Trump And Secretary Sh*tfaced Blew Up A Little Bitty Boat, Ooh Big Men! Big Men!
Yeah, we got a lot of questions.
Donald Trump is horking words onto the internet, as usual, this time about the little boat he ordered blown up in the Caribbean yesterday morning:
So many questions immediately spring to mind:
Positively identified as Tren de Aragua by whom? The same team of dipshits that sees an “I love my mommy” tattoo and human trafficks the bearer to El Salvador as a gang member based on that?
Haven’t 17 out of 18 US intelligence agencies assessed that Tren de Aragua is actually not run by Maduro and/or the Venezuelan government? Are they just lying about that again? Yes, yes, they are.
“Terrorists”? Again, we’re supposed to just take this at face value. No.
“Transporting narcotics”? In that little boat? Were they on their way to a party or something?
International waters? We’re just attacking little boats in international waters now? How many war crimes does Pete Hegseth want to commit before he’s punished as a war criminal?
How many exclamation points does that last sentence really need? Did no teacher ever explain to Dramatic Donald that extra punctuation just makes you look more illiterate, just like randomly capitalized words?
But more on those questions in a moment.
Defense Secretary Pete “Shitfaced” Hegseth also went on “Fox & Friends” this morning to two-finger his peener about this PERFECT STRIKE on a little bitty Venezuelan row-row-row-your-boat. Maybe after all the meanness over whether Trump really TOTALLY OBLITERATED Iran’s nuclear program, or whether that’s just another nickname for Hegseth, they decided to pick a target they were reasonably definitely sure even Hegseth’s unwoke military can defeat.
Hegseth insisted that “we knew exactly who was in that boat, we knew exactly what they were doing,” and fuck that little bitch, he’s a known liar, no need to poison this blog post with more of his direct quotes.
As we said, there are a lot of questions here, starting with the fuck you say?
This weekend, while Donald Trump was dead, another weird subplot was percolating involving just an insane number of Navy ships Trump had apparently sent to the Caribbean Sea. Eight warships and a submarine. Was the dead president about to attack Venezuela? No, at least not yet, but maybe they saw a man in a little boat down there that made Secretary Shitfaced jumpy! (That’s not a joke about how Pete Hegseth can’t find the clit, but it can be if you want it to be.)
As the BBC notes, this strike may very well have violated international law, according to the experts. (They also of course note that the US is not technically a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, because this nation has always found international agreements like that to be very stinky and unfair, as they would require us to play by the same rules as mere other countries.)
One biggie is that you’re not supposed to blow up random boats in international waters — who knew? Not Secretary Shitfaced we bet, as it’s increasingly clear he doesn’t know much about military stuff in general. If you’re in “hot pursuit” you can stop a boat, like if it came out of your waters and into international waters, but you are really still not supposed to just fling missiles at it.
And then of course there are all those little picky rules about how Donald Trump can’t actually just snap his tiny little rotting fingers and say somebody is a “terrorist” or that we are “at war” with somebody in order to justify doing completely fucking illegal shit. An expert explains:
Under Article 2(4) of the UN charter, countries can resort to force when under attack and deploying their military in self-defence. Trump has previously accused the Tren de Aragua cartel of conducting irregular warfare against the US, and the state department has designated the group as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation.
But Prof Michael Becker of Trinity College Dublin told BBC Verify that the US actions “stretches the meaning of the term beyond its breaking point”.
“The fact that US officials describe the individuals killed by the US strike as narco-terrorists does not transform them into lawful military targets,” he said. “The US is not engaged in an armed conflict with Venezuela or the Tren de Aragua criminal organization.”
“Not only does the strike appear to have violated the prohibition on the use of force, it also runs afoul of the right to life under international human rights law.”
Prof Moffett said that the use of force in this case could amount to an “extrajudicial arbitrary killing” and “a fundamental violation of human rights”.
“Labelling everyone a terrorist does not make them a lawful target and enables states to side-step international law,” he said.
And more!
Here are some reactions from people with reasonable questions and points to make:
It’s true, you can watch the video of them blowing up the little bitty boat here.
More picky points here from immigration lawyer Aaron Reichlin-Melnick:
For comparison, a user named Roberto Stekman reposted a 2023 video of the US Coast Guard taking down an actual narco-submarine, not a little vroom vroom boat with two joints and a cooler full of Natty Light on it. Click the link to see what a real naval operation looks like when it doesn’t involve your grandpa’s fishing boat.
Venezuelan journalist Elias Ferrer asked these good and obvious questions:
Unfortunately, Donald Trump is a dime store dictator who doesn’t believe he should have to answer anyone’s questions, and his administration is full of toilet-slurping sycophants like Hegseth who get real pissy when you question their Daddy’s authority.
Still, though, Miles Taylor — “Anonymous” from Trump 1.0 — writes on his Substack about the time during the first Trump administration when he traveled with Trump to a counter-drug command center in Florida, where they had a real objective, which was to get Trump focused on actually stopping drugs, but instead gave him a little raging stiffy to blow up boats. Taylor describes a conversation he witnessed between Stephen Miller and the head of the US Coast Guard on the plane ride back. (Miller denies the conversation, but guess who else is a little bitch and a liar?)
“Admiral,” Miller asked, “the military has aerial drones, correct?”
“Yes,” the Admiral answered.
“And some of those drones are equipped with missiles, correct?”
“Sure,” the Admiral said, beginning to catch on.
Miller pressed further: “And when a boat full of migrants is in international waters, they aren’t protected by the U.S. Constitution, right?”
The Admiral clarified that while technically true, international law still applied.
“Then tell me why,” Miller said, “can’t we use a Predator drone to obliterate that boat?”
The Admiral, a veteran of military command, was dumbfounded. “Because it would be against international law,” he replied. You can’t kill unarmed civilians just because you want to.
Stephen Miller didn’t appear interested in the legal implications. Indeed, he seemed more interested in whether anyone could stop Trump from committing such acts.
“Admiral,” he concluded, “I don’t think you understand the limitations of international law.”
Well here we are! The United States is a rogue nation, a dictatorship, and a bad actor. And that very same Stephen Miller was presumably running the White House this weekend while Trump was dead.
Taylor argues that this brings us just another step closer to Trump indiscriminately bombing civilians, and asks these questions:
If a boat full of drug-runners can be blown up instead of arrested, what’s to stop the same from being done to unarmed migrants? To asylum-seekers trying to reach U.S. shores for a better life? Or perhaps to political dissidents labeled as “terrorists” by a vindictive regime?
Yes, good and horrifying questions.
And really, who’s to say the people on that boat weren’t described in that paragraph, since we have zero evidence they were who the Trump regime says they were?
What if they were more innocent men, like the men ICE Nazi Barbie Kristi Noem and Tom Homan human trafficked to El Salvador, who then were released finally to Venezuela?
More innocent gay hairdressers with tattoos like Andry Hernandez?
Did somebody tell Pete Hegseth that little boat was woke? That there was a gay person in it, or a Black person, or a woman?
Does Shitfaced think it looks manly to summon a flotilla of battleships to go after a little dinghy, does he think it makes his own little dinghy look more impressive?
Were the Epstein Files on the boat?
Just asking. Pretty sure we all have questions here, and none of them are related to why no one has told Trump and Shitfaced “thank you” for doing this.
OPEN THREAD.
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[BBC / Miles Taylor]
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