Secret Boat Strike Memo Justifies Kills by Claiming Targeting Drugs, Not People

https://theintercept.com/2025/11/14/boat-strikes-immunity-legality-trump/

by Qem • 8 months ago

63 118 8 months ago

theintercept.com

gigatexal2• 8 months ago

Here’s hoping Congress wakes up and passes laws that curbs presidential power.

Terr_4• 8 months ago

That was my wishful hope in 2016, today I can't imagine it happening without a very different Congress.

amanaplanacanal2• 8 months ago

Midterms are next year. Think about who you want in Congress and vote appropriately.

jrmg• 8 months ago

There already are laws! They’re not being enforced (enforcement is an Executive Branch function...).

The remedy for the Executive Branch breaking and/or not enforcing laws made by the Legislative Branch is supposed to be impeachment by congress.

gigatexal2• 8 months ago

true and teh Supreme Court having been packed by trump admin #1 and an incompetent democratic leadership or rather Sith-lord 5D chess playing Mitch mcconell blocking appointments to the court ... isn't helping protect the rule of law much at all.

standardUser4• 8 months ago

Congress has all the power they need, they simply refuse to use it.

leobg• 8 months ago

You’re welcome to move to the EU. Everything is a committee. Nobody is ever responsible. Nothing ever gets done.

codyb• 8 months ago

Seems like we're bombing a bunch of low level, poverty stricken fisherman who occasionally bring a load of drugs from point A to point B.

I'm sure the complete lack of effectiveness will be worth the condemnation and lost intelligence by our allies, and further erosion of our separation of powers.

Qem3• 8 months ago

Seems like we're bombing a bunch of low level, poverty stricken fisherman

There is some precedent: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/cia-faulted-in-shootin...

teachrdan2• 8 months ago

Heh, I thought you were going to link to this: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/6/us-navy-seals-killed...

steveBK123• 8 months ago

Reading a GWOT era CIA book and.. you'll never guess where some of the guys responsible for this shootdown ended up next..

bad_haircut725• 8 months ago

Im not actually in support of killing these people but I have to say, people seem to gloss over that each boatload of these drugs literally destroys multiple American families. People who have lost someone (either through death or just throwing their life away) to drugs will tell you these "poor fishermen" are murderers, who in no way extend the kind of empathy to us that we're expected to show them.

It does get very complicated when you consider they're probably under a lot of "carrot AND stick" from the cartels... but the damage they do is real.

victorbjorklund6• 8 months ago

Would you accept other countries blowing up Americans because some Americans bring drugs and other things into other countries?

hellcow• 8 months ago

I'd argue a missing social safety net combined with grossly inadequate public education, no job opportunities, unaffordable healthcare and housing, and a prison system designed to punish all drive people to take drugs. Drug addiction is just the symptom. Let's focus on giving people real hope and value and meaning in their lives, from birth to death, instead of killing people, without trial, a world away.

burkaman3• 8 months ago

This is not a useful conversation because there is no way to know that any drugs have been destroyed. The issue at hand is that the government is blowing up unidentified boats full of unidentified people. Talking about the harmful effects of drugs is a complete non-sequitur until there is some convincing reason to believe that drugs are involved.

metabagel6• 8 months ago

These boats aren't even headed to the United States.

cowpig• 8 months ago

Even if you just assume guilt it doesn't make sense. You send the coast guard to capture the boat and then you have a person with knowledge and drugs and a boat which can be traced & used as evidence...

fzeroracer2• 8 months ago

If your barometer is 'thing destroying American families' does this mean you'd also be willing to excuse blowing up health insurers or does your logic only apply to things that aren't directly under the thumb of American businesses?

The pragmatic approach is that we're spending far too much money blowing up small boats which could be better invested in actually fixing our healthcare system and other domestic issues, with decent odds of going to war and spending even more money because of it. The empathetic side is that these are just fishermen that aren't even involved in this whole shitshow getting killed for political points by a bloodthirsty and stupid admin.

mylifeandtimes• 8 months ago

Having lost a fried to drugs, I hear your pain.

I don't see how killing a lot of fishermen and destroying their families alleviates this pain.

There might have been drugs on the boats, but maybe not. No one bothered to check first.

The fishermen might have been part-time drug smugglers, maybe not. How do we know? What investigation was done?

And if we really believe that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"

then taking away people's lives without due process is murder. Cold blooded, premeditated murder. That's a worse crime than selling someone a drug that might kill them.

Friend, don't let your pain blind you to causing more pain. Ethics is hard.

libraryatnight• 8 months ago

"The only real drug problem is scoring real good drugs. Haven't we learned our lesson? The corner store sells finer scotch. But who's got uncut powder?" - NOFX

jancsika• 8 months ago

People who have lost someone (either through death or just throwing their life away) to drugs will tell you these "poor fishermen" are murderers

Just to be clear-- we're talking about a hypothetical family member of a potential future victim of drug overdose who was unwittingly saved based on fully trusting the federal government's claim that their extra-judicial killing stopped the international trade of illicit drugs as opposed to killing innocent fishermen.

Did I correctly label all the global mutable state in your example?

I get and agree with your non-sequitur that there's a clear difference between drug mules and fishermen, I just don't see the relevance of that to the danger of leveraging these post-9/11 counterterrorism laws (and secret interpretations of them) to carry out extra-judicial killings.

Edit: to be extra clear-- the whole point of meaningful democratic oversight in this case is to be able to meaningfully care, measure and review the difference between drug mules and fishermen. The entire modern history of secret interpretations of counterterrorism laws tells us that without this basic oversight, the government will always claim they only target the murderers. Worse, they'll use the veil of national security to hide the fact that innocent victims are jailed, tortured, and killed through the same counterterrorism programs.

Hizonner2• 8 months ago

If you kill yourself with drugs, nobody murdered you. That's a stupid way to approach things.

throw0101a2• 8 months ago

Im not actually in support of killing these people but I have to say, people seem to gloss over that each boatload of these drugs literally destroys multiple American families.

So does alcohol. (And a whole bunch of other domestically-produced stuff.)

How much effort is being put into the demand-side of the equation?

UncleMeat3• 8 months ago

Wage theft destroys families. Gambling apps destroy families. Can we just blow up the owners of major corporation?

pcthrowaway• 8 months ago

people seem to gloss over that each boatload of these drugs literally destroys multiple American families

They also gloss over the fact that alcohol does the same. But I don't think it's bizarre to allow people to make their own decisions.

When alcohol was criminalized, many people would go blind from impurities in their own homebrews. Legalization and regulation are good things to prevent some of the unintended consequences, like deaths from adulteration with fentanyl, hotspots, and so on.

loeg3• 8 months ago

And the bombs are relatively expensive, when bullets are cheap. Even if you don't mind eroding the rights of drug traffickers, it's a wasteful way to do the enforcement action.

richard_todd• 8 months ago

If I'm considering becoming a drug runner, and I hear "sometimes they arrest you" I'd say "so what?" If I hear "sometimes you get shot at", I'd take my chances and shoot back. But if I keep hearing about missiles obliterating drug runners with no warning... maybe I just stay home.

bilbo0s2• 8 months ago

The great tragedy is that bullets are also more accurate.

I don't mean to be "that guy", but how do we even know the sailors on these boats aren't just some fishermen working for the cartels because they have a guy at his shack with a gun on his mother and siblings or kids? Or, even worse, what if they aren't working for cartels at all? Just went out to try to fish.

I'm not sure what our endgame is here, but just eyeballing this from the outside it looks like we're doing surgery with chainsaws instead of scalpels.

And all that assumes that our government is actually trying to help. Our end goal could be something else entirely? It's all just mystifying right now? I'm not sure anyone could give a coherent explanation of the why's, and I'm just about certain that no one could give a rational explanation of the how.

hollerith• 8 months ago

I disagree because for soldiers to get close enough to the boat for bullets to be effective risks the lives of the soldiers.

Terr_4• 8 months ago

from point A to point B.

Plus neither point is anywhere close to US territory and alleged drug markets, because the little boats the administration has been bombing can't race their way across 1000+ (terrestrial) miles from Aruba to Florida.

OK, Puerto Rico is a bit closer, but yknowwhatimean.

jrs2354• 8 months ago

I don't think this Administration/Executive Branch recognizes Puerto Rico (populace) to be American or part of the U.S. except only in as much as it can do whatever it wants there.

strictnein• 8 months ago

Not saying this is called for or legal or anything of the sort, but you can find pictures of some of the boats being destroyed. These aren't fishing boats:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd9k2w8ell0o

https://abcnews.go.com/International/4-killed-latest-us-stri...

Again, I don't support these actions, just pointing out that at least some of these boats are very obviously being used for one thing and one thing only.

standardUser4• 8 months ago

Great, then track them to their destination and make arrests. I can't conceive of any capital crime they've committed, can you? Plus, then there's a chance to disrupt someone other than the lowest-level operators.

burkaman3• 8 months ago

very obviously being used for one thing and one thing only

Can you explain this? I agree they are not fishing boats but I don't understand how anything beyond that is obvious. Is smuggling the only possible use for that boat? Are drugs the only thing that can be smuggled?

xtiansimon• 8 months ago

“These aren't fishing boats…these boats are very obviously being used for one thing and one thing only.”

It looks like a deep sea panga boat used for fishing. I’m not a sailor so it’s not obvious to me why the destroyed boat pictured is a …well… for one thing only.

Here’s a video of YouTuber ItchyBoots taking a boat around the Darien Gap. [1] What does this look like? (start from “Entrada” sign on the beach).

If the destroyed boat is different, it’s because it has three outboard motors and not just one. Still has the same open design.

I mean, it’s not a “cigar boat” [2].

Adding two more outboards seems same to me as my neighbor who drives a Dodge 3500.

[1]: Starts at 16:00 https://youtu.be/2wjLdLbpzxY

[2] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QK_7pNhbAA4

esbranson5• 8 months ago

“Fishing doesn’t pay enough to buy a motor like that,” said fisherman Junior González[1]

[1] https://apnews.com/article/1061debe2f983ef7bc9666d3f002b3a0

metabagel6• 8 months ago

Maybe so, but the administration claims that these people are not just drug smugglers, but narco-terrorists.

Normally, suspected drug smugglers should be interdicted, boarded, and inspected. The Coast Guard and U.S. Navy train for this. It's standard operating procedure.

It's not normal to destroy boats which don't pose any immediate threat. It would be acceptable to fire on a boat which refuses to permit boarding and inspection, assuming the interdiction itself is legal under maritime law.

Unless there is an imminent threat, you've got to give people a course of action which they can take to avoid their vessel being fired upon: turn back, change course, submit to boarding and inspection, etc.

ericmcer4• 8 months ago

My conspiracy theory is that the administration recognizes the current media climate (a flood of frantic but ephemeral media/social media coverage of everything he does) and are leveraging it to combat things like immigration and drug-smuggling down.

The ICE deportation shit seemed nuts at first. Sure deport undocumented immigrants, but have some compassion and sympathy. Things like deporting a mom and dad at their kids birthday party seemed psychotic and bad for everyone.

Then I read that 80% of the deportations are a result immigrants turning themselves in out of fear. Whether intentional or not the most effective thing ICE did was creating a media frenzy that resulted in people turning themselves in out of fear. Ironically the people trying to "hold ICE accountable" by blowing them up on social media have caused way more deportations than ICE themselves.

Maybe this is the same thing? If all of a sudden a few smugglers getting blown up goes viral the next fisherman who wants to make some extra money might take a pass.

The alternative is Trump is just crazy and evil and power hungry (could be easily true based on his past), but I tend to get suspicious whenever we attribute a humans motivations to: "yeah they are crazy/evil/bad" because people are much more nuanced.

Also I know I am gonna get downvoted to oblivion lol

NoMoreNicksLeft• 8 months ago

Seems like we're bombing a bunch of low level, poverty stricken fisherman who occasionally bring a load of drugs from point A to point B.

If I understand things correctly, no one's denying that this is what they're doing. Furthermore, not only are they denying it, in many people's minds, this is justification. I'm sure that many carjackers had awful childhoods, but when one has a gun to your head you're not really in a mood to pray that no one hurts him.

christkv2• 8 months ago

Why are you making the assumption that they are poverty stricken fishermen. That kind of boat and engines is not something a poor fisherman would use or own.

metabagel6• 8 months ago

What makes you assume they own the boat?

Doesn't seem like this survivor has much money.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/22/americas/caribbean-strike-sur...

Qem3• 8 months ago

One wonders what kinds of domestic abuse such legal hacking enables as side-effect as well: "Sorry Ma'am, your husband was killed in that traffic stop, but you know, the officers were not actually targeting him, just his car..."

viraptor• 8 months ago

The US already has the "confiscate and sue the money" legal loophole process for robbing people at random, without heaving to charge the people with anything. Yay civil forfeiture.

scuff3d• 8 months ago

I wonder if they're trying to setup a precedent to start deploying the military in force on US soil to fight "narco-terrorists"... "We'll we can't kill them all in the boats, so obviously we need military strike forces deployed in all major American cities and tanks on the boarder with Mexico"

christkv2• 8 months ago

They did it in Panama against Noriega in 1989.

ethin• 8 months ago

Am I the only one who thinks that this will effectively enable vigilantism? What is stopping this from trickling downwards to lower levels of government and law enforcement? And then, of course, it trickles down to the citizenry because of the actions of that government.

siliconc0w• 8 months ago

Due to the sheer number of outright lies and bad faith arguments the courts really ought to order an independent council to review all administration opinions and briefs.

jrs2354• 8 months ago

Civil forfeiture taken to a new level?

"We're suing the money and confiscating it, we're not suing you." -> "We're bombing drugs, not people."

Collateral damage be damned!

esbranson5• 8 months ago

As here, saying the Islamic State was a criminal organization may have been true, but once they were declared to be organized armed groups participating in an non-international armed conflict, they were subject to lawful killing. Should they give clear indication that they have placed themselves hors de combat (surrendered), they are subject to life imprisonment. Though it'd probably be safer to set their own boat on fire and jump off before heading out to sea.

wbshaw• 8 months ago

You can make up any story you want about the actual reason these people are in the boats, where they're going, or if they are or are not committing crimes (even intermittently). None of those stories are true. At the end of the day, we are murdering people without due process. Full stop.

Secret Boat Strike Memo Justifies Kills by Claiming Targeting Drugs, Not People

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