean any international crime, but technically its only one type. Crimes against humanity and genocide are technically not war crimes but a different category. They generally do not require an armed conflict (although often when they do happen its related to sone sort of armed conflict)
Anyways this whole thing probably counts an armed conflict. I think at the least its a non-international armed conflict with the drug cartel. Attacking boats is usually an act of war even if they are in international waters, which might make it an international armed conflict with venuzula as well if the boats are connected to it (but the rules related to that im not really clear on and is a bit beyond my knoeledge).
The possibility of this being an ‘act of war’ does seem very interesting, but I’m not sure Venezuela could claim it in this circumstance, as the vessels do not appear to be ‘flagged’. I would be interested to learn what the status of unflagged vessels is in international law, and I suspect there must be law on the subject, as pirates were typically unflagged.
Taking the moral argument aside the fact that the largest best funded navy run by the wealthiest country have to call in airstrikes against barely(if at all) armed fishing vessels, that may or may not be smugglers, rather then board arrest and at least make an attempt at tracing the cash flow back to the wealthy businessmen who is organizing/funding the smuggling reeks of weakness and desperation rather then being the signal of strength and competency it's intended to be.
Sure it's a widely understood and often repeated problem with especially western naval and military doctrine that the peace time buildup favors white elephants(battleships, F35s etc) that, as was the case of the British high see fleet of WWII, end up inactive while entire new(often much cheaper and less sophisticated) classes of ships like destroyer escorts or Patrol boats have to be build as replacements. But still the US haven't quite deteriorated so badly yet that it couldn't reacquire whatever boarding capacity got lost in the relentless pursuit of military industrial complex profits quite quickly.
There is a non zero chance one of these strikes was a mistake and instead hit an innocent fishing boat. Because humans make mistakes all the damn time.
Most of the released videos show speedboats without fishing equipment. For all intents and purposes, these speedboats might be medevac or just joyrides, but I would strongly count that they were fairly confidently related, to, uhm, the groups that were being referenced as being targeted officially. The sea allows for quite a bit more clearance regarding these things, mistakes can still happen, but are less likely than on densely populated areas on land.
Anyways these strikes don't change the big picture in terms of movement of the things that they move - the things that they move comes in on airplanes, trucks, containers, through tunnels, in pockets of people arriving, even in fishing/leisure boats. For all I know they could be easily moving it using homing pigeons. And you can pass the pigeons through the gaps in the wall. Sure, not as efficient as by speedboats,but the demand will make stuff move. The solution to this problem is complex, but solving it in the society is easier than trying to stop the flow... I mean, people would just start producing locally then. Either with the groups of people that are being targeted or without.
It seems as though part of the rationale may relate to ‘defunding’ the Venezuelan government (as the current administration seems to disfavor them), which appears to be deriving a significant amount of revenue (which may not be going to the treasury) from granting ‘license’ for these traffickers to operate from their coast.
this kind of stuff lines up with the US military MO going back to at least 2008, when more than a few civilian wedding parties in Afghanistan were hit by drone strikes (not the last wedding party in the region to be blown up during the Obama administration). We can say that perhaps we are regressing but it is not really a new development.
I submitted this link to HN with the Reddit title in quotes. Not sure why the quotes were removed, but I want to clarify that I am not the Reddit post author.
It's never been the case that an HN title like this is assumed to be a statement by the submitter.
We always match the HN title to the original post's title, unless it's misleading or linkbait, as per the guidelines. Quotation marks are generally superfluous except, I think, if the article is about a quote.
Sure, and we’ve let flags and normal penalties pull it down off the front page now. Best to flag the post if it’s a low quality article, and if it’s really needing our attention, email us - hn@ycombinator.com.
Neat, but not really new. People have been monitoring military activity with FIRMS for years.
especially in the Ukraine war
Note: "before they're announced" which is quite specifically not "before the strike occurs"
that would require a time machine
No, that would take an information leak.
Or a Signal invite from Hegseth
The satellite feed removed from internet in 3, 2, ...
From one of the comments:
> Yes, FIRMS data is what most people use to monitor large strikes that create a significant heat signature. In the middle of the sea you'll usually just see oil platforms generate heat like that.
> A lot of people reading this know this already, but you could see exactly where the bunker busters were being dropped in Iran months ago from FIRMS data within ~15-20min of the strikes.
This post is relatively old information to anybody following e.g. the Ukraine War, which is where I assume the poster got the inspiration for this. It's regularly used to publicly confirm strikes.
The United States seems to be using the same logic as Uncle Jimbo in South Park did when he hunted animals: "it's coming right for us!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaazFYTrQ_A
When you direct it at humans, it's called murder. When you do it at sea, it can be called piracy.
But as long as you leave no survivors, who is going to dispute whatever story you want to spin about the people you are killing.
How can they do this? Why is the world tolerating it? Would it be as acceptable for China to start doing this?
Because they are drug traffickers and nobody likes them. The argument against the strikes is based on principle alone, and matters of principle count for nothing in geopolitics. Other countries aren't complaining too loudly because they are happy that the traffickers are getting killed, and even happier that someone else is doing it for them. China does worse things daily and nobody makes much of a fuss.
> The argument against the strikes is based on principle alone
So you're alright with the sitting president in the US now being able to kill civil citizens in international waters without declaring a war? Without having to go through congress?
Just by saying: "Ah this is a terrorist organization. And these people must be part of that terrorist organization"
What do you mean "now"? It's been this way since the Patriot Act.
Since long before that. The US hasn't declared war in a long time, but they have spied on, tortured, killed, maimed etc foreign civilians all the time.
I think Trump is an idiot and almost everything he is doing is a disaster. And the fact that the country is still running in spite of this is thanks to a lot of effort by other people.
However, in this particular case, I do have doubt. Because drug cartels are a huge problem and local governments are often very bad at handling them. Now, I take into consideration that it might be poor Venezuelan fishermen that are being mistaken for drug dealers, but I very much doubt it. It wouldn't make sense for anyone: for Trump, once the truth comes out, for the military personnel doing the strikes, for the reconnaissance teams - it's just nonsensical. And I believe that Trump, even though I don't keep him in high regard, actually is not a fan of killing just for killing. Or, to put it more cynically, he won't win his dream Nobel prize for killing innocent people senselessly. So, maybe, in this one particular case, maybe it could be effective in scaring the cartels into finding other routes.
Venezuela more known for gold smuggling (and 'trafficking' people who want out) than drug smuggling.
I bet some environmentalist will argue that gold smuggling is worse than drug trafficking, but still, my bet is that most of the kills were trafficked people and gold smugglers.
> Or, to put it more cynically, he won't win his dream Nobel prize for killing innocent people senselessly
You say that, but the lady who just won it this year is practically cheering on the prospect of Trump taking military action _on her own country_ to overthrow their leader. So I don't think thirst for war or death precludes winning a peace prize, unfortunately
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/05/machado-praises-tru...
I didn't ask about China doing "worse things daily," I asked about China blowing up vessels in international waters and amassing a naval fleet off the coast of another country. If I understand correctly you are saying the world would be fine with that as long as they claimed the vessels belonged to a drugs cartel?
If you traffic drugs to China the CCP will do things to you that are very much worse than the comparatively humane quick death in an airstrike.
> amassing a naval fleet off the coast of another country
Surely you are joking about this part, right?
So would you say it's fine if China claims that some boats in the South China Sea are drug traffickers and blows them up without any evidence?
Shouldn't there be some evidence at least that this is the case? Maybe capture the boat and show the drugs, instead of just blowing up any chance of evidence?
> So would you say it's fine if China claims that some boats in the South China Sea are drug traffickers and blows them up without any evidence?
People making those arguments probably would say it is fine, in the abstract, then when it actually happened they would loudly complain that it was a violation of some treaty or another nation’s sovereignty.
Cartels are not some unique exception to the rule of law any more than human traffickers, terrorists, or other bad guys. But the rule of law doesn’t really matter anymore.
The legalism of the 20th century is stone dead. In time we will have to relearn the lessons that first brought us there, hopefully without too many needless deaths along the way.
Again, I'm not asking about other unnamed things China may or may not do. I'm asking about blowing up ships in international waters.
Explain to me in what scenario it would make sense to put 7 people on a small speed boat and fill up the rest with drugs to transport them from one Caribbean location to another.
1. It's a day that ends in Y
2. You like to make money
> Because they are drug traffickers and nobody likes them.
So far zero proof of that, but plenty of proof that this administration lies about everything. So, the probabilities suggest these are lies too and they're just murdering random fishermen.
It's always the same "but uhhh China is even worse" argument but no proof to back it up. It's also completely invalid to justify an immoral action by comparing it to something even worse: "Yeah we genocided some palestinians but hitler was even worse so it's ok".
Trump pardoned the operator of the largest opiates by mail operator in world history on his first or second day in office (Ross Ulbricht). I'm pretty sure they're doing this just to start war with Venezuela from some mix of Venezuela nationalizing their oil in the past and wanting to undo that, Venezuela lobby and intersection of with the rightwing Cuban lobby/Rubio's ties to that. Democracy probably as low concern, given our relation with Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.
The history of Rubio introducing the Venezuela Temporary Protected Status and Asylum Assistance Act of 2018 in Trump's first term, leading to large parts of the "immigration crisis" under Biden, and then Rubio going along with rescinding the status is pretty crazy. We played a big part in their economic crisis, offered asylum to many people driven to flee not just politically but largely from that crisis, then rescinded status to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans and began deporting to concentration camps based in some cases on tattoos, now the extrajudicial killings, and it's looking like big potential for a war of aggression.
You aren't getting it. Basically every country on earth hates the cartels and wants them dead. They aren't going to complain when somebody is making that happen, and they don't much care how it's done as long as it isn't happening on their soil. And they care even less that the people doing it aren't saints themselves because nobody is. Nobody is going to stick their neck out for a cartel.
Interdict the vessels!
Why resort to madness and slaughter?
I can think of few people on earth who deserve madness and slaughter more than the cartels.
We're powerwalking towards regime change wars over cocaine. It strikes me as completely absurd to employ our significant military power to destroy tiny vessels at sea instead of targeting operations and finances. It seems just as amoral and egregious to make a show of such wanton and asymmetric destruction. I have a number of questions about this like:
- Is our military intelligence now being used to conduct international police work and enforce international or domestic law?
- Should we expect our police mandate to extend to foreign countries?
- Are these military operations undermining existing narcotics operations and international cooperation with DEA?
- When these civilians dissolve back into the population, will we chase them there with cruise missiles and drone strikes?
- If the cartels load a brick onto FedEx freight, will we destroy the aircraft? Why not just blow it up?
- Does it matter who is captaining the vessels, if the cartels (as ruthless as they are, and I am on board with this sentiment 100%) force/threaten/coerce a person to mule for them, how would this victim convert to a valid military target?
- This is whataboutism or close enough, but it is more than reasonable: Didn't our previous interventions in these exact regions train thousands of elite paramilitary operators who would later become the very mercenaries and thugs running the show today? (School of the Americas, Los Zetas)
- Why does it feel like we are replaying 2 or 3 of our worst policy blunders since the 1980's and/or are we actually just cleaning up the blowback?
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What is the evidence that these are drug traffickers? Are they convicted anywhere? Should the police in the US be able to execute anyone they claim are trafficking drugs or committing other crimes?
No, no, people in the US are protected by The Constitution.
Killing foreigners is fine, though.
..."alleged" drug traffickers. These are summary executions. The US shouldn't be committing summary executions in international waters anymore than they should be doing so on US soil.
The reason no other country is doing anything about it is because, well, what would they do? Submit a complaint to the ICC? And for what benefit to themselves?
Like alot of others on the reddit thread, I suspect this will get shut down fast, since it relies on US government imagery from NASA.
Could we change the title to the more accurate "summary executions" instead of "at-sea strikes"?
no we can’t, pg confirmed earlier this year he aligns with this admin’s war on reality
billionaires can't afford to go against the orangefuhrer. They might start falling out of windows.
That's what the reddit thread is called, there's a rule against editorialising titles here.
Execution implies some sort of legal process. This is just murder.
If you want to be nitpicky: randomly killing people isn't necessarily murder. There's eg also manslaughter and a few other legal categories.
"narco-trafficking boats"
There's no public evidence of that though. No trial. It's the same as if we sent the navy to board those boats, put a gun to people's heads and execute them in cold blood.
100% agreed with this and this is one of the worst issues about the development of long range weapons. 'We droned this guy.' 'We bombed this area.' 'We destroyed this boat.'
All of this really sounds so much better than what it really is. It's murdering people all around the world, many of whom are 100% innocent. For instance the last person we droned in occupied Afghanistan was Zemari Ahmadi - a longtime worker for a US humanitarian aid organization. A US drone operator mistook bottles of water he was loading into his car for his family as bombs, and so they murdered him as well as 10 other civilians, including 7 children, all with the press of a button. [1]
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/world/asia/us-air-strike-...
>many of whom are 100% innocent
Under US law, 100% of them are 100% innocent, by definition. "Innocent until proven guilty" and whatnot; it literally means that every person is innocent in the eyes of the law until a court finds them guilty.
Its kind of irrelavent in an armed conflict. There are a bunch of rules (i.e. the geneva conventions) around who can and cannot be targeted in an armed conflict, but innocent vs guilty is not how it works. Innocent people being killed can sometimes totally be consistent with the rules of war. Guilty people being killed can sometimes be a violation of the rules. Innocent vs guiltly is the wrong metaphor for what makes a legal target.
It's not an armed conflict in any legal sense, according to everyone but partisans (that I've seen).
In general only combatants are allowed to be targeted. (Alleged) drug trafficking is not combatting.
But in this case the point is a bit moot anyway as laws of war apply only to losers.
It kind of seems like a stretch in this case, but in principle those two things can overlap.
For example Mexico's fight with drug cartels is widely considered to meet the definition of non international armed conflict.
Is USA at war though?
In the modern sense, yes. We no longer declare wars explicitly, nor do we limit that decision to Congress. Trump's decision to attack these targets is consistent with every other conflict we've engaged in since before either of us were born... national security threats. Even if you believe the dope itself to be no great national security threat, that's just their payload today, maybe next time they'll smuggle in a nuke or whatever.
Of all the things that people on the left might find objectionable about Trump, this should be at the very far bottom of the list.
> Even if you believe the dope itself to be no great national security threat, that's just their payload today, maybe next time they'll smuggle in a nuke or whatever.
You're saying it's fine that they're killed for something they could "maybe" do in the future? Without even seeing any evidence that they're doing what they're accused of today? Have there been instances in the past of drug smugglers moving into the nuclear warhead smuggling game?
> Innocent people being killed can sometimes totally be consistent with the rules of war.
The US attacks people and countries without declaring war.
If anyone did this to the US, can you imagine the butt-hurt response?
> The US attacks people and countries without declaring war.
Declaring a war stopped being a thing after world war 2. Not just for usa but for everyone. In modern times a decleration of war has no meaning in international law. It only has meaning in domestic law.
I think the reason is that the UN charter makes it illegal to fight a war except in self-defense. In modern times declerations of war have generally been replaced with sending a notice to the un security council that you intend to use your right to self defense. I dont know about this particular situation but i think a lot of the time historically the US has followed that procedure.
The majority of the West has implicitly or explicitly ceded their national defense and warfighting capabilities to the USA. The comparison between USA and “other countries” isn’t really valid, as the situations are vastly different
What does that mean? That USA is somehow killing people all around the world as a puppet or Iceland or something?
The West isn't the world, though. China could start taking out random boats next week.
US exceptionalism doesn’t make killing ok.
Its kind of irrelavent in an armed conflict
which this is not, so what's your point?
Seems like it’s turning into one
sure does, but temporal considerations matter and the United States military has been killing people—at the President and SecDef's direction—in the Caribbean and Pacific for weeks, now, without even the slightest fig leaf of Congressional authorization. In other words, even if there's a formal declaration of war on Venezuela (which will never happen), that doesn't excuse the prior behavior.
Declerations of war are irrelavent to if its an armed conflict (in general declerations of war are obsolete in international law. They might have meaning domestically but do not have meaning in international law).
From what i understand there are two requirements
- the violence has to be intense enough. I think we are there
- the other side has to be an organized armed group capable of conducting warfare. This is the part that seems to be a stretch. The drug runners may be organized but are they really capable of conducting warfare? The quote i found from the red cross is: "Non-governmental groups involved in the conflict must be considered as "parties to the conflict", meaning that they possess organized armed forces. This means for example that these forces have to be under a certain command structure and have the capacity to sustain military operations."
Although the Venezuela example is quite an overreach, none of these people fall under the US laws you think they do
The legal basis is them being declared Unlawful Combatants under the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Once they do they are enemy combatants in war and can be killed.
This law was so thoroughly used by all presidents since then that you cannot really claim it's illegal
> Although the Venezuela example is quite an overreach
To me it sounds like that killing was (possibly) illegal. Idk about that 2006 Act though. From a moral stand point it doesn't matter if it was (possibly) illegal or not however.
It matters quite a lot, it’s the biblical difference between killing and murder.
Law at biblical times had a different foundation than today. Today the foundation is legal positivism, which is the philosophical decoupling of moral and law (which sounds terrible at first glance, but is important if you think it through). Therefore, it is not useful to apply the definition of the terms from back then, because the whole context in which they were used doesn't exist anymore.
In the Western world, the meaning of murder and killing is different and while that described action might be an unlawful killing (by accident) it most likely was not a murder.
They're not enemy combatants, at worst they're drug runners. Just because Trump declares something to be true doesn't make it true (although his lackeys will act as if it is).
This is not how to deal with The Drug War™, it's very expensive theater that does nothing to address the problem. In fact that very war is the reason why it's a problem in the first place. Remember that an earlier batch of dangerous drug dealers were Americans working out of doctors' offices.
I assume the pretext is actually the war on terror because of the heavy involvement of Venezuela and its drug cartels with financing and supporting of Hezbollah and the IRGC
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/world/americas/venezuela-...
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PEA3...
Donald Trump just pardoned CZ changpeng zhao who was banking for sanctioned entities like Iran. Should the White House therefore strike Air Force One?
This is extraordinarily capricious and obviously disingenuous on the part of the administration.
> They're not enemy combatants, at worst they're drug runners.
And even at worst, if the Navy boarded those boats, found drugs, summarily executing everyone on board would still be murder. Rule of law is what separates us from animals, and the people ordering and carrying out these killings fall squarely in the latter.
Carrying water for this is beyond the pale, but is, of course, fully in alignment with a cornerstone of a political philosophy - that there are rules that protect some people, but do not bind them, and that there are rules that bind other people, but do not protect them.
> This is not how to deal with The Drug War™, it's very expensive theater that does
That's unclear. We'd have to know more about what sort of deterrent it is making on the drug runners. Quite possibly this does have them shitting their pants and delaying shipments hoping to avoid the risk. At the very least that's not absolutely impossible. When someone says "it's expensive theater" in this circumstance, I think that their criticism has more to do with their objection to the person ordering the strikes and less to do with the effectiveness of them, especially considering that we might not know for months what the true impact is.
The Venezuelan cartel (well, cartel network) is the 5th biggest on the Atlantic/Caribbean side, and are known for people trafficking and gold smuggling before drug related offence. Targetting Venezuelans boats is political. US should target Mexican, Haitian, Dominican, Columbian boats way, way before Venezuela if it was about drug trafficking.
"...And 50 water buffalos too! They were all certified!"
Unfortunately that had been forgotten in this era.
Fun fact, if you're not a US citizen on US soil US law does not apply. I'm not saying this because I'm taking a side, but this was how the Patriot act had knock on effects.
An interesting case of this is something like you call a foreign national in another country and this is enough to be able to tap both sides of the conversation via Patriot Act / NSA purview.
2) US law definitely applies to non citizens on US soil.
Like that's such a ridiculous statement. Even if the law was "we can do whatever if you're not a citizen", that's still law...
You think non citizens are all sovereign citizens bound to no law? To be able to do whatever they want? I didn't know my neighbor was a diplomat.
I think you mean rights. Which this is much more dubious. The constitution definitely interchanges the use of "citizens" and "people". Notably the 11th amendment uses citizens, specifying belonging to states foreign or domestic. It was ratified only a few years after the Bill of rights, so not like a drastic language change happened.
There are people who will argue "the people" means "citizens" but I find that a difficult interpretation if you read the constitution or federalist papers.
3) quite a few US laws apply to US citizens on non-US soil (paying domestic taxes on foreign income)
4) US law applies to non-US citizens who have never set foot in the USA (Kim Dotcom)
Are you saying that non-citizen residents of the US are not subject to US laws? That seems dubious.
And we know for sure there were no US citizens on these boats?
RE ".....not a US citizen on US soil US law does not apply....."
Does not maKE SENSE... Why are people extradited to US from overseas locations .
Like why they want Julian Assange ?
Just some ideas:
- Drone-bombing an embassy in downtown London does not look good on social media
- He's too famous and has many supporters in the Western world to be publicly assassinated, regardless of location (example: Lady Gaga visited him while he was stuck in the embassy)
- He's more useful as a deterrent, i.e., "see what might happen to you", to the people who might decide to go a similar route. Some will go that route regardless, but chances are at least a few have been persuaded otherwise.
For all the ridicule of the government, the Intelligence Community seems to be doing a fairly intelligent job most of the time to satisfy its objectives.
It does not apply in general, but a country will always declare jurisdiction if deemed necessary. A common example in Germany is that the country will try to enforce German law for foreign-hosted websites hosted by citizen of another country if the website is targeted at German citizen.
A country jurisdiction is both territorial and personal, the laws apply to anyone on the soil, and to the citizens, permanent residents, asylum seekers etc anywhere in the universe.
Oh sorry, I have the wrong polarity here:
"not US citizen" on "not US soil" is what I meant.
Sorry for the firestorm this created!
What I mean to say is that the USA INTENTIONALLY violates rights of people outside the USA, expressed in things like the Patriot Act re:wiretapping, and also the spaces between passport control where they say "USA laws don't apply, our agents have purview to do essentially anything". If you check the discussions in the 00s about this the fed govt was very dicey and you can tell they were chomping at the bit to be able to have essentially NO OVERSIGHT on any of these massive violations of people's rights.
I'll take the karma hit, there is no way to edit it apparently. Sorry!
But it can be even worse than that. It's "we assassinated the phone", "algorithm says vehicle has suspicious travel history and must die". There's no real thinking human in the loop for some of this stuff, just some model decided the metadata has a high probability of being associate with an opponent of some flavor and then everyone in the vicinity is blown to bits as computer said kill.
> this is one of the worst issues about the development of long range weapons. 'We droned this guy.' 'We bombed this area.' 'We destroyed this boat.'
The US administration uses the long range to argue that the War Powers Act doesn't apply: They aruge that the Act applies to 'hostilities', and US soldiers are too far from the targets to be exposed to danger, therefore they aren't 'hostilities'.
>100% innocent
Feel free to explain the submarine with no flag they bombed
Innocent until the courts say otherwise. It's why we apprehend people for crimes instead of just shooting them (in most countries)
i have not seen any submarines with flags though.
I think GP means flag as in flag state - ocean vessels are typically to some country. In this sense, nearly all submarines are flagged - US navy, Russian navy, whatever.
Not as in a literal flag flying on the submarine. (Though they do fly flags near ports and such)
Murdering people for "committing" a nonviolent crime in international waters that still wouldn't qualify for capital punishment if it was committed on US soil. It wouldn't matter if they provided mountains of evidence, it would still be wrong, and yet they are providing zero evidence. We're just openly committing war crimes knowing that no one can really stop it.
> Murdering people for "committing" a nonviolent crime in international waters
If that is the rationale usa used, then yes it would be an obvious war crime. You can't shoot people in war because they are guilty of a crime unless they can legitamently be targeted for some other reason.
I think USA is probably going to try and spin it as they are members of an armed group USA is in an armed conflict with, and they were targeted on that basis and not because of any particular crime any particular person comitted.
How convincing that is is debatable [ianal but it sounds pretty unconvincing to me], and you of course still have the problem of how exactly the US can claim self-defense against a foreign drug cartel.
Could you please clarify this statement for me:
>”You can't shoot people in war because they are guilty of a crime unless they can legitamently be targeted for some other reason.”
From what I understand (and I am no expert), in a war, the default is that you can shoot someone if you believe them to be acting in a manner which is against your side’s interests (and have not surrendered while satisfying certain conditions).
You can shoot them if they are in combat against you, but that's not considered a crime and it would be illegal to arrest them for it. Soldiers are considered to have immunity for acts of war (except war crimes)
So for example it would be a war crime to punish someone for fighting in an opposing army. You can hold them as a prisoner of war for the duration of the conflict, but its supposed to be a means of keeping them out of a fight and not a punishment per se.
I think the biggest difference is that crimes can generally be punished after the fact. A murderer can be punished whenever they are caught. A soldier can be shot at at the time, but if they decide they are tired of the war and run away to a farm or something, they are now civilians and can no longer be shot at or punished for previously being a soldier (unless they comitted war crimes) even if the war is still raging on.
Is it war crimes when there's no war? Would actually be curious to learn if the answer is yes.
Naively it seems like old fashioned murder without any special qualifier. I guess it could be both too?
War crimes require an armed conflict but not a "war". Note that declerations of war no longer really have meaning in international law and dont affect anything whether they are given or not.
Armed conflict can be either international (e.g. between two countries) or non-international (e.g. you are atacking a non-state group. For example ISIS. However note that attacking a non-state group on the territory of a different state without permission of that state makes it be both.). War crimes apply to both types but the rules are slightly different between the two.
Keep in mind also that people often colloquial use "war crimes" to mean any international crime, but technically its only one type. Crimes against humanity and genocide are technically not war crimes but a different category. They generally do not require an armed conflict (although often when they do happen its related to sone sort of armed conflict)
Anyways this whole thing probably counts an armed conflict. I think at the least its a non-international armed conflict with the drug cartel. Attacking boats is usually an act of war even if they are in international waters, which might make it an international armed conflict with venuzula as well if the boats are connected to it (but the rules related to that im not really clear on and is a bit beyond my knoeledge).
[IANAL]
The possibility of this being an ‘act of war’ does seem very interesting, but I’m not sure Venezuela could claim it in this circumstance, as the vessels do not appear to be ‘flagged’. I would be interested to learn what the status of unflagged vessels is in international law, and I suspect there must be law on the subject, as pirates were typically unflagged.
Taking the moral argument aside the fact that the largest best funded navy run by the wealthiest country have to call in airstrikes against barely(if at all) armed fishing vessels, that may or may not be smugglers, rather then board arrest and at least make an attempt at tracing the cash flow back to the wealthy businessmen who is organizing/funding the smuggling reeks of weakness and desperation rather then being the signal of strength and competency it's intended to be.
Sure it's a widely understood and often repeated problem with especially western naval and military doctrine that the peace time buildup favors white elephants(battleships, F35s etc) that, as was the case of the British high see fleet of WWII, end up inactive while entire new(often much cheaper and less sophisticated) classes of ships like destroyer escorts or Patrol boats have to be build as replacements. But still the US haven't quite deteriorated so badly yet that it couldn't reacquire whatever boarding capacity got lost in the relentless pursuit of military industrial complex profits quite quickly.
The US gov cartel is ruthless - military members get to be murderers, but its good preparation for when they are deployed against US cities
There is a non zero chance one of these strikes was a mistake and instead hit an innocent fishing boat. Because humans make mistakes all the damn time.
Most of the released videos show speedboats without fishing equipment. For all intents and purposes, these speedboats might be medevac or just joyrides, but I would strongly count that they were fairly confidently related, to, uhm, the groups that were being referenced as being targeted officially. The sea allows for quite a bit more clearance regarding these things, mistakes can still happen, but are less likely than on densely populated areas on land. Anyways these strikes don't change the big picture in terms of movement of the things that they move - the things that they move comes in on airplanes, trucks, containers, through tunnels, in pockets of people arriving, even in fishing/leisure boats. For all I know they could be easily moving it using homing pigeons. And you can pass the pigeons through the gaps in the wall. Sure, not as efficient as by speedboats,but the demand will make stuff move. The solution to this problem is complex, but solving it in the society is easier than trying to stop the flow... I mean, people would just start producing locally then. Either with the groups of people that are being targeted or without.
It seems as though part of the rationale may relate to ‘defunding’ the Venezuelan government (as the current administration seems to disfavor them), which appears to be deriving a significant amount of revenue (which may not be going to the treasury) from granting ‘license’ for these traffickers to operate from their coast.
Well luckily it turned out that they were all ne'er-do-wells so it's all good.
Just like when the US used drones on Iraqi convoys and amazingly they were all Al-Qaeda sympathisers.
this kind of stuff lines up with the US military MO going back to at least 2008, when more than a few civilian wedding parties in Afghanistan were hit by drone strikes (not the last wedding party in the region to be blown up during the Obama administration). We can say that perhaps we are regressing but it is not really a new development.
> It's the same as if we sent the navy to board those boats, put a gun to people's heads and execute them in cold blood.
That would work too but why risk american soldiers? This is much more efficient and the footage makes for good deterrent/propaganda.
Droning people without public evidence is nothing new for any POTUS in the last 20 years.
It’s not quite the same. It’s considerably more cowardly.
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satellite imagery will be called terrorism now
next up: anyone with the knowledge to do data analysis
I submitted this link to HN with the Reddit title in quotes. Not sure why the quotes were removed, but I want to clarify that I am not the Reddit post author.
It's never been the case that an HN title like this is assumed to be a statement by the submitter.
We always match the HN title to the original post's title, unless it's misleading or linkbait, as per the guidelines. Quotation marks are generally superfluous except, I think, if the article is about a quote.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Please don't post snark on HN. We're trying for something better here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
sorry for that, however it did seem a bit too much on the baity title and trivial reality side
Sure, and we’ve let flags and normal penalties pull it down off the front page now. Best to flag the post if it’s a low quality article, and if it’s really needing our attention, email us - hn@ycombinator.com.