Venezuela Boat Strikes Even More War-Crimey Than We Thought

And they were already 100 percent criminal.

We know it is a long shot, and it would only be symbolic since the United States isn’t a member and doesn’t recognize it as legitimate, but we are begging the International Criminal Court to slap an arrest warrant on Pete (Hic!) Hegseth already. We’d do it ourselves, but our entire government has been taken over by syphilitic apes who are busy ripping the copper wire out of all the walls instead of writing indictments or beating each other up over who gets the last coconut.

Because at this point, is there a law of war our dipsomaniac Secretary of Defense hasn’t broken during the rare moments he is not passed out under his desk, next to an empty bottle slowly leaking its final drops of tequila onto the carpet?

The New York Times has a story out claiming that when the United States staged the first of its many, many missile strikes on fishing boats in Venezuelan waters last September, it used a “secret aircraft” painted and decorated like a civilian plane. Presumably, the idea is that the people in the boats would have only a moment to wonder why that 737 is flying weirdly low — low enough for the people on the boat to see it, according to the Times — before the bomb bay doors open.

Why is this important?

From the Times:

[T]he laws of armed conflict forbid combatants from feigning civilian status to fool adversaries into dropping their guard, then attacking and killing them. That is a war crime called “perfidy.”

Perfidy! Duplicity! And other synonyms! When you paint your military jet as belonging to Delta, United, or Pan-Am, your opponents start firing on all Delta, United, and Pan-Am jets, just to be safe. This is Bad Idea Jeans!

Why go to all this trouble when you could simply fire a missile from a drone 10,000 feet up and several nautical miles away from the fishing boat? Who knows. Probably the Pentagon is so overfunded that they have to find wilder and ever-more complex ways to spend money.

And as the cherry atop the shit sundae, this was the same boat strike in which two people survived and managed to crawl atop some wreckage and wave at passing planes for rescue. Only the United States came back and bombed the wreckage on the off chance these poor guys were really summoning armies of bloodthirsty cartel warriors for help. Which was a cheapshit, bad faith justification to begin with.

In other words, this whole scandal is somehow even worse than we thought, and we already know the US killed 11 people.

Guess We’re At War With Venezuela Now?

The Pentagon claimed in a statement that “the arsenal used in the attack has undergone legal review for compliance with the laws of armed conflict.” But the Trump administration purposely planned the mission with so much secrecy that many military lawyers who might have been consulted in normal times were not. Plus, Hegseth has fired like half the JAG corps in the Pentagon.

And beyond all that, the administration doesn’t care if the lawyers tell them everyone participating in the planning and operation could be liable for murder anyway. That’s beta talk.

The Trump administration has claimed that military strikes on these vessels are lawful because the United States is in a “noninternational armed conflict” with nonstate actors, meaning the drug cartels. If the US is not officially engaged in noninternational armed conflict with cartels, but we are dropping bombs on fishing boats stuffed with both cocaine and Uzis instead of grouper anyway, then the attacks would be, legally speaking under the laws of war, murder. Unquestionably.

They would also be unquestionably murder morally speaking, but we’re only constrained by “Trump’s own morality,” so that’s a nonstarter.

One way the military is trying to weasel around the whole “it is illegal in war to fake civilian status so you can get close enough to blow someone up” issue is by asking why the boats aren’t planes:

Regardless of the specific aircraft at issue, three people familiar with the matter acknowledged that it was not painted in the usual military gray and lacked military markings. But they said its transponder was transmitting a military tail number, meaning broadcasting or “squawking” its military identity via radio signals.

For crying out loud, would drug dealers in a friggin’ boat have the equipment they would need to pick up aircraft transponders? This is like arguing that it was legal to rob that store because the owners can get more money from the bank across the street.

The upshot of all of this is that Trump, Secretary McDrinky Drunk, and anyone participating in the boat attacks is liable for a(nother) war crime. Unfortunately where the United States is concerned, the ICC is as toothless as the day room in a nursing home. But at least we could go from talking about the war criminals running the country to the indicted war criminals running the country. Who doesn’t love an extra adjective?

[NYT]

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