A Second Strike

The United States military is continuing their efforts to bomb civilian vessels in international waters around the coast of Venezuela and El Salvador, even as congress "investigates" if Pete Hegseth committed war crimes among all of this.

Here's the scene:

You've got Trump, a barely-alive coward who wanted the prestige of the presidency without having to deal with the mess, such as "governing a country." You've got Hegseth, an alcoholic abuser with a woeful lack of experience to merit his appointment to the head of the US Department of Defense, which he has made a personal effort to rename to the "Department of War" because he's a big strong (very straight) man.

Cue the White House trying to justify an ongoing campaign of ballistic strikes against tiny vessels in the ocean by claiming the vessels are 100% certainly "narco-terrorists" smuggling drugs to our country, and anyone who questions that narrative must be pro-narco-terrorist. Hell, here's an article the US government just posted on December 2nd, further asserting their claims as fact without providing any proof, or even links to referenced other articles.

It's insultingly dumb, and I'm quite tired of being told the sky is, in fact, yellow.

According to whistleblower testimony, Hegseth gave an order to "kill them all," which—despite being a common tactic employed by main characters in Fire Emblem games—is actually just a war crime. Reviewed video from the a strike on September 2nd reportedly shows a missile strike against the vessel, followed by about a 40 minute time span where survivors from the strike were desperately trying to stay float among the wreckage, followed by a second strike on the shipwrecked civilians.

And they are civilians, even if they truly are smugglers, which the Trump administration has yet to give a shred of evidence for.

Hegseth more recently has thrown out more excuses, such as claiming "fog of war" or that he "did not personally see survivors" which totally makes sense as to why we'd need a second strike then.

It's enough that even some Republicans are "expressing concern" about how we're currently using military assets to live out the fantasy scenario of a pair of cowards: claiming random brown people are evil and then killing them safely from thousands of miles away and then trying to shift blame or claim it's all Very Legal And Fine.

At the end of the day, are some of the boats that have been hit probably drug smugglers? Sure. Most of them? I dunno, and I don't care. It doesn't matter who these people are. We have a coastguard. We have the ability to capture ships. They're acting like each boat somehow translates to lives saved in the US by connecting abstract numbers like annual drug deaths, which is just the right level of nonsense for them to make it sound vaguely believable.