The old policy was to just pull the boats over and search them.
I wonder if there are any practical law enforcement benefits with the new “kill first, ask questions later” policy.
The article doesn’t say much about this. Like were US Coast Guard getting injured in raids, or overwhelmed by the time it took to search the boats? How many suspected boats were innocent? How many that were turned loose showed up full of coke later?
Dealing with sophisticated non-state actors on the high seas have always been somewhere between “law enforcement” and “war.” In the US it goes back to Jefferson dealing with the Barbary Pirates.
I'm pretty sure this was a distraction from the Epstein files published by congress today. All things considered, we got off cheaply. $3 for a couple of Harpoon(ish) missiles? The alternative was to invade France of bomb Poland.
The logistics of the illegal drugs market is very resilient, sinking one boat will do nothing to stop new zombies and ODs, lol...
It's so resilient that even with all the disruptions caused by the War On Drugs drug prices are mostly stable over decades, some are even deflationary.
That fent walker will still exist, supplied by someone else/some other network.
I don't think you understand how vast and resilient the network of drug logistics is. Killing people with missiles is the least efficient usage of your tax money to actually fight drug abuse due to despair.
But you do you, it's just sad to see even people who are supposedly more well-educated (as most HN users are) not understanding very basic principles, I recommend you learning about systems thinking.
It seems the other side's solution is... coddling and compassion for drug pushers. Endless social programs for addicts? Why not blow the ship and set an example for anyone else, indifferent to terrorists? Not seeing any solutions other than throw as many roadblocks they can in front of enforcement and military action, because it's Trump in charge. They are children.
You don't seem to understand the inevitable, and absurdly wasteful game of whack-a-mole this kind of action becomes... Look at the size of the oceans around the USA, look at the amount of water around Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, all of Central America where boats can sail to deliver larger payloads of drugs.
Do you believe, even with all its might and firepower, the USA has enough ships, helicopters, surveillance planes, satellites, to cover all of this area? Do you believe that cartels with very deep pockets won't be looking for ways around whatever the USA can throw at them, finding new routes, new modes of transportation, etc.? Do you think they are stupid?
No matter how much firepower the USA wastes shooting speedboats there will be other routes for drugs to get into the USA.
Again, you do you, but you don't understand at all the amount of effort it'd take to completely shutdown all trafficking routes, all transportation of drugs, into the USA, lol.
You are smarter than me! The Narcotics Rewards Program offers rewards of up to $25 million for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of narcotics traffickers who operate primarily outside of the United States and are major violators of U.S. narcotics laws. Hope that helps.
I really don't understand what you are trying to say, nor how it matters at all to the conversation we were having prior... You do not understand, don't want to understand but really enjoy posturing. Good luck with that.
11 lives and wasting advanced weaponry vs. sending the coast guard to search and seize the vessel (which, according to the article, is effectively zero risk, and often reveals the boat is not involved in the drug trade…)
"The way that we'll eliminate the illegal drug market is by killing people producing and selling drugs" has been a remarkably ineffective strategy for ages. The situations that drive people to seek substances remain. The lucrative market remains. The mechanism to produce drugs remains.
It just kills the mules and various low-level people or lackeys. Could also kill some of the family-people who are under the local feudal lord (drug cartel leadership)
Trump and Rubio don't seem particularly inclined to only go for the low level lackeys. "The president is very clear that he’s going to use the full power of America, the whole might of the United States, to take on and eradicate these drug cartels" and "TDA is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, operating under the control of Nicolas Maduro, responsible for mass murder..." etc.
Not really. None of the people in that boat were meaningful. If they were, they wouldn't have been on the boat.
This is like going outside and swatting a fly. Congrats, there are a lot more out there and how much money got spent on that strike? May not scale well.
Who says they're narcoterrorists? I only see a very pixelated video that seems to be a boat. That then explodes, killing the people on it. Is this what we've come to? No due process, no collection of evidence, no reviewing of it, see if things are actually true & if any laws are broken. And then punish fitting to the crime?
I think liquidating people without due process and then being smug about it is really befitting for a civilized society, and sounds more like something that drug cartels would do.
Don't get me wrong, drug (mis)use is definitely something that needs to be addressed in a big way, but abandoning due process is not something to be celebrated I would say, and is a very, very slippery slope.
There are international treaties governing this kind of thing and of course the US is nominally bound by several different laws that should prevent unilateral action like this from the Executive. But Congress has completely abdicated so here we are.
None of those things implicate “due process,” which is a very old, very specific concept. It dates back to the Magna Carta, and refers to the legal process subjects of the sovereign are entitled to before deprivation of property rights: https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/magna-carta-muse-and-mentor/due....
Due process doesn’t and has never applied to military actions against foreigners outside the country’s jurisdiction. Indeed, I’m unaware of any western country that applies its concept of domestic legal process rights to military actions against foreign actors in international waters. Such a concept would totally turn upside down how legal systems think about the boundaries between the sphere of domestic law and law enforcement and the sphere of military action.
The War Powers Act isn't a 'get out of jail free' card to drone strike anyone on earth - it still demands that;
'The President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances."
And then within 48 hours of the strikes;
the President shall submit within 48 hours to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and to the President pro tempore of the Senate a report, in writing, setting forth;
(A) the circumstances necessitating the introduction of United States Armed Forces;
(B) the constitutional and legislative authority under which such introduction took place; and
(C) the estimated scope and duration of the hostilities or involvement.
The ongoing Middle East and Northern Africa strikes have comically stretched the rationale of the 9/11 AUMF - but there's absolutely no authority to carry out strikes in Venezuela or in Mexico like they've been threatening to do and congress was never consulted about carrying out these strikes and of course there's no legislative or constitutional authority to do so.
It's fine that you don't think we should be bound by international law, but surely the President should be bound by our laws?
And morally, what the fuck are we doing here drone striking a small boat that could have been easily boarded and captured.
With any luck, we'll be bombing Venezuelan civilians as reprisal killings after their government has the bad judgement to murder Americans that they accused of whatever.
Try to imagine the roles reversed and realize how utterly bizarre this comment is. Just because you can perform drone strikes on parties in other countries does not make it right. If any other country would do any of this to the USA you'd be screaming blue murder but when it is the other way around you're a-ok with it.
Of course it is a due process issue. The USA does not have the legal right - even if they have the capability - to blow up random people on the planet just because they can. This is the kind of attitude that powers terrorism.
> If any other country would do any of this to the USA you'd be screaming blue murder but when it is the other way around you're a-ok with it.
I'd be totally fine with another country drone striking American gangs. They would be doing us a huge favor.
> Of course it is a due process issue. The USA does not have the legal right - even if they have the capability - to blow up random people on the planet just because they can.
"Due process" is a legal concept in Anglo law that describes the legal process required for the sovereign to deprive a subject of life, liberty, or property. The Anglo concept has no applicability to what the military can or cannot do to foreigners. And I'm not aware of any western nation having an equivalent to due process that applies to military action. The U.S. didn't provide anything resembling "due process" before it nuked Hiroshima or Nagasaki or bombed Dresden.
It makes no sense to use the word "right" to describe what the U.S. as a sovereign state can or cannot do to foreign actors on foreign soil. It's just a category error. The U.S., as a sovereign state, can do whatever it wants because nations exist within a state of anarchy as to each other: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realism_(international_relatio....
Are you a lawyer? What's the bar's position on lawyers calling for extrajudicial executions on the streets of the US? And saying those executions would be doing society a 'favor'?
> I'd be totally fine with another country drone striking American gangs.
You mentioned weddings. The moment you say 'gangs' you are assuming more knowledge than you can reasonably be expected to have. Unless of course presence on a boat is proof of being in a gang.
> "Due process" is a legal concept in Anglo law that describes the legal process required for the sovereign to deprive a subject of life, liberty, or property. The Anglo concept has no applicability to what the military can or cannot do to foreigners.
You may have noticed this - or not, you're a lawyer, after all - but ordinary people have this thing called 'ethics' that gives them a hint about what is and what isn't right or permitted. It's crazy, I know, they don't even need laws to be able to do so. On average people have a pretty good idea what is right and what is wrong even when there are no bits of paper and togas involved. And bombing foreigners off the coast of their own countries or in international waters without provocation is very much wrong - at least in my book.
A good test if you think something is wrong is to try to meditate on what you would feel like if the situation were reversed. If it was you and/or your family members on a boat off the coast of your own country and some other country decided to bomb you.
> And I'm not aware of any western nation having an equivalent to due process that applies to military action.
Absent due process you exercise a thing called 'restraint'. It is why for instance Ukraine isn't indiscriminately bombing the Russians, and because they don't have it is is why the Russians are indiscriminately bombing the Ukrainians. It shows that Ukrainians value the life of people in general, whereas the Russians appear to care only about the life of people with their own citizenship (and even then, plenty of times they do not but they appear to at least have some difference).
What you can do and what you should do is a massive difference.
> The U.S. didn't provide anything resembling "due process" before it nuked Hiroshima or Nagasaki or bombed Dresden.
Indeed, they did not. It may surprise you that this leads to mixed feelings in many places.
> It makes no sense to use the word "right" to describe what the U.S. as a sovereign state can or cannot do to foreign actors on foreign soil.
We are not discussing capability here. Nobody doubts the US has that capability.
> The U.S., as a sovereign state, can do whatever it wants because nations exist within a state of anarchy as to each other
International law is actually a thing, but if we for the moment ignore that what you are describing is not anarchy, it is war.
Besides your tone let's just try to inject some rationality here: I don't subscribe to murdering people, even alleged drug traffickers when better alternatives exist.
And for an encore: 11 people on a boat that is trafficking drugs? Think about that for a second. If you're a drugs smuggler what are you going to do with 11 people on your boat. That's easily 600 Kg more payload which has a street value of something ridiculous. And there is no way in hell that that boat would make it to the USA. That's way to far for a powerboat like that. They're great for short and very fast hops, not for 1000+ miles across open water. So there is a very good chance that 11 innocents just got murdered for no reason whatsoever other than that they happened to be on a boat.
But I don't even care: bombing boats with civilians is an act of war. This is the sort of thing that will beget a response. Just like threatening to invade Canada, Panama or Greenland begets a response. At the end of all this the USA will realize that it is large, but not larger than the rest of the world. Killing indiscriminately and bullying are all immature acts of overgrown toddlers that want to use their toys. You can't justify that by pointing to some pieces of paper, or lack thereof.
Ok, but what does all of this have to do with my, or raiyner’s comment? Are you really not familiar with the notion of “due process”? Is the legal system where you are from unable to distinguish between procedural rights and the morality of outcome?
Why is anyone surprised that people who live in countries that rely on due process for punishment aren't convinced by the asterisk of "the US military doesn't have to abide due process outside of these imaginary lines"?
You can't just hand wave the due process issues away since the boat was in international waters. Rayiner's whole presumption is legally wrong as well.
We're not at war with Venezuela, and even if we were, we have laws against murder via the war crimes act (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2441 - (d)(1)(D)). And surprise surprise, the law qualifies that it only applies to those taking no part in the hostilities - which you'd need some sort of due process to justify. There's no statutory requirement for "big D" Due Process, but due process also has common usage meaning that was ignored here.
You can tell how legally dubious the action was by the lawyer Marco Rubio's mealy-mouthed rationale explaining that Trump ordered the attack, that he was given the option to capture or kill and he chose to kill them. Everyone who knows better is distancing themselves from the decision chain of the attack since only the President is protected via the Supreme Court's recently invented official acts privilege.
And trolling or not, this wasn't remotely the same as US drone strikes in Afghanistan from a legal POV. At least there, we had the AUMF to rely on and provide congressional cover for the attacks - here, there's no plausible argument that drone striking a random smuggling vessel hundreds of miles from the US shore was legal. Don't take my word for it either, several people who've had to make the legal case for drone strikes also agree this was illegal according to US law and international treaties.
'Narcoterrorists' who had neither a trial nor a sentence and posed absolutely no imminent threat to anyone in the US. Why would we expect our military to actually follow International or even US laws?
"The government said that these people were bad so we simply killed them" is a bone-chillingly frightening statement. We've already got the US government saying that there are members of this gang in the US based on laughable evidence. Why not just simply have the army show up at Kilmar Garcia's house and shoot him in the head? Or bomb the building he happens to be in?
The alternative was loading up a Coast Guard ship with guys and sending them out to do an interdiction, seizing 11 men, processing them through the American legal system, incarcerating them for decades, and then eventually deporting them. I bet that costs a couple orders of magnitude more than a drone strike. Arguing cost is not compelling in the slightest.
It's cheaper to drone strike a house with an alleged serial killer in it, than to arrest him and then give him a trial to see if he's actually a serial killer or not.
Liberal norms are an iterative game. We can't play that game unilaterally. It is a bilateral game.
Dictators don't respect your attempts to play this game with them. If you try to play this game with them, they will use your attempts as a weapon against you.
For example, the liberal pursuit to get Ukraine to surrender its nuclear weapons. Or the liberal pursuit behind UNSC Resolution 1701, where Hezbollah pinkie promised not to keep its arms.
These people don't think like you do. They see your restraint as a weakness to exploit, not as a quality to reciprocate.
This is why I advocate only for selective bilateral liberalism as a foreign policy. Play the liberalism game with parties who want to play that game. Respect the sovereignty of democracies. Get that iterative game running.
But for dictators, at least those without a nuclear deterrent who follow a policy of cruelty, show them overwhelming power, and kill them in targeted strikes whenever the opportunity presents itself.
It didn't work in the early 2000s. But why would you use past capabilities to reason about current capabilities? The world changed, and our reasoning needs to be updated accordingly. It took 3 years and a ground invasion to find Saddam. What I am proposing is to locate Maduro and send a JDAM to him.
A more relevant case study is the war between Israel and Hezbollah, where targeting senior leadership worked. Israel killed two successive leaders until they found someone willing to sign a surrender in all but name, and ceased the rocket attacks. This would not have been possible in the early 2000s.
Yes, targeting senior leadership was exactly what the Bush administration attempted in Iraq. And they were hugely successful at it! The problem was never that the firepower was underwhelming...
"Surely if we simply assassinate the leader of a sovereign nation it will not possibly become a nightmare boondoggle. It definitely would not further destabilize the country."
Wait, only 5 members of the cartel? Where does it say that? I guess they murdered 6 innocent people (the headline says killed 11), all because they were too lazy to stop the boat?
I wonder if there are any practical law enforcement benefits with the new “kill first, ask questions later” policy.
The article doesn’t say much about this. Like were US Coast Guard getting injured in raids, or overwhelmed by the time it took to search the boats? How many suspected boats were innocent? How many that were turned loose showed up full of coke later?