Out of all the many years of fighting a war on drugs, what difference is this going to make? Some lackeys (forced potentially) get blown up, the barons find some more, or use different methods, and 40 years later we're still fighting the war on drugs.
People love drugs. They really want to get hold of them. Someone is going to keep supplying drugs, no matter how many lackeys you blow up.
It’s ~1,000 miles from the US to Venezuela. Have you ever been on a fishing boat? Especially an “overpowered” one? Guess how much fuel they burn? It’s very unlikely a boat has enough fuel to make it to the US, and if it did it would need fuel to get back. Where are they getting the fuel for these drug runs?
You can read about the logistics from countless sources.
For most boats, it's not a straight shot to the US, they often refuel from boats at sea or utilize refueling points in Central America; or perform a handoff in Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic.
They don't "need the fuel to get back," the boats are scuttled on arrival. The value of the boats and fuel is a rounding error compared to the value of the drugs.
5000 years of civilisation and a sizeable chunk of the population of first-world countries still doesn't understand why law and courts are better than "just kill people who are le bad".
Let's not even talk about the killing of shipwrecked people who are hors de combat according to the Geneva Convention. Even the Nazis during unrestricted submarine warfare had the decency of not murdering shipwrecked crews and passengers. We are truly in a wretched time when nothing matters anymore.
No evidence, as in, it was just Hegseth saying they were "narco terrorists" and using that as justification for military force. Whether or not it's typical for the government to provide it, I don't know, but the public certainly demands it because killing foreign nationals in fishing boats doesn't pass the smell test.
If they were confident about their "narco terrorist" statement, why not arrest them and put it on trial? We're obviously very capable at stopping boats because we seized an oil tanker recently.
> Was there a PowerPoint presentation citing evidence every time Bush and Obama blew up a wedding
Does it matter? I personally didn't support those actions and would condemn them just as harshly as these ones. You're doing the "But what about Obama?!" meme. A large part of Trump's 2024 campaign was about "peace" which turned out to be a complete lie. Will you admit that Trump lied or are you going to deflect to Obama again?
You again failed to acknowledge the pardon of a drug trafficker, btw.
Saying the government shouldn't carry out extrajudicial executions of terrorists without providing a trial in domestic court is just very sheltered/naive. It's simply not what the real world demands.
Killing fisherman as a pretext to regime change is not what the "real world demands", but okay at least you're admitting it was all a lie.
EDIT: the drugs narrative was a lie too. Trump just admitted that it was about extracting oil in his speech. Now we're running the country until him and his buddies can strike a d—sorry, figure out a "transition" plan.
I’m not. My point is that the ordinary rule accepted by most people, especially the mass media, is that the government doesn’t provide public evidence for military actions. So when the New York Times complains that “there is no evidence” here it seems like special pleading.
Given that it was used as justification for regime change ("Venezuela is sending fentanyl and killing Americans!!") then I'd say the pleading should be special.
hold up, I'm a "brown person."
Those people were trafficking drugs (as evidenced by the pallets of cocaine that fell out of their absurdly overpowered "fishing boat.")
I don't really care about extrajudicial killings of drug traffickers, as someone that has been impacted by them.