They blew up a boat far offshore, killed eleven people, and called it justice | Hacker News Reader

They blew up a boat far offshore, killed eleven people, and called it justice

mitchthelawyer.substack.com

78 pointsrbanffy38 comments

This is a big win for China. Standards of Justice have moved tremendously in open seas.

Whether drugs or information, you don’t want to be on the wrong side of this!

> When all is said and done, demand a foreign policy that protects Americans and respects the line between war and policing. Demand leadership that values the Constitution at home and credibility abroad.

From whom? The US is entering a post law reality.

Their only belief is might makes right, power above all other principles.

This is the norm for the next few years.

That's multipolar world in action. Something what Putin and Xi wanted so much, but it turns out that other powers can use this concept as well to interfere with their allies and they can't say anything because they are doing exactly same thing with western allies.

Sometimes it feels like Putin and Xi are naive children, thinking that they will stop playing by the international rules, but rest of the world will continue to abide by such rules.

I wonder if its just tRump is more blatantly obvious about flexing American power?

What i mean is America has always done what it wants, its just that before tRump they tried to cloak it to maintain the illusion they were "the good guys".

To put it another way—Is this a change in US policy or a change in US publicity?

tRump is certainly a master of publicity, and his brand of politics consumes new and shiny.

Unfortunately, knowing what we know of tRump, we can rationally conclude both could be true.

What we also can reason, is if there is no political (forget legal) consequences, there will be less friction for more of the same.

M2c, I imagined the boat as a flashy Miami Vice cigar boat or much larger with cabins. This boat was the equivalent of blowing up some dude’s pickup truck.

if this actually did happen it is an international crime.

u.s. coastguard has been using force to detain vessels crew, and passengers for quite sometime, by hitting the vessels engines, and boarding the vessel.

you see not everyone is always narco, the feasibility of a vessel operator not knowing drugs are present is there. the possibility of persons having no involvement, or knowledge of drugs is a large one.

refugees, migrants, and trafficked persons would be witnesses, not co-conspirators.

a military naval group, attacking unmilitarized vessels in international water is a big deal, as in maybe a joint forces operation would detain and prosecute a sitting U.S. president, if this actually did happen.

It actually happened, the administration sycophants have been gloating about it while making the rounds on "the news"

i have no problems with the idea being true, but ive seen murk already in some previous posts, such as the suggestion a quite fake looking video was produced, but i havnt seen it.

regardless of veracity, gloating over mass murder has a rather dark palpatine, look to it.

im certain i would see confirmation if i went down the rabbithole

Palpatine... they did put out an AI generated image of dear leader with a red saber

on X and TruthSocial the accounts in the President's replies post that democrats are defending narcoterrorists

to deflect from the lack of trial that determines whether the killed were narcoterrorists

Lies and slander!

Obama launched plenty of extrajudicial drone strikes!

it's funny because Obama took control of the drone strikes as a means of oversight because the military were doing it without any oversight under Bush

I was actually going to write that those accounts in anti-liberal arenas should be happy Obama didn’t wait for trials either, but the difference in doing it against a US citizen abroad was too glaring to make a one liner about

I think it's one of the most incompetent moves by this administration yet. You have eyes on a suspected drug smuggling boat. No direct confirmation, and instead of tracking the boat (which they can clearly do) to intercept and apprehend the crew picking up the payload (or at least identify the destination) -- they just blow it up. Like a child knocking down blocks. Hard to tell if it's incompetence or protection of recipients in the US. But what better way to signal to smugglers that you have the means and methods to detect and intercept while also protecting the recipients?

The cruelty is the point.

Personally I think incompetence and a malicious push toward authoritarianism is the point. But yeah, they do love that cruelty.

An integral part of authoritarianism is cruelty. How else can you assert that you have unalienable authority over a group of people? If compliance with authority is easy and painless, you don't really know if people are just acquiescing but silently resisting or not resisting yet but could if they wanted to. By enacting cruelty on others you put them in a position where they absolutely would resist if they could, and thus you demonstrate to the world that people cannot resist your authority.

One thing is for sure, don’t be taking your speedboat out for a joyride anytime soon in the Caribbean.

> intercept and apprehend the crew picking up the payload

The military stepping foot on the land to do this would be not taken well. They have no authority to invade or intervene, and shots would certainly be fired in the wrong direction. And, the local government has no authority to intervene, at the pickup point, as they're controlled by the cartels. The wider government has no interest in intervening, since it's too profitable.

The alternative is precisely nothing happening, which is the goal, with previously profound success, for the cartels.

It's all bad.

> The alternative is

False dichotomy

The US has no authority for any operations there, and no way to pressure the governments (what are we going to do, put a tariff on drugs?!). The local government is run by the cartels, and the larger government actively supports them. HOW is that a false dichotomy, when this IS the normal state? Please be specific, and describe your point of view.

Your comment presented the options as killing people at sea or doing nothing, when there are a range of more effective and lawful options

1. Negotiate with Venezuela to reduce drug exports

2. Increase drug interdiction efforts with other Caribbean nations

3. Prosecute the sale and distribution of illegal drugs in the US

4. Invest in treatment & rehab options for drug addiction in the US

All of those take time and don’t show up on TV but are effective options

The boat was presumably smuggling drugs from Venezuela. They destroyed the boat soon after departure off the coast of Venezuela. Not only did they not have authority to destroy the boat (due process, no declared war -- see GP for typical SOP), they apparently didn't even bother to find out the destination.

Trump and his entire administration are fools. You know it, and I know it. And everyone else knows it.

Its unprecedented in modern times for a nation state to act this way. We declared to the world that we think we have the right to kill foreign nationals in international waters so long as there is "suspicion" of crime. The people on that boat were not even given a chance to explain themselves or surrender. Its monstrous behavior by this administration. Not even countries like North Korea or Russia operate this way.

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