U.S. Military and boat strikes thread - On Venezuela? On Mexico?

[Frozenbeernuts 2,402]

48 minutes ago, SaintsInDome2006 said:

WADR, it’s a lousy one. Further down that account - which - despite having an American flag & bald eagle crest - is based in Eastern Europe - claims that the Rothschilds (read, Jewish) are secretly controlling the Catholic Church. This is a foreign account trying to push Americans into advocating for war.

Do you know the history of the Rothschilds? These accounts aren't always on the money.

One thing I can bet on is your brain would short circuit if you found out all the truths. Not because anything radical is happening, but because of how off the mark you are on about everything.

One of my jobs on earth is to remind people like you how little you know about literally anything. Your life would improve if you focused all of your energy on the things you could control, rather than jerking your energy off all over the wrong things like a newly pubescent boy.

You aren't the only one BTW. Ron, Tims, Squish are in the category too along with some others.

[SaintsInDome2006 726]

5 minutes ago, Frozenbeernuts said:

Do you know the history of the Rothschilds? These accounts aren't always on the money.

One thing I can bet on is your brain would short circuit if you found out all the truths. Not because anything radical is happening, but because of how off the mark you are on about everything.

One of my jobs on earth is to remind people like you how little you know about literally anything. Your life would improve if you focused all of your energy on the things you could control, rather than jerking your energy off all over the wrong things like a newly pubescent boy.

You aren't the only one BTW. Ron, Tims, Squish are in the category too along with some others.

Amigo, I’ve been up, down, east, west on every “theory” from the Templars to Clay Shaw. The ‘Rothschilds are running the world’ is one of the oldest canards, it might be over a hundred years old at this point. If you’re chasing theories maybe find someone from Moldavia spinning something new at least.

[Frozenbeernuts 2,402]

1 minute ago, SaintsInDome2006 said:

Amigo, I’ve been up, down, east, west on every “theory” from the Templars to Clay Shaw. The ‘Rothschilds are running the world’ is one of the oldest canards, it might be over a hundred years old at this point. If you’re chasing theories maybe find someone from Moldavia spinning something new at least.

I didn't say they were running the world. I don't believe they are. Are they a messed up family who is responsible for a lot of the messed up things we see? Sure.

[dogcows 1,154]

10 hours ago, Frozenbeernuts said:

I don't follow him. I hope that helps your tantrum.

You posted his Nazi here. 

[dogcows 1,154]

43 minutes ago, Frozenbeernuts said:

Do you know the history of the Rothschilds? These accounts aren't always on the money.

One thing I can bet on is your brain would short circuit if you found out all the truths. Not because anything radical is happening, but because of how off the mark you are on about everything.

One of my jobs on earth is to remind people like you how little you know about literally anything. Your life would improve if you focused all of your energy on the things you could control, rather than jerking your energy off all over the wrong things like a newly pubescent boy.

You aren't the only one BTW. Ron, Tims, Squish are in the category too along with some others.

Oh wow look more anti-Semitic posts.

Frozenbeernazi.

[SaintsInDome2006 726]

42 minutes ago, Frozenbeernuts said:

I didn't say they were running the world. I don't believe they are. Are they a messed up family who is responsible for a lot of the messed up things we see? Sure.

How about the House of Saud by comparison? Thats actual, real life. Trump is in bed with them, & this specific situation involves oil, the ownership of it & the price of it.  Rule 1 of conspiracyland is to ask Qui Bono.

[Frozenbeernuts 2,402]

15 minutes ago, dogcows said:

Oh wow look more anti-Semitic posts.

Frozenbeernazi.

Another boot licking fascist posing as a liberal. This is how fascists try to gain the upper hand. Me giving fair criticism to someone who happens to be Jewish equals Nazi. Only a good little fascist would equate the two.

[Frozenbeernuts 2,402]

14 minutes ago, SaintsInDome2006 said:

How about the House of Saud by comparison? Thats actual, real life. Trump is in bed with them, & this specific situation involves oil, the ownership of it & the price of it.  Rule 1 of conspiracyland is to ask Qui Bono.

Oh that's real life but the Rothschild's are innocent philanthropists who are misunderstood by people. Idk where you get your information from, but you should fire them.

[dogcows 1,154]

13 minutes ago, SaintsInDome2006 said:

How about the House of Saud by comparison? Thats actual, real life. Trump is in bed with them, & this specific situation involves oil, the ownership of it & the price of it.  Rule 1 of conspiracyland is to ask Qui Bono.

Good point. For example, Osama Bin Laden is a Saudi from a very prominent family. But after 9/11, America went to war with Afghanistan and Iraq instead.  

[SaintsInDome2006 726]

1 minute ago, Frozenbeernuts said:

Oh that's real life but the Rothschild's are innocent philanthropists who are misunderstood by people. Idk where you get your information from, but you should fire them.

Alright, House of Saud is real life. You agree with my point about Trump, the Saudi Kingdom & Venezuela as well?

[Frozenbeernuts 2,402]

3 minutes ago, SaintsInDome2006 said:

Alright, House of Saud is real life. You agree with my point about Trump, the Saudi Kingdom & Venezuela as well?

No. I don't pretend like I have the inside scoop on what is actually happening in those situations. Trump has America's best interest at heart, so if he is doing something, it is most likely going to benefit us.

[Frozenbeernuts 2,402]

The conspiracies that the left comes up with these days are insane. They aren't grounded in reality. It's like any source with a nugget of Trump hate must be true.

Please stop with these conspiracies and take the tin foil hats off. Ridiculous.

[SaintsInDome2006 726]

7 minutes ago, Frozenbeernuts said:

Trump has America's best interest at heart, so if he is doing something, it is most likely going to benefit us.

Somewhere there’s a North Korean propagandist saying, “Yaknow, this guy really gets it.”

[dogcows 1,154]

Just now, Frozenbeernuts said:

The conspiracies that the left comes up with these days are insane. They aren't grounded in reality. It's like any source with a nugget of Trump hate must be true.

Please stop with these conspiracies and take the tin foil hats off. Ridiculous.

Says the guy posting QAnon tweets and ranting about the Rothschilds.

You’re very special. So special that maybe you should try entering the special Olympics.

[Frozenbeernuts 2,402]

2 minutes ago, dogcows said:

Says the guy posting QAnon tweets and ranting about the Rothschilds.

You’re very special. So special that maybe you should try entering the special Olympics.

Oh look, another fascist who posts non stop about ridiculous conspiracies.

[Hardcore troubadour 15,942]

It’s almost like the Dep of War didn’t put videos out of the boats (speed) getting blown up. Fisherman. Sure.  Clowns. 

[Mr Fantasy 83]

17 hours ago, SaintsInDome2006 said:

Couldn’t Trump & Ratcliffe just…. order the CIA, which they control (!)… to stop?

The CIA controls the CIA

[SaintsInDome2006 726]

9 minutes ago, Mr Fantasy said:

The CIA controls the CIA

Ridiculous. The President & Director control it.

[SaintsInDome2006 726]

This is the part where maga has to figure out some reason why Trump is doing Deep State & Deep Swamp things. Can’t be him, oh no not that.

[Hardcore troubadour 15,942]

25 minutes ago, SaintsInDome2006 said:

This is the part where maga has to figure out some reason why Trump is doing Deep State & Deep Swamp things. Can’t be him, oh no not that.

He’s acting in a clandestine manner? Your TDS is flaring again. 

[SaintsInDome2006 726]

2 minutes ago, Hardcore troubadour said:

He’s acting in a clandestine manner? 

Quite the opposite, he’s quite transparent about it.

[FrancieFootball 231]

Looks like we have war crimes, folks.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/venezuela-strike-alleged-drug-boat-hegseth-tim-kaine-face-the-nation/

[Maximum Overkill 2,548]

2 hours ago, FrancieFootball said:

Looks like we have war crimes, folks.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/venezuela-strike-alleged-drug-boat-hegseth-tim-kaine-face-the-nation/

Got him this time 

[SaintsInDome2006 726]

Andrew McCarthy: ‘We Intended the Strike to Be Lethal’ Is Not a Defense

- Andrew McCarthy

 

An explosive Washington Post report, the subject of so much discussion the past two days, says that, in the first missile strike the Trump Defense Department carried out against operatives of a boat suspected of transporting narcotics on the high seas off Venezuela, two survivors were rendered shipwrecked. As they clung to the wreckage, the U.S. commander ordered a second strike, which killed them.

If this happened as described in the Postreport, it was, at best, a war crime under federal law. I say “at best” because, as regular readers know, I believe the attacks on these suspected drug boats — without congressional authorization, under circumstances in which the boat operators pose no military threat to the United States, and given that narcotics trafficking is defined in federal law as a crime rather than as terrorist activity, much less an act of war — are lawless and therefore that the killings are not legitimate under the law or armed conflict. (See my Saturday column, with links to prior posts on this subject.)

Nevertheless, even if we stipulate arguendothat the administration has a colorable claim that our forces are in an armed conflict with non-state actors (i.e., suspected members of drug cartels that the administration has dubiously designated as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs)), the laws of war do not permit the killing of combatants who have been rendered hors de combat (out of the fighting) — including by shipwreck.

 

To reiterate, I don’t accept that the ship operators are enemy combatants — even if one overlooks that the administration has not proven that they are drug traffickers or members of designated FTOs. There is no armed conflict. They may be criminals (if it is proven that they are importing illegal narcotics), but they are not combatants.

My point, nevertheless, is that even if you buy the untenable claim that they are combatants, it is a war crime to intentionally kill combatants who have been rendered unable to fight. It is not permitted, under the laws and customs of honorable warfare, to order that no quarter be given — to apply lethal force to those who surrender or who are injured, shipwrecked, or otherwise unable to fight.

According to the Post, two unidentified sources said, prior to the September 2 attack that killed at least eleven people, that Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, which one source described as “the order was to kill everybody.”

The operation, led by SEAL Team 6, was directed from Fort Bragg, N.C., by Admiral Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley, then the head of Joint Special Operations Command. Admiral Bradley is said to have ordered the attack against the two survivors of the first strike in order to comply with Hegseth’s directive to kill the boat’s operators. Two sources told the Post:

Bradley told people on the secure conference call that the survivors were still legitimate targets because they could theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo.

Hegseth, responding to the Post report on X, begins with the familiar pining about how all derogatory reporting about the Trump administration is “fake news,” but then doesn’t actually rebut any assertion in the report. He does state:

As we’ve said from the beginning, and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be “lethal, kinetic strikes.” The declared intent is to stop lethal drugs, destroy narco-boats, and kill the narco-terrorists who are poisoning the American people. [Emphasis added.]

Neither Hegseth’s statement nor the explanation attributed to Bradley (and excerpted above) makes legal sense.

The laws of war, as they are incorporated into federal law, make lethal force unlawful if it is used under certain circumstances. Hence, it cannot be a defense to say, as Hegseth does, that one has killed because one’s objective was “lethal, kinetic strikes.”

Moreover, if an arguable combatant has been rendered hors de combat, targeting him with lethal force cannot be rationalized, as Bradley is said to have done, by theorizing that it was possible, at some future point, that the combatant could get help and be able to contribute once again to enemy operations.

The 1949 Geneva Conventions were ratified by the United States. Consequently, Common Article 3 (CA3) of the convention binds our government. CA3 prohibits “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds,” of “persons taking no active part in hostilities” (emphasis added). According to CA3, persons taking no active part in hostilities include “those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause.”

That includes persons who have been wounded in an attack and are shipwrecked. If that were not obvious enough on its face, Jack Goldsmith, who headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush 43 administration, notes that the Department of Defense Law of War Manualdefines hors de combat to include persons “otherwise incapacitated by . . . shipwreck.” (This appears in an essential post on Goldsmith’s Substack, Executive Functions.)

Congress has incorporated “grave breaches” of CA3 in the penal code’s war crimes statute — Section 2441 — when “committed in the context of and in association with an armed conflict not of an international character” (which is how the administration describes its operations in the Caribbean). These grave breaches include “murder,” defined as follows:

The act of a person who intentionally kills, or conspires or attempts to kill, or kills whether intentionally or unintentionally in the course of committing any other offense under this subsection, one or more persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including those placed out of combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause. [Emphasis added.]

Other offenses under the subsection include “intentionally causing serious bodily injury.”

I don’t mean to be melodramatic (especially because, as I’ve discussed with Rich on the podcast, President Trump is undoubtedly going to pardon any administration officials in potential legal jeopardy), but the penalty for a war crimes violation is life imprisonment, or death, if the criminal act results in death.

Finally, I would observe that — again, if the Post report is accurate — Hegseth and his commanders changed the protocols after the September 2 attack, “to emphasize rescuing suspected smugglers if they survived strikes.” This is why two survivors in a subsequent strike (on October 16) were captured and then repatriated to their native countries (Colombia and Ecuador).

This was a ludicrous outcome: under prior policy, the boat would have been interdicted, the drugs seized, and the operators transferred to federal court for prosecution and hefty sentences. Under the Trump administration’s policy, if the operators survive our missiles, they get to go back home and rejoin the drug trade. But put that aside. The point is that, if the administration’s intent to apply lethal force were a defense to killing shipwrecked suspected drug traffickers, the policy wouldn’t have been changed. It was changed because Hegseth knows he can’t justify killing boat operators who survive attacks; and he sends them home rather than detaining them as enemy combatants because, similarly, there is no actual armed conflict, so there is no basis to detain them as enemy combatants.

This is a very serious matter. The administration’s defense can’t be that “we killed them because our plan is to use lethal force.”

[Maximum Overkill 2,548]

16 minutes ago, SaintsInDome2006 said:

Andrew McCarthy: ‘We Intended the Strike to Be Lethal’ Is Not a Defense

The "War on Drugs" is a campaign of prohibition and enforcement aimed at reducing illegal drug use in the U.S.. Key policies included increased law enforcement funding, military involvement in interdiction, stricter sentencing through legislation like the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, and federal efforts to seize drug-related assets.

[Hardcore troubadour 15,942]

Ha ha! Same morons that were mourning D Cheney a few weeks ago are harping about war crimes! Trump broke their brains! ’s. 

[TimHauck 3,347]

10 hours ago, Frozenbeernuts said:

One of my jobs on earth is to remind people like you how little you know about literally anything.

Do you have jobs not on earth?  That would explain a lot.

[seafoam1 3,476]

6 hours ago, FrancieFootball said:

Looks like we have war crimes, folks.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/venezuela-strike-alleged-drug-boat-hegseth-tim-kaine-face-the-nation/

TDS is going strong in the US. 

[SaintsInDome2006 726]

3 hours ago, Maximum Overkill said:

The "War on Drugs" is a campaign of prohibition and enforcement aimed at reducing illegal drug use in the U.S.. Key policies included increased law enforcement funding, military involvement in interdiction, stricter sentencing through legislation like the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, and federal efforts to seize drug-related assets.

I can’t believe I need to explain to *you what a congressional authorization to use military force is, or what the war powers act is… I don’t, right? 

[Hardcore troubadour 15,942]

17 minutes ago, SaintsInDome2006 said:

I can’t believe I need to explain to *you what a congressional authorization to use military force is, or what the war powers act is… I don’t, right? 

So when do Obama , Bush, and Clinton get charged? lol. War crimes are for the soldiers you idiot.  How old are you? 

[SaintsInDome2006 726]

21 minutes ago, Hardcore troubadour said:

So when do Obama , Bush, and Clinton get charged?

I guess when someone makes the case they didn’t act pursuant to AUMFs or the WPA? 

[Hardcore troubadour 15,942]

30 minutes ago, SaintsInDome2006 said:

I guess when someone makes the case they didn’t act pursuant to AUMFs or the WPA? 

Seriously, how old are you? You haven’t figured it out yet? 

[SaintsInDome2006 726]

5 minutes ago, Hardcore troubadour said:

Seriously, how old are you? You haven’t figured it out yet? 

Oh right… the thing {wink wink} …say no more.

[Hardcore troubadour 15,942]

19 minutes ago, SaintsInDome2006 said:

Oh right… the thing {wink wink} …say no more.

You got him now! Over a war crime no less! 

[FrancieFootball 231]

7 hours ago, Maximum Overkill said:

Got him this time 

Good doggie.