It's not that the US is simply "claiming" the vessels belong to a drug cartel, it's that nobody is denying that they were drug vessels. Not even Venezuela [1]. Maduro has denied that he is involved with the drug cartels, and Venezuela has claimed that the one or more of the strikes occurred within Venezuela's territorial waters, but they haven't made the argument that those boats were actually innocent non-criminal vessels.
And once you make that distinction, then yes. The world is fine with blowing up vessels that belong to drug cartels, even if China did it. They probably wouldn't be fine if it was actually refugees, but this does not appear to be the case.
See also Cuba emptying its jails and sending the prisoners to Florida: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/criminals-in-exodus-from-...
What? The king of England hasn't denied that they're drug smuggling vessels either, it doesn't mean he's admitting they are. I don't understand this logic at all.
Just because the USA has committed atrocities in the past doesn't mean that everything the government says is a lie. It's okay to be skeptical but if you haven't found any evidence to the contrary you should start to accept that maybe the US government actually hit real drug boats.
Maybe this hasn't been aired on Fox News, but people are:
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/colombian-killed-us-strike-...
Having said that, all legal vessels have an ID and someone would have complained already about their property and crew being blown up. Its pretty clear they belong to hardcore criminal elements.
Mismanagement can cause swamping or sinking. The management loses their vessel and their cargo.
Basically, "just random poor farmers that took a pay day from a cartel" is simply not possible.
Not incredibly difficult these days with GPS. Especially if they're doing an Atlantic crossing, its not like there's a lot of things to hit. They're all diesel-electrics, they spend a lot of their time practically at the surface. When they need to dive, its usually only for a few hours at a time, a compass heading is good enough for those times especially in the open ocean. Its not like they're trying to read complicated sonar outputs or anything like that. They're not busting out a sextant to figure out their latitude. They also aren't explorers trying to chart out a new path, they're pretty much going to follow the known good routes other boats have gone before.
> perform docking/unloading
I imagine there are more than just the people operating the boats at the docks. I also don't think it takes a lot of training and skill to pick things up and set things down. And its not like they're having to be some certified harbor pilot bringing in the boat into the shipping lanes, its going to be some little dock off in the middle of nowhere far away from other traffic.
They could learn the ropes of how to operate this thing in a few days along with some good basic documentation, assuming the farmers are literate. Its not like its that hard figuring out "this handle makes us dive, this handle makes us go up, don't go deeper than this, make sure batteries stay within this range, follow the GPS route".
I'm not saying these couldn't possibly be well-trained people operating these vessels, but it doesn't take too much training to figure out how to operate one of these things.
Yes, it will sink. These are semi-submersible "narco-subs". They have weak hulls and little reserve buoyancy. They have very little margin for error in heavy seas.
> Pull up on a beach in the middle of the night and grab the bricks out of the sub for the guys waiting for you there.
Beaching (and getting off a beach) is a bit tricky for semi-submersible narco-subs. You need the right water depth for approach and departure - otherwise you can get grounded or stranded. Waves can swamp you. These subs are cheap - they have simple propulsion and little reserve power and have difficulty making tight corrections.
I am not sure why people are thinking it is as simple as driving your bike. It needs both training and experience.
> amassing a naval fleet off the coast of another country
Surely you are joking about this part, right?
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?
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.
It's not like this is the first time when the US has withheld evidence for certain actions it took. That doesn't mean the evidence isn't there. This is generally a problem with judging government behavior due to the information asymmetry