I think Andrew McCarthy at National Review has this right. NBC reported that the first boat strike was based upon some list of alleged “narco-terrorists.” Since they are claiming that drug runners are the equivalent of ISIS and Al Qaeda, they are apparently using the rules of engagement that were used in the drone war over the past decade under every president since Bush. As McCarthy points out, however, that was authorized under the AUMF passed by Congress after 9/11 to fight terrorism. Just calling these people terrorists, or “narco-terrorists” doesn’t change the fact that they are trying to stuff the drug war into the war on terrorism without the congressional authorization that makes those actions legal. Neither does it change the laws of war, or the criminal code that makes these strikes shockingly immoral.
He surmises that Hegseth believes he’s just “killing terrorists” and what could be wrong about that? Well, as McCarthy explained, narcotics traffickers are not analogous to Jihadist terrorists for a variety of reasons. But he points out another twist in logic that I haven’t heard anyone else discuss:
These rudimentary distinctions inexorably caused the press and the public to question the double-tap strike in a way they would not have questioned a follow-on strike against actual terrorists (especially if, say, such terrorists had been transporting explosives rather than cocaine). In response to the intense criticism (as I related here), President Trump distanced himself from the double-tap strike, and an effort was made to distance Hegseth from it. The administration also pivoted to a defense that focused on the boat and its cargo rather than the operators against whom Hegseth had said it had been his intent to apply “lethal, kinetic strikes.”
This seemed to work for a few days because, habitually zeroing in on the wrong thing, the anti-Trump press had made the issue about whether the double-tap strike was a war crime, whereas the real issue is whether the campaign of lethal strikes against suspected drug boats without congressional authorization is illegal. Once it was clear that Hegseth hadn’t issued a second order specifically telling Admiral Bradley to kill the shipwrecked survivors, many lost interest in the underlying, flawed analogy between drug traffickers and jihadists and between cocaine and bombs.
Nevertheless, the NBC report regarding Bradley’s briefings to Congress shifts the spotlight back onto the boat operators. Indeed, according to NBC’s sources, when asked if Hegseth gave an order along the lines of “Kill them all,”
Bradley told lawmakers that the orders he received from Hegseth were to kill the individuals on the approved target list, which included everyone on the boat, then destroy the drugs and sink the boat.
Translation: the priority was killing the people who were on the boat; the drugs and the boat were secondary concerns. Now, while I am not a military veteran, it doesn’t make sense to me to think about the missile strikes in such sequential terms. The U.S. strikes simultaneously kill people, destroy cargo, and damage vessels to the point that at least some of them are instantly sunk — you don’t kill the people, then destroy the drugs, then sink the boat. Still, if NBC’s version of Bradley’s account is correct, what matters is that the top military priority was the people. That’s why there’s a list of them.
As Rich Lowry observed in his column (and I contended in the aforementioned discussion of Obama’s drone strikes), such a priority makes perfect sense when one is dealing with actual terrorists or the military forces of a foreign enemy…
But it is impossible to apply such logic to drug traffickers, which is why federal law’s extensive definitions of terrorist activity do not include narcotics-dealing. With drug dealers, the priority is always to prevent illegal narcotics from entering the U.S. market. Capturing and prosecuting the drug dealers is important but secondary. (You may notice that the Justice Department and law enforcement agencies host big press conferences every time they seize a significant narcotics shipment or stash, even on occasions when they arrest few if any of the drug traffickers.)
[…]
Bradley was also adhering to the Trump administration’s conceit that the boat operators are terrorists and that the cocaine packages are akin to bombs. By his lights, then, even though this seems perverse, it was okay to kill the boat operators as long as they weren’t too badly wounded. That is, if they were hors de combat (such that it would have violated the laws of war to kill them), there would have been no double tap. But, since they were still alive and functioning, they remained viable targets for “lethal, kinetic strikes” because they could theoretically have continued their “mission” of transporting the “weapons” (cocaine packages) that were strapped inside the remnant of the ship’s hull to which they clung.
Trump says that every boat blown to smithereens saves 25,000 American lives. That’s just insane, particularly since most of the boats they incinerated are carrying cocaine, which isn’t killing people, and that cocaine is going to Europe rather than the U.S.
We all know this is really about deposing Maduro (and possibly Petro in Colombia) and seizing the oil thus proving that Trump and his minions have the huge male appendages supposedly required to dominate the Western Hemisphere. They think they can scare everyone into bowing down and sucking their toes because they’ve been so successful at getting virtually every American elite institution (and plenty of foreigners) to eagerly demonstrate their eagerness to do just that.
All of this horrific murderous behavior is in service of that twisted, sick agenda.