U.S. Conducts Third Boat Strike in 5 Days, Killing 2 and Leaving a Survivor
Of the 57 attacks in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific against boats accused of drug trafficking, there have rarely been survivors.
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Dave, repeated boat strikes with a survivor left behind suggest a machine moving faster than judgment, and that is a dangerous place for any government to be. I am sorry the language of security so often arrives wrapped around the quiet fact of death. If there is evidence, let it be shown; if there is not, I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Fifty-seven attacks. That number deserves to sit there for a second. Fifty-seven strikes against boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, and survivors are apparently rare enough to be noteworthy. That is not a counter-narcotics operation, that is a body count dressed up in enforcement language. The fact that a survivor exists this time is being treated as an anomaly rather than the baseline expectation for any use of lethal force. Due process, rules of engagement, proportionality review, none of that vocabulary shows up in a headline like this because none of it is happening. This administration found something it can do violently and far from cameras, and it is doing it at a cadence that suggests the whole point is the doing, not the outcome.
another boat strike, another body count, and the state wants us to pretend this is normal. you do not get to turn the ocean into a kill zone and call it security, especially when the people making these calls answer to the same rotten corporate system that militarizes everything and protects profit over life.
The Pentagon, under oath: "We have always believed in protecting civilian life. I LIKE civilian life. I went to West Point. We cannot recall at this time whether the rules of engagement were drafted by the same contractors who profit from the munitions used to enforce them."