Bush, Obama, and Biden and presidents before all did the same in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere. If a person in a certain area was a “military aged male” they were a valid target, and they would rarely verify who they actually killed after doing a drone strike. They would bomb a families house based on a tip from one person with no other evidence and never check to see if it was accurate. Trump is just more open about it now and doing it closer to home.
I think doing this outside of any pretext of a military conflict is certainly a big escalation but I do agree that our failure to push back adequately against these past crimes led us here.
Straight up murder
Shoot first, ask questions later? You would usually expect such behavior with pirates and criminals. What a way to go for a “civilized” country.
Even if they were smugglers, killing them on sight.
This is fascism
One of the US’s first wars was against the Barbary pirates in the late 1700s. They killed them on sight.
That doesn’t make it fascism. What makes it fascism is that there has been no effort to confirm that the targets are actually engaged in drug smuggling. It’s all because Miller and Trump say so.
It’s fascism and we don’t have to play devil’s advocate or make fine distinctions. Government is operating outside the law performing summary executions. It’s fascism even if they are drug smugglers. This isn’t the 1700s
They are fascists. This isn’t what makes them fascists. This is what makes them murderers. So they are pedophiles who enjoy fascism and murder.
Distinction without a difference. Whom does it serve to not call them fascism or anything they do? Oh, the government are murderers, never mind
Nobody wasn’t calling them fascists. They said that the act of high seas murder was not, by definition, fascist. Fascism is what they are doing domestically.
Summary: they are fascists but attacking fishing boats with fighter jets is outside of that and also wrong.
I know but why not call their actions fascist? They’re doing it because they’re fascists. It’s not a coincidence. Who benefits from us discussing the finer details of when a murder is fascist or fascist-adjacent or only Dr murderer is the fascist but the action isn’t… Like, why?
Because words mean things. Blowing up those boats is terrible, probably even terrorism, but just being awful behavior doesn’t make it fascist. They’re doing lots of fascist shit, and those things should be called out as such and need to be dealt with by the American people. Terroristic, colonial crimes against humanity are separate and need to be dealt with by the international courts. Details matter. Don’t dumb down the situation. Don’t dumb down yourself. Everything being simplified and made digestible and minimalized to spoon-feed the stupid fucking masses is what got us here. It’s fucking lazy. And look, I shouldn’t blow up on you like that, but I’m frustrated. I grew up watching the same fucking people who put these fascists in power make fun of Trump for being an obvious idiot, a sleaze, and not as rich as he claimed to be. Those people got lazy as they got old, and I guess the leaded gas had put enough holes in their brains that they started to believe the fucking liars. And let worse and worse people gain power over things like their kids education so that they could teach them “the answers” instead of how to find answers. So now I’m ranting, and there’s no chance you’ll bother reading all this. Your previous comments tell me that. I’m still gonna hit send, so here you go.
Well if words don’t mean anything, why use them?
Did you know qevlarr is a murderer? By which I mean they are a user on lemmy, of course.
Seems like permission to not ID ICE agents before killing them.
“ICE agents”? I only see fascist pigs who kidnap people.
Protect your fellow citizens by shooting these criminals on sight.
You shouldn’t shoot federal agents, but if you see someone being kidnapped? Shoot, and never ask. Because federal agents don’t kidnap people, they protect them - ergo, these are dangerous criminals that need to be shot on sight.
Are you taking orders, or are you taking over?
That’s called murder.
It still would have been otherwise. This just makes it WORSE murder.
So essentially; The cops think there is a meth lab in a low income apartment building. This seems reasonable with some circumstantial evidence. To solve the problem, they kill all the residents of the building, light it on fire, and burn it to the ground. No evidence is left and innocent people may have been killed, but that somehow isn’t a problem for the people in charge?
Yeah, except for the “seems reasonable, with some circumstantial evidence” part.
Instead, we have nothing to back it up but the wild claims of a hysterical fascist. This isn’t even a “don’t like your face” level of circumstantial evidence. It’s closer to “all foreigners are criminals.”
“well they blew up the Chicken man in Philly last night, and they blew up his house too”
More like “the cops can’t get a search warrant, so they park outside and shoot through the windows, hoping someone fires back”.
Pentagon admits it is committing acts of war and war crimes.
Fixed that for you.
Nothing new
Why?
As in, why admit it? The current US administration is mask-off evil and very little is being done about it. They lie constantly because there are no checks/balances and it’s an idiotic system.
…so why admit anything like this?
They still have to give some veneer of accountability to Congress to keep the Republican Representatives in line. This wasn’t a Pentagon spokesperson going to the media, this was a legislator talking to the media after being briefed by the Pentagon.
“They said that they do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessel to do the strikes,” Rep. Sarah Jacobs (R-CA) told CNN following the briefing.
The lawmaker pointed to the Pentagon’s admission to explain why the Trump administration “could not actually hold or try the individuals that survived one of the attacks is because they could not satisfy the evidentiary burden.”
As a fuck you to everyone else. It is very much a “what are you going to do to stop it?”
Absolutely a demoralization tactic.
And it’s working- Americans have already given up on doing a single damn thing
That’s a fair point, now you mention it.
the more blatant the rule breaking the more humiliating it is for the powerless to nod and accept their fate
and that makes them happy
White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said that complaints about the strikes were an effort to “distract” from the ongoing government shutdown.
We can be angry about multiple things at once, like the Trump admin killing random people in boats, and the Trump admin disappearing thousands of immigrants, and the Trump admin pressuring congress to avoid negotiating lower Healthcare costs, and…
We just kill when the mood strikes. It’s not a big deal.
