I'm not an expert but I was in the military a decade or so ago. The Coast Guard and DHS definitely do partner operations in international and state-run waters for interdiction; the Navy definitely did similar interdiction operations with their smaller boats usually with partner nations. The Navy shooting missiles at alleged narco boats is new. At most the Navy and Coast Guard would engage to defend or disable.
There's documentaries on streaming services where they put this on full display.
First of all, I haven't seen any evidence that those were actually boats used for trafficking, happy to update my knowledge here. Murdering them without a shred of evidence, that's be wrong regardless of what laws apply.
If maritime law doesn't allow you to arrest these people, then maybe that's not the right place to deal with them.
Are navies allowed to just kill people on boats for not flying a flag? Arrest them perhaps, I could see - but just kill them with no attempt to find any other recourse?
Define "allowed", esp. whom it is doing the allowing.
Any and all current international treaties are visibly toothless these days. Russia invades Ukraine and the UN shrugs while they say "hey, cut it out!". Israel colonizes parts of Gaza that it has specifically agreed not to colonize and the response is the same. The US commits a war crime with it's morning cuppa and every time the international community sorta whistles and heel-turns hoping that they're not interesting enough to be next.
The problem is that IOT have any kind of effective enforcement mechanism, you have to have the bigger stick, and we've just allowed countries to do nothing but build bigger sticks since the 40s.
It's a fair question. I was only able to rabbithole on this for so long before realizing I had to get back to work, but if anyone wants to continue the search here's the most relevant document I was able to find. It's dense and very legalese:
From what I was able to gather, there are a lot of holes in the convention that are large enough to drive a gunboat through. What I mean is, in the places where a clause might say something like "don't indiscriminately sink ships", it will also say "unless effects of criminal activity extend to sovereign land" or something like that. This is vague enough that your lawyers could grind the wheels of justice to a halt on the premise that "we are protecting our citizens from all that dangerous cocaine" or whatever.
Frankly, I wonder what changed between when we were putting the stuff in cola sold on shelves and now that it justifies batrillions of dollars fighting an unwinnable war to suppress.
>If any other "framing" was correct, they would be flying a flag of some country.
sounds like your knowledge of maritime law tells that flying some country's flag would have prevented those boats from being blown up. Silly narcos not knowing that yours maritime law.
>Sending them home is about making sure there isn't anyone willing to take the next run.
> Tell me you don't understand how maritime law works without telling me you don't know how maritime law works.
I will tell you that I don't understand how maritime law works in any great detail, but I do know what unprovoked murder without any discernible basis in fact is.
If they wanted to stop these boats and turn them back, or stop these boats and arrest the people on them, they could do so with exactly the same justification they are using to murder the people on them. i.e. zero justification. And it still wouldn't be unprovoked murder. Wouldn't that be better?
Given they have the tools to track them to murder them, they could also track them and wait until they arrive in US waters to arrest them. This is how it normally works. And even if that is inefficient it still does not justify killing them as a more efficient alternative.
I don't think there have been any details released about the information. There never are with military operations, so I'm not sure why they're expected now, especially since this is ongoing, and it would invalidate their methods. Of course, this all requires that you don't believe the military is firing randomly at boats.
There has been testimony in front of Congress stating that they don't know who is on the boats and don't have any evidence that they are involved in drug trafficking. Common sense tells that the boats could not possibly reach the US, at best they are headed to the Caribbean. Even if these are drug vessels, the drugs aren't coming here.
I think that's somewhat orthogonal though, since stopping the act is the goal, rather than knowing/caring who's doing it.
> don't have any evidence that they are involved in drug trafficking
I tried, but can't find anything related to this. All I can find is that they haven't provided evidence, with many claiming they don't have any. Do you have a reference? The military rarely, if ever, gives away how they gather intelligence, so I'm not sure why it's expected now.
You appear to be correct, they have declined to provide evidence, even in closed hearings, they have not admitted to having no evidence. It's merely highly probable that no evidence exists.
> It's merely highly probable that no evidence exists.
Could you explain where this comes from? I think the track record of our military operations, and our surveillance systems (which Trump helpfully leaked), suggests the complete opposite, that they have precise knowledge of the source, destination, etc, with democrats even having faith in the intel, and more of a problem with transparency [1]. Biden was getting things going in 2022 [2]!
I mean, the fact that this administration flat out lies and bullshits about everything more or less as a matter of Surkov-type policy and is essentially run on weaponised bad faith does not encourage any other conclusion.
Also, I repeat: the guy responsible for that navy command is stepping down in terms that appear to be highly unusual.
The most significant thing you can do for your understanding of this situation is to understand that this is not inside baseball, niche knowledge, nuanced interpretation stuff. It's Calvinball.
I know. 50 years ago my father was on a USSR fishing vessel arrested by US for violation of fishing rules. They spent 2 weeks in NY harbor until some US fishing vessel got arrested by USSR for violation of fishing rules :)
That is one of the things one learns with time (if one not smart enough to understand it from the beginning) - it is small guy who get caught in the fight between Big Guys who suffers the most and pays the price, so don't be that small guy.
For few decades it looked like we've been building around the world the system which would protect small guy, yet the last few years the system has come down crashing. Interestingly that one of the architects of that crash - Dick Cheney (RIP, was just on the news and this is why he came to mind) - has lived to see those fruits of his labor and ultimately even voted against the most prominent expression of his policies - ie. against Trump and for Harris.
