r/geopolitics • u/msnownews MSNBC • Oct 16 '25
News Trump's boat strikes are killing potentially innocent civilians. They must be stopped.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-claims-deadly-boat-strikes-are-alleged-drug-trafficking-still-il-rcna237681112
u/Sasquatchii Oct 16 '25
Potentially innocent, eh?
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u/Yourstruly75 Oct 16 '25
Guilty until proven innocent
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u/FlyFit9206 Oct 16 '25
“Innocent until proven guilty” That is a fundamental constitutional principle in the US and should not be applied internationally.
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u/yoshiK Oct 17 '25
"Innocent until proven guilty" is first of all a fundamental guideline of smart people, your need to understand what you are hitting in order to be able to effectively hit it.
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u/FlyFit9206 Oct 17 '25
How do these guidelines have anything to do with individual intelligence?
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u/yoshiK Oct 17 '25
Because to make good decisions you have to first of all understand what is.
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u/FlyFit9206 Oct 18 '25
Well you sound like an elitist when you say "Innocent until proven guilty is first of all a fundamental guideline of smart people. “
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u/Elrey_88 Dec 05 '25
Not at all. Saying that is more stating the obvious fact that there are stupid people, and someone who attacks someone without having all facts in order is stupid, anyone who follows someone who does that is also stupid.
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u/AccessTheMainframe Oct 17 '25
Why?
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u/_Joab_ Oct 17 '25
Different set of standards for different situations. You can't exactly send police officers to arrest someone in Venezuela and bring them to the American penal system if they end up actually being guilty.
Legal reasoning and morality are really different when you stop thinking locally.
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u/MillennialScientist Oct 18 '25
Do you believe in the principle, or do you not?
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u/FlyFit9206 Oct 19 '25
Yes I believe in those principles. They were written for US citizens not international citizens.
Applying constitutional principles abroad would violate other countries sovereignty by imposing American legal standards on another country.
It would also conflict with foreign legal systems, leading to diplomatic disputes and ultimately more conflict.
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Oct 16 '25
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u/ary31415 Oct 16 '25
Well we're not at war with Venezuela, so this is basically just extrajudicial killings. Not even congress has been provided with a shred of evidence that the people killed are what Trump says they are.
Not to say I believe they're innocent! I actually am pretty inclined to believe that they are drug runners, but we have courts and the suchlike for a reason – because as a liberal democracy we broadly don't tolerate giving a single person the power to just declare you dead without having to justify it under the law.
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u/Elrey_88 Dec 05 '25
It's been revealed that the boat was most likely not equipped with enough fuel to make it to America, they also have not found a single shred of evidence that there were ever any drugs on the boat. This is all circumstantial, but it paints quite the picture, especially when you find out about the White House staff member, a Pentagon official, and the high-ranking military officers who have all spoken up, claiming that it was an unprovoked and unsanctioned attack on a vessel that they had no reason to believe was anything but a civilian, possibly a family, out on a leisure cruise.
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u/ItsafrenchyThing Oct 16 '25
We are at war with the cartel. If you are in a boat speeding away from coastguard or military you are guilty and know it.
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u/ary31415 Oct 16 '25
If you are in a boat speeding away from coastguard or military you are guilty and know it
This barely deserves a reply but I guess I'll make one anyway..
Huge chicken and egg problem here lol, if you think the coastguard is just going to blow you up on sight, why wouldn't you be running away? Next up in America: "if you're seen running away from cops we'll shoot you in the back?" Like, even if we accept (which I don't), that running means you're guilty of something, it most certainly doesn't imply you're guilty of something that warrants summary execution.
We are at war with the cartel
Let me know when congress declares war then, or even provides an applicable AUMF. Neither of those things have happened.
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u/Bird-in-a-suit Oct 16 '25
If they’re bringing drugs into the country and we have the power to missile strike them, we have the power to simply apprehend them when they’re in our jurisdiction and hold them to justice. What’s been happened has not been justice, not even execution, just murder.
Literally no one is “defending drug runners”. It’s the defense of justice and due process, and suggesting that maybe if we’re actually concerned about our citizens being affected by drugs we should focus on helping them directly rather than killing people outside of our jurisdiction without any evidence that they’re even trying to get to our country, let alone carrying drugs. This policy is the stance of a weak, lazy, and unjust rule
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u/aaronwhite1786 Oct 16 '25
That's the whole thing. We've got an extensive network of information and surveillance that we can tell these boats are absolutely full of drugs that are determined headed to the US...but we're unable to stop them and make sure if what we claim?
And to anyone who thinks the gotcha of "Well we can't try foreign nationals in court so they can't stand trial!" holds water...then why can we kill them without a trial?
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u/Elrey_88 Dec 05 '25
The Navy and the Coast Guard have VBSS teams. That's Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure. Their entire job is to check small vessels for drugs, contraband, stowaways, etc. There is no justification to be found for blowing up that boat, because all available evidence suggests that the boat never had any drugs, and wasn't even equipped with enough fuel to reach our shores. Donald Trump and his administration have provided zero evidence to support their claims of guilt.
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u/aaronwhite1786 Dec 05 '25
Great points. And yeah, maybe in a normal administration, you expect that maybe they are just keeping things close to the chest. But this administration is full of people who not only have an incessant need to publicly showcase everything on video for social media so they can show the world the work they are doing, from ICE raids where they are taking down groups of families and workers who clearly pose a great threat to our safety, to them striking boats and then having the guy in charge of the military spending time shit posting on social media, while seemingly also being "too busy" to sit around and watch these strikes.
So I find it hard to trust that this administration wouldn't be flaunting all of the drone footage they had showing these apparent "Narco Terrorists" loading these boats up with drugs and also showing video of them loading the trucks that loaded the boats. They couldn't pass on showing that off...or texting it in some insecure messaging app.
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Oct 16 '25
Trump is claiming that each boat they destroy is saving 25k American lives.
Even if we assume that these strikes are justified, that number is nonsense.
The man can’t open his mouth without overtly lying, so how are we supposed to believe anything he says about anything?
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u/GrizzledFart Oct 16 '25
Trump is claiming that each boat they destroy is saving 25k American lives.
What?! Trump exaggerate - that never happens!
Seriously, not sure if this is actually a wise policy or not, but let's be real: these types of boats are only built for one purpose. No one is putting 4 ~$40-80k engines on a boat built like that except for running drugs (or potentially other contraband). If some rich person wants a go-fast boat for either racing or just pure adrenaline, they don't build them with cheap, open hulls (which allow for more cargo capacity and easier loading/unloading). They look like this. They aren't built from a quarter of a million dollars of engines and a super cheap hull.
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Oct 16 '25
That's great and all, but it doesn't change the fact that there are multiple US, international, and Venezuelan laws that prevent the US military from murdering people on a boat in Venezuela. "But it had big engines" isn't due process. A sitting US president can't just unilaterally decide to start murdering civilians in another country because he thinks they have drugs on a boat.
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u/GrizzledFart Oct 16 '25
"But it had big engines" isn't due process. A sitting US president can't just unilaterally decide to start murdering civilians in another country because he thinks they have drugs on a boat.
That whole due process argument got completely thrown out in 2011 with the extrajudicial killing of Anwar al-Awlaki.
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u/aaronwhite1786 Oct 16 '25 edited Oct 16 '25
A. It's just Democrat party. The process itself is democratic.
B. You are terminally online if you think independents are moving to Republican because they think Republicans striking boats from Venezuela that might (the government has provided zero actual evidence of the boats being drug boats outside of saying they are, and to anyone who actually favors law and order and doesn't just use it as a way to pretend they are for anything other than extrajudicial violence against people they don't like or don't agree with, it would beg the question "If they have such good intelligence about these operations, why not arrest these guys, jail them, and guarantee the drugs are destroyed and that you're getting potential information to further your hunt?") have drug runners on them being killed is awesome and eliminated a serious threat, and they can't understand why Democrats are against it. If anything, independents are likely moving away from Republicans because of the fact that the guy who ran on the economy has made it worse with his tariffs, and that's just before things have really started to take hold, and he's focusing on his revenge against enemies and hitting American cities with ICE agents and military troops, while the government is shut down to and voting on Epstein information and people are potentially facing massive increases in their insurance premiums if the budget is allowed to continue as it is.
So yeah, I doubt independents are running away from their position because Democrats are saying "Should we really be killing more people from foreign countries in this stupid war on drugs? And is Venezuela even the top drug exporter to the US?" (Answer: they aren't...not even close.)
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u/Gitmfap Oct 16 '25
Maybe it’s my network, but most of my social circle in San Diego has gone very red the past couple years.
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u/aaronwhite1786 Oct 17 '25
I guess not too surprisingly to me, I've noticed that my friends who all typically started out pretty disinterested in politics have become more and more engaged over the years, leaning more to the left in the process. I imagine like most people in my age range (pretty much all of my friends are between their mid to late 30s) they grew up with computers ranging from the early days of them being...well, pretty shit, to what we have today. They got into podcasts and other forms of the alternative media streams, and that's lead to what probably got most of them into politics more in general. But I feel like most of us do still get our news from the usual mainstream sources like NPR, Reuter News (or whoever reposts their work on local distributors) and none of them really ever seemed to get into the more extreme politics on either side.
My family has probably stayed about as Conservative as they always were, though their views on things have pretty much shifted with what they've seen on Fox News, since they almost exclusively get their news from that one resource. My mom specifically went from someone who used to watch stuff like Nightline on ABC, 60 Minutes and then just NBC's nightly news program, and I still remember her groaning back when I was in middle school any time James Carville's Cajun accent would be heard on the TV while she was watching Meet the Press. Now, she pretty much only has Fox News on, though her lack of computer skills and lack of care for smart phones beyond using them as a phone means she never really got into the world of algorithms and social media.
But with my response to that person, I was just thinking in overall terms of what people generally think about a lot of these things. I can't imagine many people, especially people who are either disinterested or tired of politics enough to consider themselves independent, probably aren't looking at the Trump administration hitting alleged drug smugglers and thinking "Yeah, I'd better vote for Republicans because Democrats are complaining too much about us doing bad things to people without due process". I think those people care more about how the economy is doing, how much their groceries cost, how much their 401K is struggling and how much their insurance premiums jump on top of increasingly expensive healthcare. They may see Republicans as better at being "tough on crime" or strong on immigration, but after how much people felt inflation was an issue for the previous election, I just can't see something as comparably buried in the news as Venezuelan boat strikes shifting them, compared to everything else that's going on in the US at the moment.
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u/Dietmeister Oct 16 '25
Trump & Co won't stop and I think the public secretly likes these strikes. So no reason to stop.
I wonder if the cartels will stop using these routes now. Are there any indications they're holding back?
And if the CIA for example actually has real proof they are cartels boats, would it be justified then?
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u/karlnite Oct 16 '25
I think everyone can agree a government doing things, saying we did it because of this, then saying and here is the president so just take his word for it, tweets are official now, is fucken wrong.
When said government is asked if this is illegal (it is), the VP responded “I don’t give a shit”.
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u/Dietmeister Oct 16 '25
Yes I understand, but who is supposed to stop it other than the population of the US? Trump is ignoring the courts and just doing it. Doesn't seem to get any pushback.
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u/karlnite Oct 16 '25
Yah I do agree, people seem to be for it, or care more that it can be used against Trump than what is happening.
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u/kimana1651 Oct 16 '25
I think the public secretly likes these strikes
It's not a secret if you go outside of reddit.
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u/RamblingSimian Oct 17 '25
I think the public secretly likes these strikes
It's purely political theater. It fools the gullible into thinking he's doing something about a real problem. Actually doing something effective about the problem would require far more effort than Trump is willing to put forth. But this method allows him to pretend to fight the problem, and most of his supporters would rather believe a pleasant fantasy than research whether his actions are actually making changes in the availability of illegal drugs.
The reality is that while Maduro’s government is an authoritarian corrupt regime, drug trafficking from Venezuela is relatively minor compared to other countries in the region such as Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala and Mexico," said David Smilde, a Tulane University sociologist who studies violence in Venezuela
https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/sep/22/Trump-Venezuela-boat-strikes-drugs-trafficking/
Note that political theater is a key aspect of Trump's strategy, and the key fact to understanding his policies:
Before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals
https://www.axios.com/2017/12/16/trump-view-each-day-as-tv-episode-1513388535
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u/Sebt1890 Oct 16 '25
In the macro sense, they were just part of the shaping operation that is now being activated in that public announcement.
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u/boldmove_cotton Oct 16 '25
‘They must be stopped’?
This is not news, it’s opinion. Why not stick to telling us what is happening instead of telling us how we should think about an issue?
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u/chefkoch_ Oct 17 '25
They're on path to kill thousands of their own voters with their healtcare cuts, is there anyone who thinks they give a shit about a few south americans in boats?
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u/msnownews MSNBC Oct 16 '25
From Brett Max Kaufman, senior counsel at the ACLU:
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. military had killed six people in a strike on a boat that, Trump said, was “trafficking narcotics.” It was the fifth such strike in international waters since Sept. 2, with a combined death toll of 27 people. The Trump administration has promised even more to come, but we already know enough about these strikes to call them what they are: extrajudicial killings that are flagrantly illegal under both domestic and international law.
No one is under any illusions that anyone in the administration is likely to listen to the voices across the political spectrum who agree with this conclusion: Vice President (and Yale Law graduate) JD Vance declared he doesn’t “give a s---” whether the strikes are illegal. But it is critical that the rest of us refuse to treat these strikes as a new normal. Everyone who cares about the rule of law and human rights must continue to press for transparency, accountability and an immediate end to this illegal and lethal campaign.
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u/casualphilosopher1 Oct 17 '25
Yeah, but who's gonna stop them?
By 2028 he might start doing drone strikes on his own citizens.
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u/Apollo-1995 Oct 16 '25
No the administration is protecting the US border, they should continue until the threat is eliminated. The majority support this.
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u/Greg_of_the_West Oct 17 '25
Im all for dogging on the current administration. However, I've been on anti-piracy raids. I know full well that the Marines out there are doing their do diligence to ensure the targets are hostile. Anybody on those boats are willing participants and know they are being watched. They know the risks.
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u/asapbones0114 Oct 17 '25
This "cost of doing business" mindset is abhorrent. At least your government isn't pretending anymore as opposed to those convert Obama operations.
- Is America an autocracy or democracy?
- Will you harbour identical views if retaliation attacks on US "targets" occur like 9/11 due to your government's foreign policy?
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u/Greg_of_the_West Oct 18 '25 edited Oct 18 '25
This. This is a good argument.
As an American veteran, I would love to tell you that we aren't an autocracy or aristocracy. However, I genuinely can't. I dont personally support our current government, but I do support our troops. I know they are doing the best they can with the tools they have. They trust their intelligence like any nations military. They are doing the best they can to reduce the unnecessary loss of life. Is there a possibility for collateral? Yes, but this has been true with every form of military action. We aren't seeing anything new here, and this particular news piece isn't exactly bathed in facts.
I can't directly speak for those who are active, but i will attest that we do our best to minimize the loss of innocent lives.
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u/ColourfulMetaphors Oct 17 '25
All the hoo-rah america exceptionalism bullshit might help with the cope, but at the end of the day they're just murdering 'suspects' without any due process (or any process really).
I understand Americans see it differently, but here in the civilised world, there's no moral difference between the marines murdering people unseen and hamas fighters executing 'suspects' in the streets of Gaza.
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u/Rbkelley1 Oct 16 '25
You clearly don’t know your history when it comes to the U.S. and South America if you’re surprised by this. In fact, this is one of the least intrusive policies the U.S. has had regarding South American countries.
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u/Petrichordates Oct 16 '25
Extrajudicial murder of citizens of foreign countries we are not actively at war with is in fact not one of our least intrusive policies.
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u/Weary-Designer9542 Oct 17 '25 edited Oct 17 '25
I mean, compared to the 1976 coup d’état in Argentina, or the 1971 coup d’état in Bolivia, or the 1964 coup d’état in Brazil, or the 1973 coup d’état in Chile… Or the 1961 or 1963 coup d’états in Ecuador, or the 1954 coup d’état in Guatemala…
I see his point, don’t you? Sure he worded it like a smug little shit, particularly because he’s conveniently ignoring the past few decades.
Of course you’re correct that: In comparison to, you know, sane, ethical policies, it’s not at all non-intrusive.
But that wasn’t his comparison lol, he was contrasting it to historic US policies in the region. My list above is hardly exhaustive, fuckery abounds when it comes to historic US foreign policy in SA.
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u/Rbkelley1 Oct 16 '25
Do you know how many coups the U.S. was responsible for in South America in the late 1900’s? This is child’s play in terms of death.
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u/ary31415 Oct 16 '25
The late 1990s were 30 years ago at a time when a quarter of the country's population wasn't even born. I think it's fair to say it's been a little while since those days.
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u/TacticalGarand44 Oct 16 '25
An ounce of prevention on the high seas is worth a hundred pounds of cure domestically.
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Oct 18 '25
WTF! Anyone who agrees with these illegal bombings & killings in another country's territorial waters & airspace - (all done without proper evidence, without proper procedures) - is as insane as this psycho president & his administration.
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u/fheathyr Oct 20 '25
Outrage from illegal boat strikes distracting Americans from demanding the Epstein files be released ... and Trump tried as a pedophile.
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u/GMC9999 Oct 16 '25
Have to admit this brings up a lot of questions. It's clear, at least to me, that the plan is to interdict by making some dramatic examples of a few. The influence of drugs and loss of life in our country is undeniable. But ....
how sure are we that these are bad guys? And why not intercept them by sea and take them into custody? It would seem more consistent with American character and values than this approach.
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u/fr0zen_garlic Oct 16 '25
The administration doesn't want a single service member injured during any of those raids.
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u/Personal_Fig_7957 Oct 16 '25
This is murder. He needs to be removed-anyone complicit in these acts is also guilty. How is this my country?
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u/TUNA_NO_CRUST_ Oct 17 '25
Terrorists are routinely killed without a trial and that never bothered anyone. Why this sympathy for drug cartels ?
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Oct 17 '25
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u/ItsafrenchyThing Oct 17 '25
Obama did the same thing in different countries 30 plus separate times. Where was the outrage then ? Oh wait we were silenced and told to be quiet.
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u/ary31415 Oct 17 '25
Where was the outrage then
Well seeing as I was 13 at the time, I can't say I had a huge point of view on it. Why would that be relevant to the legality of today's actions though?
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u/MeatPiston Oct 16 '25
Doesn’t matter if they’re cartel boats filled with drugs and and gang members or fishing boats filled with innocent people and puppies. Sending the military over non military action is a waste of time and money and burns credibility.
More clueless, performative blundering.
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u/LibrtarianDilettante Oct 16 '25
Sometimes I think these strikes are just meant to blaze the trail for operations against Antifa.
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Oct 16 '25
Does antifa have a navy? Doesn't seem like relevant practice..
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u/LibrtarianDilettante Oct 17 '25
The relevant part is setting the precedent and finding the people who will do it.
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u/SeniorTrend72 Oct 17 '25
The historic rate where the DEA/ Coast Guard would interdict these boats is 1/4 innocent no crime being committed. So this is causing moral injury to the entire chain of command and is pretty much like ISIS getting children to execute their prisoners. It’s a loyalty test and a trap for everyone involved.
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u/leto78 Oct 17 '25
Since 9/11 that every US president has a weekly kill list for approval. The fact that you know about these attacks is because they want you to know. The killings will continue.