The answer seems to be there is no bottom. For the longest time, the US has been behaving like a rogue state, invading other countries, bombing places any time that it wants to, and killing innocent civilians, Americans and foreigners, with little or no justification other than that they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It has done whatever the hell it wants in the world, either covertly or overtly, and this has been true for a long time through both Democratic and Republican administrations.
With Trump, the crimes have become ever more egregious with not even the semblance of an effort to cloak them in some facsimile of legality by concocting some justification .It seems futile to chronicle its crimes, like painting a black wall with more black paint.
The latest Trump outrage is that on Tuesday he proudly said that he had ordered a military strike on a small speedboat in international waters that he claimed killed 11 members of what he called a drug smuggling ring. There is, however, one big problem with this.
While the White House, the president, the secretary of state, the defense secretary and the deputy chief of staff have all shared video of the US military strike on a small speedboat off the coast of Venezuela on Tuesday, with barely suppressed glee, the administration has offered no evidence that the 11 passengers who were killed were smuggling drugs, or cited any clear legal authority for the use of lethal force.
“Drug trafficking is not a capital crime; it doesn’t carry a death sentence”, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a lawyer at the American Immigration Council, observed. “I genuinely cannot think of anything under U.S. law that would permit premeditated government assassination of people suspected of drug trafficking.”
“Even if they had ironclad proof, the fact that they had the boat under clear surveillance means they could have stopped it in U.S. waters, arrested the people on board, and tried them in a court of law”, he added. “What legal excuse could they have for killing them? Can’t think of one!”
“There is zero evidence of self-defense here. Looks like a massacre of civilians at sea. Even if they had drugs aboard, that’s not a capital offense”, Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group, noted on Bluesky in response to the video of the attack.
“Lethal force against a civilian vessel in international waters is a war crime if not in self-defense”, he added. “If not in self-defense, only non-lethal actions, such as warning shots or disabling fire, are allowed. ‘Not yielding to pursuers’ or ‘suspected of carrying drugs’ doesn’t carry a death sentence.”
To attack a boat in international waters and kill all its occupants because one thinks that it contains people who are engaged in criminal activity, and then brag about it, is the behavior of a rogue, lawless state. The Trump administration is even worse than that of former Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte who gave his security forces the license to murder anyone whom they wanted as long as they justified it on the grounds that they were suspected of drug dealing. But (at least as far as we know) Duterte limited the killings to people who were in his own country.
The US loves to be in a state of war since it enables the administration to rally the population around it even as it pursues dubious and even illegal policies. Whenever it does not have an actual nation to wage war against, it hauls out that reliable standby, the War on Drugs and the frightening specter of menacing drug cartels who might soon be roaming the streets of the country, to scare the hell out of people.
So far no mention of the names of those who were murdered that I can find. Maybe they killed 11 random people just for funsies. 4th of August 1964 our government just plain made shit up.
The concept of “law” has been abandoned for “the will of Trump”
There is a video of the whole incident on Bluesky and probably a lot of other places by now.
The boat they hit was small. About the size of a few bass boats I’ve seen in people’s driveways.
They hit it with a cruise missile that undoubtedly cost more than the boat.
.1. I can’t see where that 11 people came from.
It’s an open small boat and there are only two people in the video.
2. I can’t see how they were going to smuggle anything into the USA.
It is a small speed boat 1,300 km from the USA.
They don’t have enough fuel to go even a small fraction of that distance.
.3. The evidence that it was a gang owned boat smuggling drugs is…nonexistent.
.4. To be sure it was a suspicious looking boat.
Small, with a very large engine, and moving fast, a speedboat.
Doesn’t mean they were smuggling drugs and especially that they were smuggling them into the USA. It didn’t even have that much cargo capacity.
They might have been smuggling people into or out of Venezuela, which has seen a mass flight of refugees due to their dictatorial regime.
They might have been smuggling something else to somewhere else. There are a lot of islands in the Caribbean area. Guns, cell phones, whatever.
.5. As the OP points out, being a suspicious looking boat isn’t supposed to be a death sentence.
They are supposed to stop and search those kinds of boats first.
That is what the US Coast Guard does every day dozens of times.
I suspect they hit it with a cruise missile because it was faster than the large US navy ships around it.
We’re gonna see drug supplies going noticeably down in the US as a result of this, right? Addicts flocking to rehab as their drug supplies run out, right? RIGHT?!
Oh wait, that didn’t happen anywhere as a result of Reagan’s War on Drugs, so…maybe not…
This is yet another made up distraction to stop people from focusing on the near certainty that DJT is outed as a pedophile in the Epstein Files.
So, we murdered 11 people to hide the crimes of a known criminal. Good work, MAGA morons!
It’s the rules-based international order. Our rules, your death sentence.
We all know the answer to that question. The U.S. acts with impunity until our military is defeated or otherwise is unable to function.
@3 raven is already excitedly coming up with post hoc justifications why the boat was filled with Bad Guys.
@nomenexrecto
This hardly seems new. How many drone strikes did Obama order? All the shit the Bushes did? I’m not even going to look up the stuff that happened before i was born
Trump is just building on what has gone before
Yabbut what if they were transporting a load of 12-inch salami sandwiches?
@ nomenexrecto
The point is they at least used to be embarrassed and try to cover it up.
@ beholder
If anything in raven’s comment said “justified” to you, you either need to read with greater comprehension, or you don’t know what the word “justification” means.
Sorry, first bit above was @ dangerousbeans -- wrong handle.
There is more from an article in the NY Times.
.1. A former US government official said that it was more likely that this boat was smuggling people out of Venezuela than smuggling drugs.
That might be where that “11 people” claim came from.
.2. A small drug smuggling boat wouldn’t be carrying 11 people.
They don’t need that many people for anything.
And, if it is intercepted, 11 people get caught.
What they would be doing is taking up space that could be used for cargo.
.3. This boat had a very short range.
It isn’t clear where it was going but it wasn’t going to get any where near the USA.
From where it was destroyed, it might have been to the island of Trinidad which is near the coast of Venezuela.
AFAICT, all the data and evidence was blown up and destroyed by a large weapon strike.
At this point, all we have is an international crime and cold blooded murder by… the USA and the US Navy.
@Silentbob
No they weren’t, at best they kept it quiet for PR reasons. Then there are cases like the Wech Baghtu wedding airstrike
I keep hearing that the US military is a principled body whose members will stand up to authority and refuse illegal orders. TV and movies regularly show such principled stands, often dramatically and with great and noble speeches. And yet in practice we see repeated instances of buckling to such commands, or even more horrifying, a bloodthirsty desire to kill against orders.
I’m sure the military contains principled people, but the structure is weighted against them acting that way.
#6 beholder
He’s taking what was said about the boat and concluding none of what was said justifies the strike. The exact opposite of your accusation.
Well nevermind Holms, they’re calling for all trans people to be treated like Jews in 1930s Germany so always a silver lining form the the point of view of your vehemently expressed ideology, eh?
https://outinstl.com/republican-commentator-joey-mannarino-calls-for-all-trans-people-in-the-u-s-to-be-detained-and-studied/
No. Now stop pretending to know what my thoughts are, you’re shit at it.
Also, you know very well what Mano has asked of me, and you have seen that I adhere to that consistently, meaning you know very well I am not going to pursue that tangent any further. Yet when I aimed a verbal jab at StevoR some time ago, I distinctly recall you chastising me for picking on him as he was not able to respond. Specifically:
Holms: “I wonder if the IDF has finally become too toxic for War Crimes Apologist StevoR?”
Silentbob: “Picking on commenters who can’t respond is lame”
Hypocrisy much? I noted it back then, too:
“This is a very funny quote coming from you, given your habit of raising a certain subject knowing I’ve been asked not to reply to it.”
P.S.
I have a good memory for past interactions. This will be added to the vault.
#6 — what do you mean by “until our military is defeated”? The US military has been losing wars consistently since the 1960s. It’s been defeated SO many times. It’s entire purpose seems to be to the biggest make-work project in the history of this planet. “Defeat” is pretty irrelevant when the entire goal is just to keep a lot of people employed so that they don’t start getting socialist ideas.