4 ms·
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.
by esseph 1y ago
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.
- _mlbt 1y ago[flagged]
- mikeyouse 1y agoYou can't think of a good reason to be against an extrajudicial drone strike that killed 11 people?
- _mlbt 1y ago[flagged]
- mikeyouse 1y ago'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?
- esseph 1y agoImagine if we had done this to a Chinese boat in international waters.
- foogazi 1y agoNot all narco terrorists are the same
- guitarro 1y agoWho 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.
- rayiner 1y ago“Due process” isn’t a concept that applies to foreign actors in international waters. We don’t have a world government with worldwide legal rights.
- maxerickson 1y agoMight makes right after all. 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mikeyouse 1y agoThere 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.
- rayiner 1y agoNone 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-process-of-law.html 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. As to Congressional abdication, you might have an argument that we need some sort of Congressional sanction, as Jefferson obtained against the Barbary Pirates: https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/first-barbary-war https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jeffers.... But that ship sailed a long time ago. Under the War Powers Resolution, the President is authorized to basically shoot first, ask for permission later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Resolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Resolution
- UncleMeat 1y agoWhat about 100? What about 10,000? 1,000,000? "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? A horrifying future.
- jacquesm 1y ago> A horrifying future. Depending on where you live, a horrifying present.
- esseph 1y agoAs someone previously very deeply involved on the ground with a lot of drone strikes, the type we do in the US are NOT cheap.
- pseudo0 1y agoThe 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.
- judahmeek 1y agoWhat about due process?
- myvoiceismypass 1y ago"Due process for me, not for thee"
- esseph 1y agoWhy would we prosecute people in international waters? I guess the drone strike was fine though! /s
- myvoiceismypass 1y agoThis is the same excuse when cops go blazin' in - shoot first ask questions. Look up Amadou Diallo (1999) if you were not around then.
- immibis 1y agoIt'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.
- energy123 1y ago[flagged]
- esseph 1y agoKeeping your last sentence in mind. That's wild.
- energy123 1y agoI believe the status quo is more wild and more inhumane. I'm not proposing another Vietnam or Iraq. I'm proposing a modern solution to an old problem, involving 100000x less death.
- esseph 1y agoThat goes both ways, and means you're asking for other countries to do the same here. You don't want that.
- energy123 1y agoLiberal 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.
- Starman_Jones 1y ago
- foogazi 1y agoHuman rights, law & order, war crimes
- mcphage 1y ago> Swat enough flies and they’ll alter their behavior. They will, but flies are stupid. People are not, and they will not necessarily alter their behavior in a direction that you prefer.
- UncleMeat 1y agoBecause this has worked so enormously well over the past 25 years.
- myvoiceismypass 1y agoThese are not flies, these are fucking human beings.