I May Have Found a Way to Spot U.s. At-Sea Strikes Before They're Announced
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A Reddit post claims to have found a way to detect US at-sea strikes before they're announced, sparking debate about the ethics and legality of such operations.
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> Yes, FIRMS data is what most people use to monitor large strikes that create a significant heat signature. In the middle of the sea you'll usually just see oil platforms generate heat like that.
> A lot of people reading this know this already, but you could see exactly where the bunker busters were being dropped in Iran months ago from FIRMS data within ~15-20min of the strikes.
For Iran, 15 minute latency would mean you got lucky with the cycles of several steps lining up just right.
They brag about them, because murdering random people in the ocean on flimsy pretenses is popular to their base.
We have murdered at least 66 people so far.
It sure is funny how republicans insist that Fentanyl is a huge problem, but decline to punish those actually responsible, the sacklers, and have abandoned their blame of China for fentanyl production.
Meanwhile we continue a military build up off the coast.
Can't wait for all those people who voted for Trump because he "Doesn't start wars" to be completely silent or even supportive of a war against Venezuela.
Some things don't entirely make sense with the cynical view though. I would think his base would be very supportive of openly advocating for regime change in Venezuela even by force, so I don't quite understand subterfuge unless this is just early opinion driving.
Republican presidents sure like how wars do for their re-election though, and the Trump admin would love a war to "excuse" something like... say.... suspended elections.
For combatants down in Venezuela's waters, the only time they're going to have permission to blow a boat out of the water without checking with higher authority is if that boat is actively firing on American servicemen or presenting a similar imminent threat to human life. Otherwise the strikes flow through an approval matrix. All of this is subject to change as situations develop, and command centers have military attorneys present in the room with them to counsel local leadership.
And it’s very unlikely any future or current president will want any past president in front of a court, because next time it may be them.
Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_pizza_theory
(Or similar for the nearest base/command centre for operations near Venezuela)
The US pays people to search for and red-team their real non-public operations using OSINT. It helps the US understand how exposed they are, how to effectively hide in the OSINT environment, and how to manipulate OSINT to misdirect adversaries sifting through the same data.
This is much less effective these days due to the pervasiveness of network connected sensor data but it is still commonplace.
There's no public evidence of that though. No trial. It's the same as if we sent the navy to board those boats, put a gun to people's heads and execute them in cold blood.
All of this really sounds so much better than what it really is. It's murdering people all around the world, many of whom are 100% innocent. For instance the last person we droned in occupied Afghanistan was Zemari Ahmadi - a longtime worker for a US humanitarian aid organization. A US drone operator mistook bottles of water he was loading into his car for his family as bombs, and so they murdered him as well as 10 other civilians, including 7 children, all with the press of a button. [1]
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/world/asia/us-air-strike-...
Under US law, 100% of them are 100% innocent, by definition. "Innocent until proven guilty" and whatnot; it literally means that every person is innocent in the eyes of the law until a court finds them guilty.
An interesting case of this is something like you call a foreign national in another country and this is enough to be able to tap both sides of the conversation via Patriot Act / NSA purview.
Does not maKE SENSE... Why are people extradited to US from overseas locations .
Like why they want Julian Assange ?
- Drone-bombing an embassy in downtown London does not look good on social media
- He's too famous and has many supporters in the Western world to be publicly assassinated, regardless of location (example: Lady Gaga visited him while he was stuck in the embassy)
- He's more useful as a deterrent, i.e., "see what might happen to you", to the people who might decide to go a similar route. Some will go that route regardless, but chances are at least a few have been persuaded otherwise.
For all the ridicule of the government, the Intelligence Community seems to be doing a fairly intelligent job most of the time to satisfy its objectives.
2) US law definitely applies to non citizens on US soil.
Like that's such a ridiculous statement. Even if the law was "we can do whatever if you're not a citizen", that's still law...
You think non citizens are all sovereign citizens bound to no law? To be able to do whatever they want? I didn't know my neighbor was a diplomat.
I think you mean rights. Which this is much more dubious. The constitution definitely interchanges the use of "citizens" and "people". Notably the 11th amendment uses citizens, specifying belonging to states foreign or domestic. It was ratified only a few years after the Bill of rights, so not like a drastic language change happened.
There are people who will argue "the people" means "citizens" but I find that a difficult interpretation if you read the constitution or federalist papers.
4) US law applies to non-US citizens who have never set foot in the USA (Kim Dotcom)
"not US citizen" on "not US soil" is what I meant.
Sorry for the firestorm this created!
What I mean to say is that the USA INTENTIONALLY violates rights of people outside the USA, expressed in things like the Patriot Act re:wiretapping, and also the spaces between passport control where they say "USA laws don't apply, our agents have purview to do essentially anything". If you check the discussions in the 00s about this the fed govt was very dicey and you can tell they were chomping at the bit to be able to have essentially NO OVERSIGHT on any of these massive violations of people's rights.
I'll take the karma hit, there is no way to edit it apparently. Sorry!
The legal basis is them being declared Unlawful Combatants under the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Once they do they are enemy combatants in war and can be killed.
This law was so thoroughly used by all presidents since then that you cannot really claim it's illegal
To me it sounds like that killing was (possibly) illegal. Idk about that 2006 Act though. From a moral stand point it doesn't matter if it was (possibly) illegal or not however.
In the Western world, the meaning of murder and killing is different and while that described action might be an unlawful killing (by accident) it most likely was not a murder.
This is not how to deal with The Drug War™, it's very expensive theater that does nothing to address the problem. In fact that very war is the reason why it's a problem in the first place. Remember that an earlier batch of dangerous drug dealers were Americans working out of doctors' offices.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/world/americas/venezuela-...
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PEA3...
This is extraordinarily capricious and obviously disingenuous on the part of the administration.
And even at worst, if the Navy boarded those boats, found drugs, summarily executing everyone on board would still be murder. Rule of law is what separates us from animals, and the people ordering and carrying out these killings fall squarely in the latter.
Carrying water for this is beyond the pale, but is, of course, fully in alignment with a cornerstone of a political philosophy - that there are rules that protect some people, but do not bind them, and that there are rules that bind other people, but do not protect them.
In a war bombing a boat filled with combatants or members of an armed force is legal and does not amount to murder. While in the same war capturing the same boat filled with enemy combatants and executing them is illegal.
So I don't think your example holds, and that distinction is probably the basis for drone assassinations
You can squint and claim that a wedding that has one person who spends his Saturdays and Sundays playing partisan in the hills is full of enemy combatants (obviously all men and boys above the age of 12, don't think too hard about what that means for your kid's next track meet), but justifying this is utterly beyond the pale. This is a war crime if there's a war, and murder if there isn't.
This government corrupts anyone it touches, so this is fully in its playbook - make it's subordinates choose between following their conscience and resigning, or being complicit in its crimes.
These attacks are theater to distract us from other failures, like the ability to the federal government running again. And the Epstein Files too, it's likely that is the driver for this.
That's unclear. We'd have to know more about what sort of deterrent it is making on the drug runners. Quite possibly this does have them shitting their pants and delaying shipments hoping to avoid the risk. At the very least that's not absolutely impossible. When someone says "it's expensive theater" in this circumstance, I think that their criticism has more to do with their objection to the person ordering the strikes and less to do with the effectiveness of them, especially considering that we might not know for months what the true impact is.
tl;dr -- the current model is whack-a-mole and is a fiasco except for it's unstated but intended purpose (oppression of "others"). What you're suggesting will not work, will waste likely billions of dollars, and just create even more misery in the world.
The current model is designed to create crime from end to end. And it was never about safety (FFS, look at how people who are busted for using drugs are treated).
Humans like having altered states and there will always be a market for that. There are risks and dangers in that but they can be mitigated. I'll trot out the classic counterpoint to the current madness: alcohol and tobacco are legal and sanctioned but we know they're dangerous and kill over half a million US citizens per year.
Again, if you think it's about safety you are mistaken: it's about oppression and control and it's ruining this country as well as our neighbors to the south.
The US attacks people and countries without declaring war.
If anyone did this to the US, can you imagine the butt-hurt response?
Declaring a war stopped being a thing after world war 2. Not just for usa but for everyone. In modern times a decleration of war has no meaning in international law. It only has meaning in domestic law.
I think the reason is that the UN charter makes it illegal to fight a war except in self-defense. In modern times declerations of war have generally been replaced with sending a notice to the un security council that you intend to use your right to self defense. I dont know about this particular situation but i think a lot of the time historically the US has followed that procedure.
which this is not, so what's your point?
From what i understand there are two requirements
- the violence has to be intense enough. I think we are there
- the other side has to be an organized armed group capable of conducting warfare. This is the part that seems to be a stretch. The drug runners may be organized but are they really capable of conducting warfare? The quote i found from the red cross is: "Non-governmental groups involved in the conflict must be considered as "parties to the conflict", meaning that they possess organized armed forces. This means for example that these forces have to be under a certain command structure and have the capacity to sustain military operations."
So the precedent is there that this is how we do things. It's not just this operation. (If you don't like that, what do you want? Do you want to require that the military get Congressional approval for every operation in which someone might get killed?)
At least (just today), some members of Congress finally got briefed on the classified intel that leads people to think that these are in fact drug smugglers getting killed.
Look, I'm not saying that bombing these boats is justified. I'm just saying that the Congressional oversight rules are not unique to this operation.
Of all the things that people on the left might find objectionable about Trump, this should be at the very far bottom of the list.
You're saying it's fine that they're killed for something they could "maybe" do in the future? Without even seeing any evidence that they're doing what they're accused of today? Have there been instances in the past of drug smugglers moving into the nuclear warhead smuggling game?
Smuggling of any sort is a weapon with disastrous consequences. We wouldn't let the cartels have nukes, why would we want them to have "smuggling"? Yes, I'm fine with this. That they promise not to use it for really bad stuff for now wouldn't make a difference (and they're not even making that promise).
>Without even seeing any evidence t
I'm not interested in being the internet jury for this, no.
>Have there been instances in the past of drug smugglers moving into the nuclear warhead smuggling game?
Gee. That's something I really want to wait until after they commit the offense before we do something about it. You've changed my mind with your top-notch debate strategy.
Source: I did a deployment in counter drug interdiction in the Navy.
Edit: if you really want to know how threatening these guys are, they usually spotted our aircraft and the first thing they did was ALWAYS to jettison any weapons they had immediately, then start throwing out the drugs. They knew they weren’t fighting a USN ship and that we weren’t guns to harm them if they were peaceful. I suspect they might fight back now, though.
Oh. Wow. That makes it ok then. As long as they can all play hot potato and the drug runners don't have it on their own persons when the missile hits, it was unjustifiable.
Because usually we only respond to behaviours and actions that actually exist in the real world. By this logic we should charge all shop lifters with treason because they're not promising they'll never steal state secrets.
> Gee...You've changed my mind with your top-notch debate strategy.
I'm not sure why you're choosing to take this tone but I would hope we could have any further discussion like adults.
Given that the left are the only ones complaining about the extrajudicial killings under the Obama administration, I disagree.
Personally, I find public officials murdering unarmed people objectionable in practically all cases. And I think it's probably the worst thing a public official can do.
I see no evidence of that. The only places I've ever noticed any complaints there were from the alt-right and libertarians (same thing?). You can see this in magazine titles like Reason if you care to check.
>I find public officials murdering unarmed people
What evidence is there that these people were unarmed? And what if they were? If there was 800 pounds of cocaine (or whatever) on board, and they didn't even have a butter knife with them... why should that somehow exempt them from the hostile response they received?
lol, no. Alt-rights may call themselves "libertarian" while they're testing the waters before they can admit to themselves that their real desires are rooted in coercing people. But libertarianism, being concerned with individual liberty, is fundamentally leftist. The rightist axiomatic conception of the US "Libertarian" party can be useful on a small scale, but scaled up it doesn't amount to much beyond just another system of control. Proof by contradiction - definitionally ruling out coercion based on intrinsic market inefficiencies means one can merely reframe any government as a monopolistic corporation with onerous contracts to achieve a hollow "Libertopia".
The administration wants to see results and it would seem that the problem is that the American judicial systems is set up to simply cost money, which is something narcos have.
If you take a cartel to court, they just have a lawyer tie up your law team. We've made the mistake of allowing capitalism to influence too many of our systems of government from judicial (cost of lawyers) to electoral (advertisement costs and political campaigning). Isn't this the problem?
Oh sure. A 5% chance of finding that boat on that particular day, and confiscating the device. That sounds like a great idea. I think I'd rather stick with causing the smugglers enough misery that they consider another line of work.
Saying the quiet part out loud: "Murdering people without due process should be at the bottom of the list of things to care about." Yes, thank you for clearly outlining the "right's" position on the issue.
But in this case the point is a bit moot anyway as laws of war apply only to losers.
For example Mexico's fight with drug cartels is widely considered to meet the definition of non international armed conflict.
The US administration uses the long range to argue that the War Powers Act doesn't apply: They aruge that the Act applies to 'hostilities', and US soldiers are too far from the targets to be exposed to danger, therefore they aren't 'hostilities'.
Feel free to explain the submarine with no flag they bombed
Not as in a literal flag flying on the submarine. (Though they do fly flags near ports and such)
Naively it seems like old fashioned murder without any special qualifier. I guess it could be both too?
Armed conflict can be either international (e.g. between two countries) or non-international (e.g. you are atacking a non-state group. For example ISIS. However note that attacking a non-state group on the territory of a different state without permission of that state makes it be both.). War crimes apply to both types but the rules are slightly different between the two.
Keep in mind also that people often colloquial use "war crimes" to mean any international crime, but technically its only one type. Crimes against humanity and genocide are technically not war crimes but a different category. They generally do not require an armed conflict (although often when they do happen its related to sone sort of armed conflict)
Anyways this whole thing probably counts an armed conflict. I think at the least its a non-international armed conflict with the drug cartel. Attacking boats is usually an act of war even if they are in international waters, which might make it an international armed conflict with venuzula as well if the boats are connected to it (but the rules related to that im not really clear on and is a bit beyond my knoeledge).
[IANAL]
If that is the rationale usa used, then yes it would be an obvious war crime. You can't shoot people in war because they are guilty of a crime unless they can legitamently be targeted for some other reason.
I think USA is probably going to try and spin it as they are members of an armed group USA is in an armed conflict with, and they were targeted on that basis and not because of any particular crime any particular person comitted.
How convincing that is is debatable [ianal but it sounds pretty unconvincing to me], and you of course still have the problem of how exactly the US can claim self-defense against a foreign drug cartel.
>”You can't shoot people in war because they are guilty of a crime unless they can legitamently be targeted for some other reason.”
From what I understand (and I am no expert), in a war, the default is that you can shoot someone if you believe them to be acting in a manner which is against your side’s interests (and have not surrendered while satisfying certain conditions).
So for example it would be a war crime to punish someone for fighting in an opposing army. You can hold them as a prisoner of war for the duration of the conflict, but its supposed to be a means of keeping them out of a fight and not a punishment per se.
I think the biggest difference is that crimes can generally be punished after the fact. A murderer can be punished whenever they are caught. A soldier can be shot at at the time, but if they decide they are tired of the war and run away to a farm or something, they are now civilians and can no longer be shot at or punished for previously being a soldier (unless they comitted war crimes) even if the war is still raging on.
Late edit: to clarify that is soldiers of an actual country have immunity. Combatants of a non-state group do not have immunity, so can be subject to arrest for merely participating in the conflict.
See also: All those "terrorists" they held at gitmo
That's how gitmo came about - It was impossible to do the "right thing" under US law which would be inevitably be too lenient to the captured enemies of the US.
Ironically, by violating U.S. laws they made it virtually impossible to try Gitmo prisoners. They would have been better off presenting evidence at trial in the first place.
It's just pragmatic.
That would work too but why risk american soldiers? This is much more efficient and the footage makes for good deterrent/propaganda.
You know what is? A high chance of any, even minimal punishment. Better life conditions.
Sure it's a widely understood and often repeated problem with especially western naval and military doctrine that the peace time buildup favors white elephants(battleships, F35s etc) that, as was the case of the British high see fleet of WWII, end up inactive while entire new(often much cheaper and less sophisticated) classes of ships like destroyer escorts or Patrol boats have to be build as replacements. But still the US haven't quite deteriorated so badly yet that it couldn't reacquire whatever boarding capacity got lost in the relentless pursuit of military industrial complex profits quite quickly.
They don't tell us the due diligence they do, but we would hope that our bureaucracy is careful about who they target and carefully thinks about how it affects the perception of americans vs. the potential benefit to our society (elimination of narco traffickers)?
Ukraine / Russia aside, we no longer have much in the way of conventional wars where each team wears a certain color and they shoot at each other. Instead the weaker force tries to disguise itself as best possible and strike when possible. In this case, a drug cartel would try to be as under the radar as possible.
What level of due diligence would you need to see before you would trust that a strike is justified? Or is the problem that narco trafficking doesn't justify death and therefore they should simply be imprisoning traffickers?
On the subject of evidence, the problem with AI is that now video and imagery can easily be faked. You've always been able to plant a bag of weed on a teenager and arrest him, so planting a kilo of coke on a boat and arresting someone is no different.
Malaysia, Philippines, China, Singapore all punish drug related crimes with death. One could argue that the societal impact of drugs is incredibly bad, thus warranting death to the traffickers.
Without a doubt, helping addicts is a societally very challenging problem! Anyone who has had a loved one fall victim to addiction has dealt with the struggle of emotions that comes with it. A need for them to be better, but lacking the path forward when they regress. Simply removing the drugs from the equation would have never destroyed their lives.
At some point it fundamentally needs to come down to trusting the people who defend the country ... who are entrusted to do this most difficult job.
CBS Evening News has showed footage of the boats [1]. While this isn't ironclad proof (would you expect the drug runners to hold up identification showing them as criminals?), it is unlikely that these four-engined speed boats loaded with something is anything other than drugs. They are not boats full of people/refugees. They aren't cargo ships operated by a shipping company with any official records claiming to have been lost, or any legitimate tour company. The characteristics of these boats match many other drug trafficking boats that the US Coast Guard has intercepted in the past full of drugs.
You can debate whether the US President has authority to order strikes like this but insinuating these might just be innocent people and not drug runners isn't going to go very far.
[1] https://youtu.be/a2CQbRUEeWY?si=pPS_97LqIgCdLWix
Just like when the US used drones on Iraqi convoys and amazingly they were all Al-Qaeda sympathisers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaazFYTrQ_A
But as long as you leave no survivors, who is going to dispute whatever story you want to spin about the people you are killing.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9WMSxV6lMs
We always match the HN title to the original post's title, unless it's misleading or linkbait, as per the guidelines. Quotation marks are generally superfluous except, I think, if the article is about a quote.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The history of Rubio introducing the Venezuela Temporary Protected Status and Asylum Assistance Act of 2018 in Trump's first term, leading to large parts of the "immigration crisis" under Biden, and then Rubio going along with rescinding the status is pretty crazy. We played a big part in their economic crisis, offered asylum to many people driven to flee not just politically but largely from that crisis, then rescinded status to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans and began deporting to concentration camps based in some cases on tattoos, now the extrajudicial killings, and it's looking like big potential for a war of aggression.
Why resort to madness and slaughter?
- Is our military intelligence now being used to conduct international police work and enforce international or domestic law?
- Should we expect our police mandate to extend to foreign countries?
- Are these military operations undermining existing narcotics operations and international cooperation with DEA?
- When these civilians dissolve back into the population, will we chase them there with cruise missiles and drone strikes?
- If the cartels load a brick onto FedEx freight, will we destroy the aircraft? Why not just blow it up?
- Does it matter who is captaining the vessels, if the cartels (as ruthless as they are, and I am on board with this sentiment 100%) force/threaten/coerce a person to mule for them, how would this victim convert to a valid military target?
- This is whataboutism or close enough, but it is more than reasonable: Didn't our previous interventions in these exact regions train thousands of elite paramilitary operators who would later become the very mercenaries and thugs running the show today? (School of the Americas, Los Zetas)
- Why does it feel like we are replaying 2 or 3 of our worst policy blunders since the 1980's and/or are we actually just cleaning up the blowback?
Cartels will be fine though, do not worry. USA credibility, less and less.
Those operations have nothing to do with cartels and everybody knows that. Nobody knows if those boats are remotely linked to cartels, there's reason to doubt that the US army even does. Cartels are irrelevant here and the murder of random people is not why the world stands by and let this happen.
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